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Waze's new pre-drive display shows all the crap you want to avoid on your morning commute
Get to your destination just a little bit faster
Whether you're headed out on a road trip or back into the office, knowing the best way to drive from one place to the next is essential to avoid headache-inducing obstacles. Waze is already one of the best alternatives to Google Maps, utilizing crowdsourced data to track speed traps and traffic jams. With a new update, the app wants to ensure drivers know what they'll face well before rubber hits the road.
All the new Google Maps features announced at I/O
There's a ton of new stuff coming to the app and the web later this year
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While Google I/O gets a lot of attention for Android, Chrome, and Search, Google hasn't rested on its laurels for one of its most successful products: Maps. According to the I/O keynote presentation, over 100 improvements to the system are currently in the works, many of which are relying on new AI developments.
Google Maps may soon help you avoid railroad crossings along your route
The alerts show where the crossings are, not live train positions
Living in a small town crisscrossed by train tracks is a recipe frustration if you need to get anywhere in a hurry. Google knows this, and is starting to integrate railroad crossing info into Google Maps navigation. The feature isn't official yet, but it's showing up for a few users.
Google's crowd-driven mapping app, Waze, is officially rolling out railroad crossing alerts to drivers around the world in navigation.
Step by step, Google Maps is bringing incident reporting to our daily drives. The feature, which has been a staple of Waze for years, first showed up in November with crashes and speed traps, then added slowdowns/congestions. Now, another traffic reason is making its way to the report pop-up: construction work.
Public transit is easier on your wallet and the environment than driving or taking an Uber, but it's also frequently a frustrating, crowded experience. Google can't necessarily fix that, but the company is working to at least prepare you for it: starting today, Maps will show real-time traffic delays for buses and crowdedness predictions for trains.
Google Maps is one of the company's most magical services, but its navigational utility sadly varies a bit from country to country. For several reasons, not all regions have the same sort of data available. Google offers three tiers of data availability and quality when it comes to things like biking directions, traffic, and speed limits, and the company has just updated its table for Map Coverage Details to reflect several recent changes in coverage.
If you ride a bus, tram, or train in India and use Google Maps to help you get where you need to be, you're about to get some useful, timely information. The company has not just been working to expand its availability of transit scheduling information, but improve upon its accuracy. In 10 of the largest Indian cities, commuters will be able to see live India Railways train statuses, traffic-impacted bus trip times, and new navigation suggestions tat integrate auto-rickshaw into other public transit modes.
In early September, we spotted Google Maps' new Commute tab — a section that takes over from the Driving and Transit tabs to provide a more robust view of your daily commute to work or school. That change is now rolling out globally on Android and iOS, along with several other updates to make routine travel easier, including in-app controls for three of the most popular music streaming apps — Spotify, Apple Music, and Google Play Music.
You might take for granted that you can just open Google Maps and see what traffic is like, but that feature isn't available everywhere. There are still numerous countries that don't have live traffic, but today ten more of them do. Google has updated its support docs to call out the newly added markets, but not all of them will get the same features.
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- And now the apk is up for this latest update over at APK Mirror. If you can't pull the update down via Google Play for some reason, there's your recourse.
The private beta for Waze on Android Auto rolled out early last month, and two months of testing seem to have been enough. The feature once promised at I/O 2016 is now here. According to a blog post, today Waze will be available for everyone on Android Auto. Avoiding bad traffic just became that much easier.
Google Maps received a fairly minor update last night, bumping it up to v9.15. There aren't any big visible changes, and even the teardown was pretty light, but there is one addition to the Settings screen that's worth mentioning. Under the Notifications section is a new checkbox titled "Traffic information." Obviously, it lets you shut off traffic notifications, which might be fairly handy if you already know they're coming or there tend to be a lot of false positives reported in your area. It's not the most exciting feature, but it will certainly matter to a few users.
In Lebanon, we have one seaside road where traffic direction reverses reliably at 11am and 11pm to lower congestion and help more people get into or out of Beirut as fast as possible. It doesn't do miracles on very busy days, but it helps a bit. The idea isn't unique to us and if you live in big metropolitan U.S areas with heavy traffic on some of the highways, then you know what reversible lanes are. The problem is that mapping software doesn't take these lanes into consideration when planning your routes, or isn't always up-to-date on the direction or load of traffic in those lanes.
In just 3 weeks, we expect Google to officially announce a new subscription option that will allow users to enjoy YouTube completely ad-free. In the lead-up to this, both the web service and its Android apps have received a swarm of updates and features. In just the last month, there has been a revised web player, search for 360-degree videos, and some improvements to YouTube Kids (with more to come). There has even been a pretty severe service interruption for Music Key subscribers, most likely as a result of upgrades to the software. With so much happening, it comes as no surprise that the YouTube Creator Studio app also received an update. The new version finally brings a Material redesign and adds traffic sources to the Analytics screen.
No one app is going to make an Android device immediately safe from any and all threats, but some can make it easier to remain ever vigilant. viaProtect may one day be such a app. This piece of software gives you a basic idea where the apps installed on your phone or tablet are sending your information. It doesn't go into specifics, but it will at least show you how much of your traffic is encrypted and some other security-related information.