Google Maps for iOS has been updated with a nice set of new features today, including the ability to sign in with Google Contacts to have your saved addresses at your finger tips.
The new version of the app also allows for ‘quicker’ local search by choosing from categories like restaurants, stores and more. This version of the app also lets you pick between Kilometers and Miles for your distance units.
Contacts support is certainly welcome, as it allows you to bring over your home address and other familiars from your Google cache on the Web, as long as you’ve signed in. Unfortunately, there is still no native iOS contact support built in, something that I’ve been after from the beginning. It seems like a simple change to be made, so it’s likely a conscious decision by Google to only support synced contacts, which is kind of a bummer, frankly.
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Alas, there is still no iPad-optimized version of Google Maps on iOS. I’d estimate that this is likely a lower priority for the team than getting feature parity between the iOS and Android versions at the moment. In some ways it’s just as good, if not better than the one on its home platform, but there are some gaps in functionality still.
Google Maps remains one of the most popular apps on iOS, having garnered some 10M downloads in just 48 hours after release. This release also marks the rollout of the Google Maps app in Bahrain, Egypt, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and UAE.
Image Credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
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