Saturday, August 18, 2012

Google Maps 6.10.0 update breaks feature

I upgraded to Maps 6.10.0 for Android today, and with much sadness I noticed yet another feature from the app is gone. You cannot anymore search for places which you have starred. In previous versions, you could type in the description of a starred location, and it would pop up at the top of your list. The picture below shows an example of what I mean -



If you clicked the first entry, which corresponds to some place I marked with a star myself, it will immediately take you to that place in the map. Showing up as the first entry when searched is really the expected behavior as explained in Google's support page -



Now this only happens only if you have bad Internet connection - in other words assuming you are connected to Internet, starred places almost never will even pop up anywhere in the list.

In fact this feature was broken since the 6.9.0 update. Another notable miss is the ability to have your places sorted by distance and direction in the My Places list - now they are only sorted by the date when you starred them.

This is unacceptable to me and hence I reverted to 6.8.0. The sad thing is Google has a long history of closing its eye on feedback - so I do not even expect a fix. Till now it is okay because I do not need the new features added - which are mostly UI enhancements and other additions not very useful to me. I will will just cross my fingers and hope that the last good version 6.8.0, will keep on working if they continue to add more 'features' - and that I will not have to choose from something really useful versus this in the future.

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