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Home to a kaleidoscope of corals and fish, sites like Batu Bolong and Raja Ampat attract scuba divers from around the world. Now you can take a dip with turtles, go swimming with sweetlips, and inspect colorful corals all without having to put on a wetsuit. All you need is Google Maps, to see and appreciate these unique and beautiful sites (available on iOS or Android).

Starting today it just got a little easier to get around town with Google Maps – even when you run into some of the most frustrating travel scenarios around.

Scenario 1: You live or are traveling around a place with expensive data or spotty service
We’ve all been through this — whether in our own backyard or a different country. You need to get directions, but you don’t have service. Or you do have service – but it’s spotty – so you find yourself staring at the map in a perpetual state of loading while you sit in your car waiting to find out which way to go. Now, when you know you’ll have spotty service or just want to save on data, you can toggle to “Wi-fi only” to use Google Maps entirely offline on Android. And the best part is that you can still use other apps and the rest of your phone as you normally would. You might even save on battery life too.

Scenario 2: You’re running out of storage
Entry-level smartphones come with internal storage capacities as low as 4GB, while higher-end models range between 8GB and 32GB. For many of us, that’s not enough for all the videos, music, apps, and photos we cram onto our beloved smartphones. To ensure that Google Maps users with any storage capacity can download and use offline areas when they need them most, we’ve added the ability to download your offline areas to an external SD card (if your device supports them) on Google Maps for Android. Now you’ll never have to choose between snapping more food photos or the ability to navigate offline.

Scenario 3: You just want someone else to do the driving
Sometimes you just need to get somewhere fast and don’t want to drive, walk, or take public transportation. In March, we introduced a dedicated mode where users can easily compare ride service options without having to open multiple apps. In addition to showing options from Uber, we’re now showing GO-JEK rides in three cities in Indonesia with ten more cities coming soon (Android, rolling out on iOS) and Grab rides in 24 cities throughout Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand (Android, rolling out on iOS). We’ve also expanded the availability of Gett, Hailo, and MyTaxi in select cities across Ireland, Poland, Italy, Austria, Russia, and Israel (Android, iOS).

Commuting around your own city can be a battle and navigating around a foreign land can be ten times tougher. Using Google Maps offline and comparing between ride service options help make it a little easier so you can spend more time living and less time figuring out how to get places.

Posted by Amanda Bishop, Product Manager, Google Maps

Mapping a sprawling, densely populated city of 6 million people like Rio de Janeiro is a tough task. With an extra 10,000 athletes, half a million travelers, and tens of thousands of volunteers heading to the city this month, you can expect additional friction caused by road closures, traffic, and jam-packed attractions. Google Maps is putting the finishing touches on some first prize-worthy updates to help tourists and Rio residents alike get around “the Marvelous City” with ease. We even threw in a couple changes for those enjoying the events from home to feel like they’re in the middle of the action.

Getting around Rio without a hitch
For folks on the ground in Rio, Maps can be your real-world assistant, helping you get where you’re going via whichever mode of transportation you prefer. In April, we launched real-time transit for 1,300 bus lines in the ​​Rio metro area, as well as bike routes throughout Rio and the rest of Brazil.

Construction, security and crowds during large-scale events can put a damper on a driver’s day. We’re working with the City of Rio to make sure Google Maps has the most up-to-date info on traffic, road closures and detours and help get you where you’re going faster.

Breezing through traffic and beating the crowds is reason for celebration. With the Explore feature on Google Maps for Android and iOS in Brazil, anyone can uncover the local gems wherever you go by simply tapping “Explore food & drinks near you” at the bottom of the app. From there you can swipe through the best breakfast, lunch, coffee, dinner, and drinks spots around them.

Getting all of Rio on the Map
The favelas of Rio aren’t well-known to many outsiders, partly because there’s limited information about these areas to include on maps. We partnered with the local Brazilian nonprofit Grupo Cultural AfroReggae on a project called “Tá No Mapa” (“It’s On the Map” in English). Together with AfroReggae we trained 150 favela residents on digital mapping skills and in just two years they’ve mapped 26 favelas and gotten more than 3,000 businesses on the map. Not only does this allow locals to find businesses like Bar do David—an award-winning restaurant in the favela Chapeu Mangueira—it’s helped some local residents get a mailing address for the first time.

Getting in on the action from home
For those of you (*raises hand*) who can’t make it to Rio this summer, you can still get in on the excitement from the comfort of your home. We refreshed our Google Street View imagery to give virtual travelers an insider’s look at the stadiums. You can almost taste the caipirinhas!

For those who really want to feel like they’re in the the game, we also launched indoor maps of all 25 official indoor venues and added more details to the maps of the 12 outdoor venues – like the custom-made golf course where you can now practically see all 18 holes.

No matter what city you find yourself in this summer, these very same features can help you find the perfect spot to watch the action and get there with ease.

Posted by Marcus Leal, Product Manager, Google Maps

For years, Google Maps has been adding 3D imagery from all over the world – New York City, the Grand Canyon, Mont Blanc, and more. A few of us started wondering if this 3D imagery could make learning about the world a bit more fun for kids. We started playing with quick prototypes, and even brainstormed with our own kids to get inspired by their sense of curiosity.

Our idea became a new, experimental app called Verne: The Himalayas. It invites you to explore the Himalayas as a 500 foot Yeti named Verne. You can run up Mt. Everest, chase yaks, discover bits of information, ride a jetpack, play Himalayan instruments, and more.

We’re excited to share it today as a fun way for anyone to take a summer trip to the tallest mountain range in the world. Get the app for your Android device from the Play Store, or learn more here.

Posted by: Amar Gandhi and JR Schmidt – 3D tinkerers and Yeti Enthusiasts

Released today, the latest version of the Google Maps Android API includes more developer requested features: you can now track camera movements more accurately via our new camera listeners, set the minimum & maximum zoom levels on your map, and restrict the user’s panning to particular lat/lng bounds of the camera target. In addition, we’ve added a new marker Tag property so you can now associate your own data object with a marker.

Track camera movements more accurately

As one of our top requests, developers have been asking for a better way to track camera movements and the ability to see why the camera is moving, whether caused by user gestures, built-in API animations or developer controlled movements [Issue 4636]. Our new camera change listeners support you in doing this. Your app can now receive notifications for camera start, ongoing, and end events.

See the developer’s guide to camera change events and take a look at this code sample which shows you how to detect when the user drags the map, and draws a line to track this movement when it happens.

Control the zooming, panning and scrolling experience

Have you ever wanted to be able to control how much your user can zoom in and out and pan around on your map so that you can more tightly control the experience? Or have you got tile overlays only for zoom levels 15 through 20 and wish you could limit the zooming capability of both the map and your tile overlays to those particular levels?

You can now set the min and max zoom levels on your map by using GoogleMap.setMinZoomPreference() and GoogleMap.setMaxZoomPreference() [Issue 4663]. These zoom levels will also apply to any tile overlays you have on your map.

In addition, you can also constrain the lat/lng center bounds of the focal point of the map (the camera target) so that users can only scroll and pan within these bounds using GoogleMap.setLatLngBoundsForCameraTarget(). This is awesome if you want your users to stay within the map area of your tile overlays, or you wish to confine the map in your app to a particular local area.

Pan and zoom limits on a map for Adelaide, a beautiful city in South Australia

See the developer’s guide to learn more about setting boundaries on the map as well as this code sample.

Marker tags

Does your app cater for different types of markers and you want to treat them differently when a user taps on them? Or do you want to assign priorities to your markers? The new marker Tag property allows you to associate whatever data object you like with a marker, supporting you in doing this and more [Issue 4650].

A big thank you to Android developers everywhere for using the Google Maps Android API and submitting feedback via the issue tracker.

Our release notes contain details of bugs fixed as well as the features mentioned in this post. Take a look and start using our new features today!

Posted by Megan Boundey, Product Manager, Google Maps Mobile APIs

With many people looking to sneak one more getaway into their summer plans, we’ve launched multi-stop directions for Google Maps on iOS (already available on Android). Here’s how it works: Just open the app, enter a destination, tap the corner menu, and then tap “Add stop”. To rearrange the order of your stops, tap and hold the stop you want to move and drag it to the position you want. Once you’ve added all your stops, tap “Done” and your multi-stop route is complete. When you enter navigation mode you’ll have the same seamless driving experience you’re used to, whether you’re going from errand to errand or hitting scenic spots along Route 66.

Posted by Aditya Dhanrajani, Product Manager, Google Maps

For over three decades, Zagat has been dishing out trustworthy guidance for urban foodies across the US. We thought it was time to spice up Zagat’s look and refresh its mobile iOS app in order to provide relevant restaurant recommendations for diners on the go. Looking for new watering holes in your area or wanting the top recommended dining spots for the city you’re visiting? Zagat now makes it simple and easy using its reliable recipe that looks at the wisdom of the crowds combined with hand-crafted reviews. Check out the Zagat blog for more details.

Author: Laura Slabin, Director, Local Content & Community

In today’s release, the Google Places API for iOS 2.0 and the Google Maps SDK for iOS 2.0 are now in separate CocoaPods. For developers who only use the Google Places API for iOS, this will significantly reduce the binary size of their app.

What does this mean for me? What do I have to do?

Nothing immediately for your current implementation, but we strongly suggest that you upgrade within the next year to the new Google Maps SDK for iOS 2.0 and Google Places API for iOS 2.0. The Google Maps for iOS SDK Version 1.x will become unsupported in one year’s time.

If you are using the Standard Plan Google Maps SDK for iOS 1.x, and haven’t specified a version in your podfile, you will be automatically upgraded to the new Google Maps SDK for iOS 2.0 when you run ‘pod update’. If you use any Places functionality, we’ve created this migration guide for the Places API to step you through the process of migrating to the new Google Places API for iOS 2.0.

In addition, we’ve documented how to extract all the frameworks (Maps, Places) from the relevant CocoaPods so you can manually include the SDKs in your project rather than using CocoaPods if you wish. [Issue 8856]

What does this mean for Premium Plan Maps SDK customers?

There is no longer a separate Google Maps Premium Plan SDK. Instead it has been replaced with the new streamlined Google Maps SDK for iOS 2.0 for both Standard and Premium Plan developers.

We’ve created a Premium Plan migration guide that will step you through the process of migrating to the new Google Maps SDK for iOS 2.0. We’ve also documented how to extract the frameworks from the CocoaPods so you can manually include the SDKs in your project if you’d prefer that. Your Enterprise Maps key will continue to work, as will your Premium Plan.

Please note:
The Google Maps SDK for iOS Premium Plan SDK 1.13.2 (current version) will be supported for one year during which time we suggest you upgrade to the new streamlined Google Maps SDK for iOS 2.0.

Take a look at our release notes and start using version 2.0 today!

Posted by Megan Boundey, Product Manager, Google Maps Mobile APIs

The real world is changing every second and Google Maps is changing with it. Most often these changes happen behind the scenes in the form of road closures and new businesses. But today we’re making a few visual changes and additions to Google Maps on desktop, Android and iOS to help you better explore the world around you.

A cleaner look 
The world is full of information, which means highlighting necessary info on the map without overcrowding it is a balancing act. So as part of this update, we’ve removed elements that aren’t absolutely required (like road outlines). The result is a cleaner look that makes it easier to see helpful and actionable information like traffic and transit. And we’ve improved the typography of street names, points of interest, transit stations, and more to make them more distinguishable from other things on the map, helping you navigate the world with fewer distractions.

Areas of interest
The cleaner canvas also lets us show local information in entirely new ways. As you explore the new map, you’ll notice areas shaded in orange representing “areas of interest”—places where there’s a lot of activities and things to do. To find an “area of interest” just open Google Maps and look around you. When you’ve found an orange-shaded area, zoom in to see more details about each venue and tap one for more info. Whether you’re looking for a hotel in a hot spot or just trying to determine which way to go after exiting the subway in a new place, “areas of interest” will help you find what you’re looking for with just a couple swipes and a zoom.

We determine “areas of interest” with an algorithmic process that allows us to highlight the areas with the highest concentration of restaurants, bars and shops. In high-density areas like NYC, we use a human touch to make sure we’re showing the most active areas.

A more subtle and balanced color scheme
The new Maps has a subtle color scheme to help you easily differentiate between man-made or natural features, and quickly identify places like hospitals, schools or highways. In case you’re curious, here’s a key showing what each color on the map represents.

Google Maps already provides you everything you need to get around the world in one place —including business information, ratings and reviews, and more than 100+ million distinct places. And with these updates, it’s now even easier to navigate to where you want to go.

Posted by Zhou Bailiang, UX Designer, Google Maps and Mark Li, Software Engineer, Google Local

Bluetooth beacons mark important places and objects in a way that your phone understands. Last year, we introduced the Google beacon platform including Eddystone, Nearby Messages and the Proximity Beacon API that helps developers build beacon-powered proximity and location features in their apps.

Since then, we’ve learned that when deployment of physical infrastructure is involved, it’s important to get the best possible value from your investment. That’s why the Google beacon platform works differently from the traditional approach.

We don’t think of beacons as only pointing to a single feature in an app, or a single web resource. Instead, the Google beacon platform enables extensible location infrastructure that you can manage through your Google Developer project and reuse many times. Each beacon can take part in several different interactions: through your app, through other developers’ apps, through Google services, and the web. All of this functionality works transparently across Eddystone-UID and Eddystone-EID — because using our APIs means you never have to think about monitoring for the individual bytes that a beacon is broadcasting.

For example, we’re excited that the City of Amsterdam has adopted Eddystone and the newly released publicly visible namespace feature for the foundation of their open beacon network. Or, through Nearby Notifications, Eddystone and the Google beacon platform enable explorers of the BFG Dream Jar Trail to discover cloud-updateable content in Dream Jars across London.

To make getting started as easy as possible we’ve provided a set of tools to help developers, including links to beacon manufacturers that can help you with Eddystone, Beacon Tools (for Android and iOS), the Beacon Dashboard, a codelab and of course our documentation. And, if you were not able to attend Google I/O in person this year, you can watch my session, Location and Proximity Superpowers: Eddystone + Google Beacon Platform:

We can’t wait to see what you build!

About Peter: I am a Product Manager for the Google beacon platform, including the open beacon format Eddystone, and Google’s cloud services that integrate beacon technology with first and third party apps. When I’m not working at Google I enjoy taking my dog, Oscar, for walks on Hampstead Heath.

Each day, we make million of updates to Google Maps throughout the world. But it’s still not enough to ensure that every single restaurant, shop or landmark worldwide has the most accurate information possible. That’s why we’ve been rolling out new, easy ways for you to help keep the neighborhoods and places where you hang out up-to-date.

Easily add places or suggest edits
First, we’ve expanded the ability to add missing places and edit existing business or landmark information worldwide on both the Google Maps app (Android, iOS) and through Google Search. This lets people contribute new and updated information to Google Maps from more places—whether they’re searching for a new restaurant on Google.com or looking for a nearby convenience store while on the go.

There’s more to a place than its business hours or address—you might want to know if a place has a romantic vibe, serves vegetarian food or offers outdoor seating. Now on Google Maps for Android and when searching on your mobile phone, you can contribute what you know about a place so that others can benefit from the info as well. Knowing these types of details helps us build a deeper understanding of a place so we can better help users find the places most relevant to them.

We’ve also introduced a new way for users to help approve edits suggested by others, ultimately reducing the amount of time it takes for edits to appear on the map. For places that have pending suggestions, you’ll see a notification stating that “Someone suggested new info.” If you click or tap that notification, you’ll have the option to verify whether the suggestion is accurate. Once enough votes are received to be confident that the suggestion is accurate, it’s published to the map. This feature is available to Android users on the Google Maps app and both Android and iOS users on mobile Google Search.

Together, these new changes let people who are familiar with their neighborhoods help provide accurate, reliable information about their favorite haunts and hidden gems. So now when searching for useful information about a place on Google Maps or Search, you’ll get an even better representation of the ever-changing world around us.

Posted by Nirav Mehta, Product Manager, Google Maps and Local Search

Today we’ve added marker clustering to the Google Maps SDK for iOS Utility Library! This much-requested feature is now available for iOS in addition to Android and JavaScript.

Do you ever feel that your map just has too many markers on it, making it feel cluttered and hard to comprehend? Or, perhaps you want to show where the popular restaurants are in your city, but you still want your map to look clean?

Marker clustering supports you in doing this. As the zoom levels of the map change, you can aggregate markers, indicating clearly to your users exactly where those popular restaurants are located. As your user zooms in, the markers progressively split out until all of the individual markers are displayed.

Using the new marker clustering feature in the Google Maps SDK for iOS Utility Library is an easy 4 step process:

• Add ‘Google-Maps-iOS-Utils’ to your Podfile
• Instantiate the GMUClusterManager
• Implement the GMUClusterItem protocol for your marker objects
• Add the marker objects to the cluster manager

We provide the default algorithm, renderer and icon generator to support you in doing this. In addition, you can also fully customize each of these by extending the default implementations, or by providing your own implementation of these protocols: GMUClusterAlgorithm, GMUClusterRenderer, GMUClusterIconGenerator.

Take a look at the documentation and demo samples, and start using marker clustering in the Google Maps SDK for iOS Utility Library today!

Posted by Megan Boundey, Product Manager, Google Maps Mobile APIs

While at Google I/O, l had the opportunity to present the session ‘Building geo services that scale’. I’m pleased to share it more broadly for those of you who were not able to be there in person:

Building geo services that scale
Not all map and geo applications run entirely on your mobile device. Perhaps you want to protect your keys or other API access data from reverse engineering by putting them in the cloud, or you have custom business logic that you run on your server that you don’t want to distribute via mobile. To protect your keys and API access data you’ll need to operate some kind of service. In this session you’ll learn how to build that service on the Google Cloud Platform and consume it in a mobile application that uses the Google Maps APIs.

About Laurence: I am a Developer Advocate at Google, working on mobile services, specializing in cross-platform developer technologies. As the host of ‘Coffee with a Googler’ on the Google Developers channel I’m able to meet with some of those most creative and inspiring developers at Google and learn about the projects they’re leading. When I’m not Googling, I’m involved in many things, including working on the revival comics for the Stargate TV shows, and enjoying the geek cred that this brings.

It’s elections time in Australia! With 94% of eligible Australians registered to vote, there will be close to 15 million participants this year.

Googlers in the Sydney office were recently chatting about the upcoming election and realized we all had similar questions: what were the results last cycle, where are the closest polling stations, and where do we look for real-time results on election day? Friends and family were asking the same questions, so we decided to build a solution using Google Maps APIs, Firebase, Google App Engine, Google Cloud Compute, Angular 2, the Google Translation Toolkit and Go.

The aim of the election map was to provide all the information that Australians would need to participate in the voting process. We wanted to cover pre-, mid- and post-election needs, including:

1. A polling place locator with searchable addresses, suburbs, and electorates
2. Directions and navigation to the polling places, accessible via the election map
3. Real-time election results once polling has closed and counting has started
4. The ability to share and embed maps.

UX mockup: map and fake election results using testing data

The pre-election map displays static electorate data, polling booths and ballot papers. It also indicates who won the electorate in the last 2013 election. To do this, we sourced 2013 election data from the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) and stored it in a Go application intended for Google App Engine so that it could be served to the website frontend. The AEC provided us with data about electorate boundaries and polling place locations.

The website frontend was built using Angular 2 and we’ve used several open source projects, including GDAL, mapshaper and a point clustering library. These libraries allowed us to send only the required details for a user’s viewport, while keeping data usage reasonably low and reducing visual noise.

Polling location information with address and directions intent

Day-of website visitors will have the ability to search for polling stations and learn about what services are available at each location (accessibility, sausage sizzle and/or cake stand). We sourced the sausage sizzle and cake stand data from Democracy Sausage and Snagvotes. We used the polling place ID to match these to the AEC polling place identifiers. We built a small Google Compute Engine app which sources the data from our sausage sizzle data sources and broadcasts it out to our live web application using Firebase Realtime Database.

Autocomplete searches for polling locations

To enable the search functionality, we use two different services in parallel. We first attempt to match the search query against the electorate list on the client. We also use the Google Maps Javascript API Places Library with Autocomplete to provide suggestions of what users might be searching for, including suburbs, places of interest and addresses. This gives our users the ability to select recommendations instead of having to type full queries.

Voters also need to plan their trip to the polling booths. We relied on Google Maps’ existing real-time traffic information and turn-by-turn directions to provide directions functionality.

After 6pm on election night and when votes begin to be counted, we will switch the site to show real time election results. To do this, again we are using the AEC data feed and Firebase Realtime Database.

To make it really easy for people to visualize the elections results we employed a hemicycle (half donut circle) in the left sidebar to display real-time results. We also added “share” and “embed” features so people and media can easily share information about the election.

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This project was put together by a cross-functional group of Google volunteers including software engineers, UX Designers, product managers and the legal and marketing teams. We’ll all be voting on July 2nd, cake in hand. See you at the polls!

About Taylah: I am an Associate Product Manager at Google’s Sydney office where I work on Google Maps for Android Auto. I love working on Google Maps as you get to help millions of people explore the world every day. When I’m not at work, I love exploring beautiful places, shopping in thrift stores, painting and spending time with my family and friends.

The weather’s heating up, kids are out of school, and that means only one thing: summer’s officially here. Summer brings weekend road trips, faraway escapes and all kinds of getaways in between. And with the latest update to Google Maps, we’re introducing two new features to get you where you’re going and help you remember your travels in a brand new way.

Road trip warriors can now get multi-stop directions in Google Maps on Android (coming soon to iOS). Just open the app, enter a destination, tap the corner menu, and then click “Add a stop”. To rearrange the order of your stops, tap and hold the three dot menu to the left of “Add stop” and drag it to the position you want – you can even search for types of places like gas stations or restaurants like you normally would. Once you’ve added all your stops, tap “Done” and your multi-stop route is complete. When you enter navigation mode you’ll have the same seamless driving experience you’re used to, whether you’re going from errand to errand or hitting scenic spots along Route 66.

Posted by Liz Davidoff, Communications Manager, Google Maps