They took a long time to arrive and, surely, they will be greatly missed by the drivers. The alerts for the presence of radars on the route they are in Google Maps from 2019 and they are an extremely useful tool for knowing when you may be fined for exceeding the speed limit. However, these notices have started to disappear from the application.
According to Android Authority, Google has removed from the mobile app the option to report the presence of a radar on the road. The change has taken place in the United States and has not yet reached Spain, although it is expected to do so soon. The option to signal a radar, so that the rest of the users of the app know their location, has been replaced by a much more generic ‘Police’.
In addition to ‘Radar’the options that the application shows to the user to contribute by reporting an incident are ‘Collision’, ‘Retention’, ‘Works’, ‘Lane cut’, ‘Accident vehicle’ and ‘Object on road’. According to the media, with this update Google intends to prevent the ‘Radar’ option from being used to report situations with police presence that do not correspond to that of a radarsuch as, for example, an officer who is directing traffic at a given time.
It is not clear if this means that the current speed camera signs in the app will be immediately replaced by ‘Police’ signs. or if it will be something that happens over timeas users report new radar locations that will be registered under the new label.
It’s true that ‘Police’ has the same deterrent power as the old label, but many drivers probably won’t like the change, since it gives less precise information.
An image of the new incident reporting menu, published by Android Police, also shows how Google has decided give more importance to this categorywhich goes from being the last of all the options to the third position, after ‘Collision’ and ‘Retention’. According to the latter medium, this change It will also come to Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. The latter uses Apple Maps by default, but can also be replaced by Google Maps.
This change will surely make many users look with new eyes at Wazethe eternal competitor of Google Maps for navigation, which was bought by Google in 2013. Since then, Various Waze Featuresraised from the beginning as a community of drivers who share information with each other, They have been moving to Maps. Road incident warnings, which have been in the Israeli app since its inception in 2010, were one of them.