After buying Waze in 2013, merging the teams in 2022, and then announcing in July that it would finally cross-pollinate Google Maps and Waze data between the two Google apps, the search giant is finally bringing Waze’s incident reports to Maps.
This means when you’re in Google Maps and using turn-by-turn navigation, the app will let you know about road closures, police speed traps and construction zones that Waze users have marked. The Verge’s story mentions that this is the first time it has seen the Waze data in Maps, but a commenter below the story mentions that they’ve seen cross-posted data for over a month. Not that this matters much, but I expect as with most Google updates, it has been rolling out slowly and will likely hit a majority of phones soon.
Google/Waze have stressed in the past that the two apps will remain separate, but at this point, it feels very strange for Google to be operating two apps that basically do all the same things and also cross-post their data. That being said, when you spend a little bit of time on both the Waze and Google Maps subreddits, it is apparent that both apps have very different user bases. Waze users tend to be more into navigation, alternative routes and incident reports, while Google Maps users seem more casual and have a wider swath of mapping interests. For instance, even on the Reddit post this report is based on from the Google Maps Subreddit, many people are actually complaining about incident report features because they find them annoying and distracting.
Image source: Reddit
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