For the record it wasn't always this way, the last couple of years though they have made a lot of improvements on this front. I think it may have something to d

For the record it wasn't always this way, the last couple of years though they have made a lot of improvements on this front. I think it may have something to do with Google's "next billion of devices" being in countries with bad connectivity. With that said I especially like the Google Maps offline features which have been added recently. You can even have it calculate driving directions completely offline if you have the starting and ending addresses.