On May 18, 2021, Google made several Google Maps-related announcements during its Google I/O 2021 keynote:

AR Navigation

• Google is adding a dedicated button for its AR navigation mode (a.k.a. “Live View”), in order to make it quicker and easier to access. (More info.)

• AR navigation will start rolling out to specific indoor venues, starting with train stations in Zurich and Tokyo. (More info.)

• Apple Maps-style landmark icons and 3D street labels similar to those found in Apple Maps “Look Around” will be added to AR navigation. Google will also add opening and closing time information to POI icons appearing in AR navigation. (More info.)

• For travelers, AR navigation will indicate the distance to a user’s hotel relative to their current location.

Detailed Street Maps

• Google plans to release detailed street maps for fifty new cities by 2021’s end, including Berlin, São Paulo, Seattle, and Singapore.

[Note #1: Berlin, São Paulo, Seattle, and Singapore are among the 80+ cities that Google has added Apple Maps-style custom landmark icons for. Moreover, the first four cities to receive detailed street maps (New York, London, San Francisco, and Tokyo) were the very first cities to receive custom landmark icons back in Fall 2019. This suggests that cities with landmark icons might be the cities that Google is preparing to launch detailed street maps for—especially given that Google seems to be paying extra attention to these cities.

These cities currently have custom landmark icons on Google Maps:
Amsterdam, Athens, Bangkok, Barcelona, Bengaluru, Berlin, Boston, Brasília, Brussels, Bucharest, Budapest, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Cape Town, Casablanca, Chennai, Chicago, Cologne, Copenhagen, Dubai, Edinburgh, Florence, Frankfurt, Ho Chi Minh City, Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Istanbul, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Kiev, Kolkata, Kuala Lumpur, Kyoto, Lima, Lisbon, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Manila, Marrakesh, Melbourne, Mexico City, Miami, Milan, Montreal, Moscow, Mumbai, Munich, Nagoya, Nairobi, New Delhi, New York, Nice, Osaka, Oslo, Paris, Philadelphia, Prague, Rio de Janeiro, Riyadh, Rome, Saint Petersburg, San Francisco, Santiago, São Paulo, Seattle, Shanghai, Singapore, Stockholm, Sydney, Taipei, Tehran, Tokyo,Vancouver, Venice, Vienna, Warsaw, Washington, and Zurich.]

[Note #2: Based on testing, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Paris, and Phoenix also appear to be among the cities that might be released.]

Time-Specific POI Prioritization & Other Personalized Map Labels

• Google will soon prioritize different POI categories by time of day (e.g., coffee shops and bakeries will be prioritized over other restaurants in the morning, dinner restaurants in the evening, etc.). (More info.)

• Local landmarks will be highlighted for users traveling in unfamiliar cities.

Area Busyness

• Google will highlight areas within cities that are unusually busy/crowded. (More info.)

[Note #1: These maps are very similar to the surge pricing heatmaps in Uber’s & Lyft’s driver apps.]

De-Prioritization of Routes with Sudden Braking

• Google will de-prioritize routes where “hard-braking” / sudden braking is likeliest, with the overall goal of reducing traffic collisions.

In total, Google plans to add “100+ improvements powered by AI” to Google Maps by the end of the year.

Google often announces new features months before releasing them to small segments of its userbase. And then in the months that follow, Google eventually releases these features to its entire Google Maps userbase.

This effectively gives Google three different news cycles to promote new features (and helps keep Google Maps in the news every few weeks).

Google’s “detailed street maps” feature is a good example of this media strategy at work: Google initially announced the feature in mid August 2020, but it didn’t start rolling it out to select Google Maps users until late November 2020. And it wasn’t until January 2021 that they were finally widely released to all Google Maps users. At each stage of the cycle, Google received press for the feature.

Miscellaneous Stats Shared by Google

• Google Maps now offers AR navigation in “more than 100” countries.

• Google Maps has 60 million kilometers (37.3 million miles) of roads.

• Google Maps has 1 billion buildings.

• Google has 150 million Local Guides.

• There are 150,000 kilometers (93,205 miles) of bike lanes in Google Maps.

• Each day, more than 80 million people use live busyness / “Popular Times” information.

• With AI, Google is able to map roads over 10 times faster than it could five years ago.