I rely on Google Maps every day, but these 4 missing features still hold it back

Over the past two decades, Google Maps has evolved from a simple navigation app into a tool I use for almost everything. From my daily commute to helping me find nearby coffee shops and business opening hours, to providing live traffic information so I can figure out when I need to leave for my destination, the feature set has expanded by leaps and bounds.

But despite all those updates, redesigns, and AI additions, there are still some features I wish Google Maps had added. None of these features require a ground-up rethink. Instead, these are simple quality-of-life tools that would make Maps more useful for people who rely on it every day.

Here are four features I think Google Maps desperately needs.

This is perhaps my biggest ask. Google Maps’ offline maps haven’t changed much over the years, and that’s not necessarily a good thing.

You can download an area for offline use, but you still have to select it manually by drawing a rectangle over the area you want to save. This means planning a long road trip in a massive country like India can quickly turn into a game of drawing boxes around every part of the route you might need, simply because the rectangle doesn’t go big enough.

Leave aside the fact that it is an exceedingly cumbersome way to manage map data; it also means that I can’t have the entirety of a country saved offline unless I can fit it into a series of rectangles.

Apps like Maps.me and Organic Maps take a much simpler approach. You can download an entire country or region as a single package by selecting the region from a drop-down menu. That’s exactly how I think Google Maps should work.

Give me a list of countries, states, or cities, let me tap “Download”, and take care of the rest. Maps could automatically update over Wi-Fi and eliminate the need to manage a collection of overlapping offline areas. Considering I could do this with Ovi Maps on a Symbian phone, it shouldn’t be a big deal for Google. Google already has the mapping data; it just needs to make downloading it less tedious.

Look, Google Maps is great when I’m going from point A to point B. But if you want to add an additional stop or two to the trip, the current implementation in Google Maps quickly starts breaking down.

I know I can add multiple stops to a route in Google Maps. The problem is that it generally expects me to decide the order myself. If I need to drop off a package, pick up groceries, visit a store, and stop at a gas station, I have to manually arrange those destinations. There’s no way for Google Maps to figure out the most efficient route to all my stops. Admittedly, it’s not something people would use every day, but I’ve found myself wishing for the feature anytime I’ve stepped out for a day of shopping.

Get the order wrong, and Maps will happily send me across town and back again. Within my own city, I generally know the best way to go around, so I can manage just fine. In a new country? Not so much. Between the detailed road maps, live traffic information, and historical data, it’s a feature gap that I feel Google should have solved years ago.

A simple optimize route button within a multi-stop itinerary should analyze permutations and combinations of traffic and locations to create the most efficient route possible.

One of my biggest frustrations with Google Maps is that the fastest route isn’t always the route I actually want to take. Right now, I can ask Google Maps to avoid taking toll roads and highways, but that’s the limit of route customization.

The problem is that Google Maps is very good at finding shortcuts. Sometimes, this is to its detriment. I’ve been taken down routes that claimed to save 20 minutes by sending me through a narrow residential street or a tiny village road, only to add an extra hour to my journey because Google Maps had no idea about the road’s condition.

Google already gives us options to avoid highways, tolls, and ferries. What I want is the opposite of that. Specifically, a setting to prefer main roads. If the choice is between a 20-minute route through narrow local roads and a 25-minute route on a proper, wide-lane road, I’d often take the latter without thinking twice because the narrow road is bound to have unknown traffic conditions like a local market, pedestrians, or, in rural-enough areas, animals on the road.

This matters even more in places where roads and infrastructure are unpredictable. A road that exists on the map might not be usable for all practical purposes.

It’s safe to say that Google Maps is the de facto travel app of choice for most people. It’s what I turn to every time I want to save interesting places to visit for an upcoming trip. However, despite that very obvious use case, it feels surprisingly basic when it comes to actually planning a trip.

On a recent trip to Japan, I saved dozens of restaurants, shrines, cafes, and shops to a list. But there’s no meaningful way to order that list in a manner that would make it easy to navigate.

Right now, I tend to look up saved places when I’m in a neighborhood to double-check what else I’d saved in the area. What I want Google Maps to do is to help me create a travel itinerary grouped by neighborhoods or regions. Google Maps knows travel times, opening hours, traffic patterns, and even crowd-level data. It should be able to turn that into an itinerary.

Following the current implementation, I ended up traveling an hour to visit a shrine that had already shut for the day. If Google Maps could create a travel plan for the day, it would be able to move a certain bookmark higher up the list based on my travel plans, or simply tell me to drop it, as I wouldn’t be able to fit it in.

In fact, the increasing amounts of Gemini integration make Google Maps ripe for this sort of functionality.

Google Maps is, without a doubt, one of the most useful apps on my phone. I use it constantly, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. But as good as the app is, there’s always room for improvement. Alternatives like Apple Maps have already taken steps to match Google Maps in most areas that matter. And some, if not all, of these features could be all it takes for Google Maps to leap frog ahead again.

The improvements I’m looking for might not be the most exciting in the face of visual redesigns or AI integrations, but they don’t have to be. I want Google Maps to solve the boring problems most of us face every day.

Let me download an entire country before a road trip. Let Maps optimize my route map for the day automatically. Give me a way to decide the kind of roads I’m comfortable driving on. And maybe, help me turn that database of every place on Earth into an actual trip.

For people who use Google Maps every day, those improvements would matter far more.