Waze was founded as FreeMap Israel back in 2006 with the goal of creating a free map of Israel in Hebrew by crowdsourcing the information from the community. A couple of years later it evolved into the consumer product we know today and turned into a popular application thanks to a couple of rounds of funding. The company was acquired by Google back in 2013 and offered something unique when compared to Google Maps. The two services have continued to offer navigation services in their own unique way but it looks like Google Maps is now testing a feature that has been used by Waze for years.
Being able to report crashes, as well as speed traps, is something that has become quite popular among the Waze community. It hasn’t come without its drama though as police officers are not a fan of the speed trap feature. It had gotten to the point where cops were reporting fake speed trap spots using the application in an attempt to undermine the system. Still, the feature and its community have been able to weather through the issues and the platform continues to grow.
It’s been interesting to see Google keep various features separate between the two applications but now it looks like the company is testing two of Waze’s popular features on its original Google Maps service. Incident reporting started showing up in Maps earlier this year. Now, a select number of people have been able to report crashes in Google Maps (similarly to how they can in Waze) and the same is happening with the ability to report speed traps too. It’s unclear if these features are part of an A/B testing process by the Mountain View tech giant, or if they are simply slowly rolling it out to the whole user base.
If they do end up keeping it in Google Maps, it will surely be a major benefit to those who have yet to migrate over to Waze (for whatever reason).
Waze - GPS, Maps, Traffic Alerts & Live Navigation (Free, Google Play) →
Via: Android Police Source: Reddit user frasmac
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