6 ms·

Author's point about Google Maps being bloated and slow is 100% true. I use that app every day and I just recalled today when I first started using Google Maps

Author's point about Google Maps being bloated and slow is 100% true. I use that app every day and I just recalled today when I first started using Google Maps in 2009 on my good old Nokia E63 phone it was fast and so great and then since last few years the app's design keep changing (at least on Android) and it is hard to keep up with these design changes and worst of all...every design change makes the app even slower. :(

ChrisCinelli 7y ago
It is still pretty fast for me. How fast is your connection? Latency? I agree on annoyance with "design changes" sometimes. Last weekend having the map always oriented to the North was driving me nut. They used to have a compass with a N to toggle it. While I was driving it took me 15 minutes to find the option under all the advanced options. But that said I think Google is in general pretty good in trying to reduce the "featurite" in the app and simplify the UI.
- markdog12 7y ago
  > How fast is your connection? 200 Mbps
- gordon_freeman 7y ago
  I am on Google Fi network with ~35 Mbps of download speed on LTE. The overall speed on interaction within the app is slow. For example: When I click on Route Options to select "Avoid tolls" I always end up clicking on something else because the UI lag is almost always there on interactions. And the new features such as "Start AR" never opens for me and app crashes on that feature.
  - ChrisCinelli 7y ago
    Weird. I have 10 Mbps at the moment and I have a 3 years old phone. I tried exactly what you said with Avoid Tolls. Every interaction has absolutely no delay for me. I do not have "Start AR" at the moment so I cannot test that.
- nerdponx 7y ago
  I remember after the first big design overhaul it got significantly slower. I think we all just got used to the slowness since then. And some of us got faster computers and stopped noticing as much.
- el_benhameen 7y ago
  The maps load pretty quickly for me (satellite data on the desktop is another story, for some reason). My problem is with the "featurite", which I humbly disagree is getting better. I spend so much time fighting with the UI to try to just see a map: -The app always loads with an "Explore {your_location}" card that takes half the screen. I am usually at my suburban house, near which there is nothing worth exploring. Even when I'm somewhere else, my primary use of the app is to get directions to an _already determined_ destination. The card is useless 95% of the time, but obscures half of the map, which is what I want to see and is so important as to be the name of the application. -If I so much as brush the screen with more than one finger, it enters its 3D map mode. Like the "Explore" card, this seems to be screaming "look what we can do!", but it ignores what I want to do, which is navigate using the bird's-eye paradigm that has been used by every other map since the dawn of cartography. -If I search for a place and tap a result, I get a full-screen card with information about that place, but no map. I just searched for "pizza" and tapped the first result and got a large picture of a pizza. I already knew what a pizza looks like, but I still don't know where the restaurant is. If I swipe the card down and then tap the map to try to get a better view of the restaurant's location, I lose the location indicator on the restaurant and the map re-centers on my current location. I could go on, but I feel like an old man shouting into the void.
- jcelerier 7y ago
  I wonder what "pretty fast" means for you. I have a 1gbit fiber connection and a beastly computer, and everything lags in gmaps, in both firefox and chrome (on a machine that can run Witcher 3 at 120fps in ultra)
malingo 7y ago
In the past 18 months I've noticed Google Maps' navigation prompts being announced just slightly too late for comfort; e.g. I'm often nearly into an intersection at 30-40 mph when my phone tells me to turn onto the cross street. In that same 18 month timeframe I've moved to a new city so I'm acutely aware of this lag. I chalk this up to Google Maps' overall bloat and sluggishness on my 2-year-old phone.
- 83457 7y ago
  Would you happen to be playing audio through Bluetooth? My car has a delay for non-call Bluetooth audio which causes that delay for me and gets really annoying. I will often take the phone off car Bluetooth just for that reason.
  - brokenmachine 7y ago
    On my phone it doesn't even get the audio prompts out when I'm playing music from the phone through bluetooth. The music just cuts out for a few seconds, but there's no navigation audio. I've turned off navigation prompts for that reason, and just check the "next turn" thing at the top every now and then.
    - sciurus 7y ago
      What's even more bizarre is that for me, when using bluetooth audio I get part of the prompts, but other parts are missing. I I remember correctly, it leaves out important words like "left" amd "right". It works fine as soon as I turn off bluetooth.
      - toast0 7y ago
        I get the prompt starting, then the volume on the music is lowered.
  - malingo 7y ago
    > Would you happen to be playing audio through Bluetooth? No, straight from the phone. Last weekend I had a friend in the car using apple maps on a newish iPhone, and every prompt from his phone was around a second earlier than from my phone. At 35 mph, one second is 50 feet (15 meters). That's enough to turn a safe maneuver into an unsafe one.
vbezhenar 7y ago
I like Google Maps. It's definitely not slow for me, the only thing that is slow is network speed, JavaScript is not slow at all. And I recently discovered their 3D feature which really astonishes me. Google Mail is quite fast for me as well... And I'm not even using some crazy fast computer, just old PC with Core i5.
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  Subjectively others view gmail as slow and you view it as fast. Lets make it objective. On a dual core cpu from 2014 with an ssd running linux I opened first firefox 70 and then chrome 75. In both cases I was logged into my google account. In both cases I opened and then closed gmail to ensure what could be cached was cached. In each I then entered mail.google.com and measured the time between hitting enter and seeing what looked like a usable interface. Lets compare that to other local ways of accessing email. Running mu find maildir:/Gmail/INBOX took 9 ms this is easy to measure as it happens in the terminal. Creating an emacsclient frame takes about 150ms added to the mu query which takes about 9. Logically there is some time required to render the view but its quite small and challenging to measure so lets say aprox 200ms or 1/5th of a second. Loading the old school plain interface html interface to gmail took aprox 1.5 seconds. It took 10 seconds in either browser to load the "modern" javascript gmail view. For reference this is about 7 times slower than the html view or 50 times slower than mu4e. Reading https://www.pubnub.com/blog/how-fast-is-realtime-human-perception-and-technology/ https://www.pubnub.com/blog/how-fast-is-realtime-human-perce... > A response time of 100ms is perceived as instantaneous. Response times of 1 second or less are fast enough for users to feel they are interacting freely with the information. Response times greater than 10 seconds completely lose the user’s attention. This is why the slow loading Gmail interface has a loading screen so it is perceptibly doing something rather than appearing to be frozen. After this the interface is fast enough in the context of web apps wherein the user expects a small delay between actions but not as quick as a desktop app which can trivially be perceptibly instant. Interestingly the old interface despite using vastly less ram and loading much much quicker initially appears to say load a message slightly slower than the slower loading interface so the optimum web interface would appear to be the slower loading more sophisticated interface if you don't mind keeping that browser tab pinned and always running. A desktop app is still on the overall the superior option. Is your gmail experience objectively different?
gxnxcxcx 7y ago
And it doesn't stop at phones. I kid you not, the main benefit of upgrading my early 2009 Mac Pro GPU was having a fully functioning Google Maps experience again.
- m463 7y ago
  Interesting. On older tesla cars, people complained about the maps and the older MCU1 cpu. The telsa maps are based on google maps. I heard there were two ways to speed up maps: 1) turn off traffic, which significantly slowed things down 2) switch from vector maps to satellite maps. Apparently the map tiles of the vector maps require costly rendering for display, but the satellite maps just required a blit. #2 may also explain #1, I'll bet traffic requires rendering too.
rexf 7y ago
As a counterpoint, Google Maps on my iPhone 3G in 2008 was not reliable at all for directions. Sure it was better than printing out MapQuest on sheets of paper, but Google Maps has gotten significantly more reliable over time.
mehrdadn 7y ago
They've been absolutely wrecking Google Maps's performance and UX on Android since around ~1.5-2 years ago. Switch back to version 9.42.3, or possibly a couple releases later if you need the "Favorites" and "Want to go" features in addition to just "Starred". It's pretty snappy and a breath of fresh air.
- artificialLimbs 7y ago
  Tried, after force stopping and disabling (which reverts it to factory version, 9.72.2) on my Verizon Galaxy S7. Says "App not installed." when trying to install APK after running through the install process. =(
  - mehrdadn 7y ago
    You'll need root for this. You should be able to use one of those system app removal tools, or Titanium Backup if you have it (you might be able to convert it to a user app first). You might need a reboot after you do that before you can install another version. At least that's what I did on my end.
- hnick 7y ago
  Related, they released an update for GMail a while ago that bricked the app and made it not able to open on certain inboxes (I had 3 accounts on my phone, one would trigger this bug as soon as I switched to this while the others did not). The only fix was reverting to the stock version, and it was AMAZING. So smooth. I had completely forgotten how fast it was while they boiled this frog's water over the years with their updates.
madcon 7y ago
Install "Google Maps Go". It is another product by Google without all the bloat and is much much faster.
mkl 7y ago
I recently had to use my 8 year old Nexus S phone for a few weeks, and Google Maps wouldn't even load. Chrome and Firefox could barely load most web pages, though the older Android Browser could limp along on enough pages to be useful (HN was the only site that actually felt usable). The phone's got half a gig of RAM, and didn't seem terrible when I stopped using it full time four years ago, but four more years of software updates have completely destroyed the usability of almost every app, while barely improving functionality at all.

ChrisCinelli 7y ago

It is still pretty fast for me. How fast is your connection? Latency? I agree on annoyance with "design changes" sometimes. Last weekend having the map always oriented to the North was driving me nut. They used to have a compass with a N to toggle it. While I was driving it took me 15 minutes to find the option under all the advanced options. But that said I think Google is in general pretty good in trying to reduce the "featurite" in the app and simplify the UI.

markdog12 7y ago
> How fast is your connection? 200 Mbps
gordon_freeman 7y ago
I am on Google Fi network with ~35 Mbps of download speed on LTE. The overall speed on interaction within the app is slow. For example: When I click on Route Options to select "Avoid tolls" I always end up clicking on something else because the UI lag is almost always there on interactions. And the new features such as "Start AR" never opens for me and app crashes on that feature.
- ChrisCinelli 7y ago
  Weird. I have 10 Mbps at the moment and I have a 3 years old phone. I tried exactly what you said with Avoid Tolls. Every interaction has absolutely no delay for me. I do not have "Start AR" at the moment so I cannot test that.
nerdponx 7y ago
I remember after the first big design overhaul it got significantly slower. I think we all just got used to the slowness since then. And some of us got faster computers and stopped noticing as much.
el_benhameen 7y ago
The maps load pretty quickly for me (satellite data on the desktop is another story, for some reason). My problem is with the "featurite", which I humbly disagree is getting better. I spend so much time fighting with the UI to try to just see a map: -The app always loads with an "Explore {your_location}" card that takes half the screen. I am usually at my suburban house, near which there is nothing worth exploring. Even when I'm somewhere else, my primary use of the app is to get directions to an _already determined_ destination. The card is useless 95% of the time, but obscures half of the map, which is what I want to see and is so important as to be the name of the application. -If I so much as brush the screen with more than one finger, it enters its 3D map mode. Like the "Explore" card, this seems to be screaming "look what we can do!", but it ignores what I want to do, which is navigate using the bird's-eye paradigm that has been used by every other map since the dawn of cartography. -If I search for a place and tap a result, I get a full-screen card with information about that place, but no map. I just searched for "pizza" and tapped the first result and got a large picture of a pizza. I already knew what a pizza looks like, but I still don't know where the restaurant is. If I swipe the card down and then tap the map to try to get a better view of the restaurant's location, I lose the location indicator on the restaurant and the map re-centers on my current location. I could go on, but I feel like an old man shouting into the void.
jcelerier 7y ago
I wonder what "pretty fast" means for you. I have a 1gbit fiber connection and a beastly computer, and everything lags in gmaps, in both firefox and chrome (on a machine that can run Witcher 3 at 120fps in ultra)

malingo 7y ago

In the past 18 months I've noticed Google Maps' navigation prompts being announced just slightly too late for comfort; e.g. I'm often nearly into an intersection at 30-40 mph when my phone tells me to turn onto the cross street. In that same 18 month timeframe I've moved to a new city so I'm acutely aware of this lag. I chalk this up to Google Maps' overall bloat and sluggishness on my 2-year-old phone.

83457 7y ago
Would you happen to be playing audio through Bluetooth? My car has a delay for non-call Bluetooth audio which causes that delay for me and gets really annoying. I will often take the phone off car Bluetooth just for that reason.
- brokenmachine 7y ago
  On my phone it doesn't even get the audio prompts out when I'm playing music from the phone through bluetooth. The music just cuts out for a few seconds, but there's no navigation audio. I've turned off navigation prompts for that reason, and just check the "next turn" thing at the top every now and then.
  - sciurus 7y ago
    What's even more bizarre is that for me, when using bluetooth audio I get part of the prompts, but other parts are missing. I I remember correctly, it leaves out important words like "left" amd "right". It works fine as soon as I turn off bluetooth.
    - toast0 7y ago
      I get the prompt starting, then the volume on the music is lowered.
- malingo 7y ago
  > Would you happen to be playing audio through Bluetooth? No, straight from the phone. Last weekend I had a friend in the car using apple maps on a newish iPhone, and every prompt from his phone was around a second earlier than from my phone. At 35 mph, one second is 50 feet (15 meters). That's enough to turn a safe maneuver into an unsafe one.

vbezhenar 7y ago

I like Google Maps. It's definitely not slow for me, the only thing that is slow is network speed, JavaScript is not slow at all. And I recently discovered their 3D feature which really astonishes me. Google Mail is quite fast for me as well... And I'm not even using some crazy fast computer, just old PC with Core i5.

michaelmrose 7y ago
Subjectively others view gmail as slow and you view it as fast. Lets make it objective. On a dual core cpu from 2014 with an ssd running linux I opened first firefox 70 and then chrome 75. In both cases I was logged into my google account. In both cases I opened and then closed gmail to ensure what could be cached was cached. In each I then entered mail.google.com and measured the time between hitting enter and seeing what looked like a usable interface. Lets compare that to other local ways of accessing email. Running mu find maildir:/Gmail/INBOX took 9 ms this is easy to measure as it happens in the terminal. Creating an emacsclient frame takes about 150ms added to the mu query which takes about 9. Logically there is some time required to render the view but its quite small and challenging to measure so lets say aprox 200ms or 1/5th of a second. Loading the old school plain interface html interface to gmail took aprox 1.5 seconds. It took 10 seconds in either browser to load the "modern" javascript gmail view. For reference this is about 7 times slower than the html view or 50 times slower than mu4e. Reading https://www.pubnub.com/blog/how-fast-is-realtime-human-perception-and-technology/ https://www.pubnub.com/blog/how-fast-is-realtime-human-perce... > A response time of 100ms is perceived as instantaneous. Response times of 1 second or less are fast enough for users to feel they are interacting freely with the information. Response times greater than 10 seconds completely lose the user’s attention. This is why the slow loading Gmail interface has a loading screen so it is perceptibly doing something rather than appearing to be frozen. After this the interface is fast enough in the context of web apps wherein the user expects a small delay between actions but not as quick as a desktop app which can trivially be perceptibly instant. Interestingly the old interface despite using vastly less ram and loading much much quicker initially appears to say load a message slightly slower than the slower loading interface so the optimum web interface would appear to be the slower loading more sophisticated interface if you don't mind keeping that browser tab pinned and always running. A desktop app is still on the overall the superior option. Is your gmail experience objectively different?

gxnxcxcx 7y ago

And it doesn't stop at phones. I kid you not, the main benefit of upgrading my early 2009 Mac Pro GPU was having a fully functioning Google Maps experience again.

m463 7y ago
Interesting. On older tesla cars, people complained about the maps and the older MCU1 cpu. The telsa maps are based on google maps. I heard there were two ways to speed up maps: 1) turn off traffic, which significantly slowed things down 2) switch from vector maps to satellite maps. Apparently the map tiles of the vector maps require costly rendering for display, but the satellite maps just required a blit. #2 may also explain #1, I'll bet traffic requires rendering too.

rexf 7y ago

As a counterpoint, Google Maps on my iPhone 3G in 2008 was not reliable at all for directions. Sure it was better than printing out MapQuest on sheets of paper, but Google Maps has gotten significantly more reliable over time.

mehrdadn 7y ago

They've been absolutely wrecking Google Maps's performance and UX on Android since around ~1.5-2 years ago. Switch back to version 9.42.3, or possibly a couple releases later if you need the "Favorites" and "Want to go" features in addition to just "Starred". It's pretty snappy and a breath of fresh air.

artificialLimbs 7y ago
Tried, after force stopping and disabling (which reverts it to factory version, 9.72.2) on my Verizon Galaxy S7. Says "App not installed." when trying to install APK after running through the install process. =(
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  You'll need root for this. You should be able to use one of those system app removal tools, or Titanium Backup if you have it (you might be able to convert it to a user app first). You might need a reboot after you do that before you can install another version. At least that's what I did on my end.
hnick 7y ago
Related, they released an update for GMail a while ago that bricked the app and made it not able to open on certain inboxes (I had 3 accounts on my phone, one would trigger this bug as soon as I switched to this while the others did not). The only fix was reverting to the stock version, and it was AMAZING. So smooth. I had completely forgotten how fast it was while they boiled this frog's water over the years with their updates.

madcon 7y ago

Install "Google Maps Go". It is another product by Google without all the bloat and is much much faster.

mkl 7y ago

I recently had to use my 8 year old Nexus S phone for a few weeks, and Google Maps wouldn't even load. Chrome and Firefox could barely load most web pages, though the older Android Browser could limp along on enough pages to be useful (HN was the only site that actually felt usable). The phone's got half a gig of RAM, and didn't seem terrible when I stopped using it full time four years ago, but four more years of software updates have completely destroyed the usability of almost every app, while barely improving functionality at all.