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.

To rename Google Map starred landmarks

If you use Google Maps on Android, you may have seen that you can mark new POIs (by tapping and holding a location, and starring it), but there is no obvious way to rename the marked location - it takes the name as whichever address Google could look up for that place. It cannot be done even on Google Maps on the Internet.


It also appears that customers have been requesting Google for this feature, and it hasn't been added for a long time. Chances are that Google will one day add this feature - though at this moment it seems the engineers in Google are busy with implementing other features that they find motivating and challenging.

Well, there is an obscure but moderately easy way to help you change the name. The trick lies in another service provided by Google, called Bookmarks. If you open Google Bookmarks, it will show all your starred locations. You can then from there click the edit link to rename a location, it will be immediately updated, and shown next time you use Maps either on your phone or online!

If you have never done this before, you would find this feature nifty because even though Android maps does not show the starred locations by the name you have given, you will be able to search quickly by these names in the map!