There's some nice discussion about Google's possible motivations for doing this here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/138res/google_launches_ingress_a_

There's some nice discussion about Google's possible motivations for doing this here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/138res/google_launches_ingress_a_worldwide_mobile/c71v7yv?context=2 http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/138res/google_launc... Granted, speculation, but rather convincing. >TL;DR: Whatever the plot's about, the point of it is to quickly and cheaply build an unrivaled corpus of pedestrian-accessible routes, locations and journey-times for the next generation of foot-enabled Google Maps and Navigation apps Edit seems that user 'rescripting' somewhere above has already made a reference to that discussion.