Google Maps steals a feature from Waze to inform about accidents (but there's a catch)

Last July, Google Maps was able to announce an improved interface for Android, iOS, Android Auto or Car Play: according to the latter, “These changes come from the Waze and Google Maps communities, and you'll even be able to see which app the reports are coming from“. Waze was able to announce, in particular, that “Google Maps will display reports from our contributors attributed to Waze directly from the app, starting with police alerts“, subsequently pointing out that “more data will be shared on Google Maps and attributed to Waze” we could read at the time.

Google Maps and Waze exchange good practices

Today, this position is becoming a little more concrete. Indeed, in Google Maps, some users have already noticed that police alerts are already accessible on the application. Each user can also contribute: directly from Google Maps, they are asked if the police are still in the area, to which users can answer “yes” or “no”, to feed the information received by the service, and thus keep it constantly updated. Unfortunately, note that this new feature will not be available for a while in France: for the moment, it only concerns American users, for purely legal reasons. In France, the legislation regarding road signs is in fact much stricter.

There is no doubt that feeding the communities of both applications simultaneously will make their precision much more important. As a reminder, Waze has around 150 million users, while Google Maps reaches 2 billion monthly users. With these two particularly large user bases, it will be easy for applications to keep their data up to date thanks to their community. Especially since things are not going to stop there: last October, Waze notably tested conversational reportswhich means that it will soon be possible to speak to the application to directly explain the situation on the road, or report an accident for example. A service which could, eventually, also arrive on Google Maps.