Hacker News Reader

Google Maps without internet is barely usable. It only has driving directions which is pretty useless if you are on foot or a bike. It's actually astonishing that Google Maps can create an offline navigation plan for a vehicle that weighs thousands of kilos while walking directions always need internet to work.

Though, annoyingly, you can't use the search function without data. So you can see the map tiles fine, but that's about it :-/

> Though, annoyingly, you can't use the search function without data.

Have you tried this recently? I just did a family vacation in Death Valley and used Google Maps offline exclusively. Search worked fine.

Admittedly not for some time, I'll be over the moon if it finally supports offline search!

I use offline search all the time

From my experience this is heavily location-dependent, so US is probably the worst example.

There's an upper limit on the size of the area (although not their count), so it gets rather tedious if you want to cache a lot. It also expires eventually. with no way to block that.

OsmAnd+ is the only sane option for reliable offline maps w/navigation on smartphones, IMO.