Google-owned Waze is the fun version of Google Maps and has seen Batman-themed voices and icons come to the app in recent times but it seems that more important features are on their way with Waze at an event overnight announcing lane guidance, trip suggestions and more.
Trip suggestions will use your previous trips and locations to suggest a list of places the user may want to revisit — without having to type in the destination manually. Waze will then surface the time required for the trip based on the traffic conditions at the time.
Another new feature will be traffic notifications to notify users how the current traffic is likely to affect their trip to their favourite or recent destinations. This notification will pop up on a users lock screen when Waze detects that the roads are busy enough to affect the time to destination.
Lane guidance is a feature that has been in beta testing for a while now. Sometimes it is difficult when exiting a freeway etc to know which lane you need to be in to exit legally but now Waze will help you out there with the app notifying the user which lane they need to be in for the next turn or exit. This feature is currently rolling out to all users.
As Waze continues to improve it will be interesting if any of these new features will make their way over to Google Maps, after all that is what the bulk of users rely on. Are you a Waze or a Google Maps users?
Ever since I had AA been using Waze as at the time Google Maps didn’t have a speed indicator nor alerts about law enforcement presence. Prior to this i used TomTom Go which unfortunately is not permitted to run in AA.