The countdown continues. We’ve already talked about the new Google Calendar and Gmail, and now it’s the turn of another of the company’s totems: Google Maps, which has now been added to the list of apps that have received the Material Design facelift, with superimposed layers of information and flat colors as well as greater integration with external services.
The distribution of features on a pull-out toolbar, the location entries, and the automatic search system via geolocalization remain practically the same, albeit with small changes to the spacing and ordering of the items to make them more comfortable than before. For instance, now the option to calculate a route is accessible from a floating button permanently superimposed over the main map view.
The other novelty is its integration with certain third-party services, as in the case of Uber, a tool for requesting taxis and private cars, or OpenTable, a restaurant-reservations platform (only available in certain countries).
As with other apps from the Google ecosystem, version 9.0 of Google Maps still can’t be downloaded from Google Play, meaning the only way to get it early is to download the APK manually and install it to your Android device.
