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Comment by malingo | Hacker News Reader

In the past 18 months I've noticed Google Maps' navigation prompts being announced just slightly too late for comfort; e.g. I'm often nearly into an intersection at 30-40 mph when my phone tells me to turn onto the cross street. In that same 18 month timeframe I've moved to a new city so I'm acutely aware of this lag.

I chalk this up to Google Maps' overall bloat and sluggishness on my 2-year-old phone.

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Would you happen to be playing audio through Bluetooth? My car has a delay for non-call Bluetooth audio which causes that delay for me and gets really annoying. I will often take the phone off car Bluetooth just for that reason.

On my phone it doesn't even get the audio prompts out when I'm playing music from the phone through bluetooth.

The music just cuts out for a few seconds, but there's no navigation audio.

I've turned off navigation prompts for that reason, and just check the "next turn" thing at the top every now and then.

What's even more bizarre is that for me, when using bluetooth audio I get part of the prompts, but other parts are missing. I I remember correctly, it leaves out important words like "left" amd "right". It works fine as soon as I turn off bluetooth.

I get the prompt starting, then the volume on the music is lowered.

> Would you happen to be playing audio through Bluetooth?

No, straight from the phone.

Last weekend I had a friend in the car using apple maps on a newish iPhone, and every prompt from his phone was around a second earlier than from my phone. At 35 mph, one second is 50 feet (15 meters). That's enough to turn a safe maneuver into an unsafe one.

Add to that when the only directional advice you do get is “Go north-east on <street name>”. It is not very useful if your biking or otherwise not able to see the screen.

Not a regular Google user, but you could try downloading the offline map for your city. Might improve responsiveness?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=google+maps+download+offline+maps

For me at least it doesn't. Even just typing into the search field lags sometimes so that I have to stop a second to let the characters appear. Searching for a restaurant, clicking on it, reading the information can take whole 10 seconds and be so frustrating.

I use Google Maps many years already but it just became so slow in the last year or so. Maybe they just don't support non-high end phones anymore.

It's also slow on fast phones and feels like the ui thread is being blocked by something for several 100s of milliseconds. I stopped using google maps because of this. So annoying.

Do you know a good alternative?

I don't have a good alternative for points of interest (restaurants, ...), but for maps and routing I use https://www.locusmap.eu (with offline Locus Maps, Android only). For car navigation Waze, ironically an app from google, is also nice and has full congestion avoidance.

Same experience on a few years old lower end samsung phone. Rubbish.

No. In my experience, the first thing that Google Maps does is send your location to Google, run an auction for local advertisers, then download a half dozen images of local "featured" businesses. On my old phone, Maps was snappy enough before they added that antifeature, and things went downhill from there. When I retired that phone last year, it could take over a minute just to show a map (often devoid of street names).

Now, I actually don't have a mapping app on my phone. It takes a little planning ahead, but I'm happier to do without.

Might want to try a dedicated GPS. Not too expensive, and they have nice features like talking you into the correct lane.

Also, no lag (especially wierd lags) and no interruptions from notifications, phone calls and similar.

Apple maps works offline while giving accurate timely route information.

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