Google Maps' incident reporting feature has been a long-time coming. After the company bought Waze in 2013, everyone thought Google Maps would get its popular crowdsourced reporting feature in no-time, but years have passed it's only a few months ago that we started seeing hints of it in our teardowns of Maps. The first real signs started showing up in the app after that, with users spotting confirmation prompts for reported incidents and, recently, a button to report crashes and speed traps. Now, the latter is showing up for many under a new look, but it doesn't work at all.

Launch navigation on Maps and you may spot a new icon below the volume one, with a plus sign inside a speech bubble. Tap it and you get the Add a report menu at the bottom that explains you should only continue if it's safe to do so. But when you tap that, the element below (step-by-step directions) gets selected and expanded instead.

Google Maps' incident reporting.

This looks like a rebrand of the crash and speed trap reporting icon we spotted last month, but the weird thing is that it's showing up for many of our tipsters across several countries, and all of them say that it's not working past the bottom banner. The incident icon could have been mistakenly switched on for many users, or it could be that the functionality is coming out today but the icon appeared prematurely. When it properly rolls out, it should allow you to report crashes, speed traps, and speed cameras.

Google Maps Developer: Google LLC
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Thanks: Samarth Verma, Moshe E, Kieron Quinn, Pieter Verledens