holy shit I’m glad I saw this because i thought my screen was going or something, the colors are good but they’re just barely different enough to where I thought I was going crazy
I just want to have higher information density in google maps. Having to constantly zoom in to see buildings is a pain.
It’s already an information overload. It would be nice to have more options on what information to show.
Sometimes I need to see street names and house numbers, sometimes I need to see the name of the burger place, but I don’t ever need to see the name and ratings of each and every hotel and coffee shop in a 10 km radius.
It also ought to figure this out by itself. It already knows if I’m on foot, driving or using public transport. It already knows if I’m in my local area or traveling on the opposite side of the globe. They also know if I’m using the app for navigation or just browsing the map of distant places compared to my actual location.
They have so much data but still can’t figure out to show relevant information.
Probably because all information changes I’ve notes in the last few years have nothing to do with improving information access and all to do with monetizing it.
Google used to make good software that they could monitize with ads. Now they build their apps to sell ads.
Yes. The product was good and the ads surrounded it. Ow the ads is the purpose and things are designed around that. Not just with googlez but all companies.
There is a serious problem with commerce and friction in payments when most companies that are valuable in the last 20 years don’t have a product but help people to find a product already available.
I hate that cold color palette :(
I really like it, but it’d be nice if they offered customization options for folks who feel differently.
https://osmand.net is also an open source option.
I’ve tried OsmAnd, unfortunately it’s too slow for me compared to pretty smooth operation of GMaps. I also use Google Timeline very extensively, with tagging all visited places and snap-to-road whenever I can. So far I haven’t found any open-source direct replacement for Timeline, it can be pretty annoying at times (e.g. Google mangling already manually corrected routes and not telling me).
Interesting. I find it much snappier than Google Maps because it can do higher framerates.
@ijeff @ZiemekZ There’s also Organic Maps which has way better colors than everyone imo.
Maybe I just hate change, but isn’t it much more difficult to differentiate between grass and water with the new colors? I find myself really preferring the old version, though I am used to it
That looks like a colorblind mode. The roads not using yellow and instead that muted gray is much worse.
As a colorblind person, this new color palette is so much fucking worse
Why would you change the roads to grey from yellow? What? What is the primary thing your eye is seeking when using a GPS app?
When using the general view? Typically landmarks and buildings so I appreciate this change. Roads are most important when using navigation, which they made much more vibrant. I’m finding these to be welcome changes.
looking again, the greater contrast for smaller roads is nice.
Agreed! I think it strikes a good balance, whereas highways were a bit overemphasized before.
I do think that the highway emphasis is important, as you’re typically traveling faster and you don’t want to take your eyes off the road more than you have to. Having the bright yellow highway for things like complex offramps has been helpful to me in the past. I’ll just have to see how it goes.
It becomes very vibrant when you’re in navigation mode. Similar to before but more saturated.
It would be nice if they fixed their app so that when I set it to always dark mode, it actually stays in always dark mode. I don’t have much faith in UI improvements when that bug has plagued me for literally years, across Android versions and devices. But now the colors that suddenly blind me when it changes from dark to light will be different, yay?
It seems to stay properly for me. My gripe is that it doesn’t have an option for automatically changing based on the time of day without the OS also being set to do so.
Copy Apple Maps, acquire more iOS users.
It looks a bit more legible than the old one.
This is too minor of a thing to really gripe about. Getting upset over this is like getting angry that Coke or Pepsi has altered the design of their logo again. It’s just… Not really a big deal.