As long as you stay inside the bounds of the downloaded map, you can get turn-by-turn directions entirely offline for driving, walking, cycling, for transit. With Apple Maps on iOS 17, you can now save a region of the map locally on your iPhone. If you often travel through cellular deadspots, especially applicable to some highways and suburban areas, having maps available offline is a nice safety net so that you know you won’t get lost. Offline maps are useful when travelling abroad, but also at home when you can’t always rely on a network being available. Apple Maps now lets you download a maps region to store on your device, and use entirely offline for navigation and routing without an internet connection. That feature gap is now closed with iOS 17. Google Maps and others have let you download maps to be available offline for a long time. In China, the Gaode Map app, which is operated along with other navigation services by the Alibaba owned AutoNavi, had approximately 730 million monthly active users as of September 2022.Apple Maps has improved leaps and bounds over the last decade, but one area it has always been lacking is offline use. In July 2022, Google Maps was the second most popular Google-owned mobile app, with 13.35 million downloads from global users during the examined month. Native iOS app Apple Maps, which does not offer this possibility, was by far the navigation app with the highest data consumption, while Google-owned Waze used only 0.23 MB per 20 minutes. Navigation apps generally offer the possibility for users to download maps to access when offline. adults were using a voice assistant in their cars, in order to place voice calls or follow voice directions to a destination.

The app, which comes with maps and the possibility to access information on traffic via users reports, was developed in 2006 by the homonymous Waze company, acquired by Google in 2013.Īs of 2021, less than two in 10 U.S. Waze followed, with 9.12 million downloads in the examined period. In 2022, Google Maps was the most downloaded map and navigation app in the United States, despite being a standard pre-installed app on Android smartphones.

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