30 ms·

Absolutely wrong. Back in version 6, there was a "My Maps" feature which allowed you to save a region and use that saved region to navigate.

• modeless 11y ago
  "My Maps" was and still is the name of a feature which allows you to add your own places, lines, etc. on top of the base Google map. It has never allowed you to search the base map or start turn-by-turn navigation offline.
  • drited 11y ago
    As long as you had internet connection at the start of your journey it worked for navigation, even if you dropped offline during your trip. Therefore downloading maps was useful at the time because if you didn't do this, you could be driving blind for a while in areas where there was no internet connection. You could only download small sections of the map at 1 time for offline use (e.g. an area just bigger than Manhattan). Still it was a total PITA given that most other navigation apps at the time allowed you to download maps and start navigation even if you were offline. Of course, if you did that all the time Google wouldn't be able to collect data on you to support its business model, which is probably why they've taken so many years to get around to implementing this.