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Comment by jurassicfoxy | Hacker News Reader

Waze is really good. No comment on the accuracy of the directions, but I loved the crowdsourcing, and the warnings were the best of any of Apple, Google, & Waze. Loved the very accurate "police ahead" warnings.

Like most of you I'm sure (beating a dead horse here) I really wish they hadn't been bought out by Google.

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The alternative was Meta if I recall correctly, but they couldn’t make the deal fast enough.

The founders wanted to sell, they were ready to exit, it was a matter of when not if

Do you still appreciate the police warnings knowing you only get them because a group of people saw one and started fiddling with their phones, probably while driving, to let the app know?

I don't fiddle with my phone. I touch 3 times my onboard touchpad via carplay without looking.

Or they pressed the report button on their screen, not too dissimilar to changing the AC. Or do you pull over before operating any of the controls in the car? :)

It's at least 2 clicks away. And trying to click an icon on a screen is much much worse than interacting with an actual button.

https://support.google.com/waze/answer/13739289?hl=en

My Mazda has a jog dial that works with CarPlay. Sending a report can be done without moving my hand from the center console.

Can someone build a little Waze keyboard that maybe Bluetooth links to do the phone and does a one-touch accident report?

Should be doable with an auto-hot key type of script.

More likely possible on android.

> More likely possible on android.

Just as easy on iOS. You can have an NFC button associated with a Shortcut, so as long as Waze exposes "send accident report at current location" to Shortcuts, it would be very simple.

Just checked and Waze isn’t exposed to Shortcuts at all :(

Uhh okay?

It's two button presses on carplay. Not exactly fiddling.

Yeah?

You can do it with your voice, something like "hey google, report police" when you're in Waze

Typically I'm only worried about police during highway driving, so I don't actually mind the phone usage that much. You make a point: it's not the greatest & safest, but Waze has a much better UI than Google Maps for this, so it's very quick.

Maybe the police reported themselves. Either way they could just not be there, causing accidents and unsafe road behavior.

I used it recently on a roadtrip with some friends, it seemed quite nice, but I really don't want advertisements in my navigation app, I'm guessing there is some premium subscription to avoid these?

I'm also not sure about those gamified prompts that come up all the time, I feel like if I was driving alone I could get distracted by the strong call to action to always tap something on the phone to earn points.

The gamification made it feel like an app targeted at children.

Haven’t seen a price to remove ads. yet. They’re pretty annoying at night when you have dark mode on but bright white ads pop up whenever you stop.

For all we know they would have been out of business now if it weren't for the acquisition.

Yeah, besides some adverts (when you stop, and I haven't seen them in a while), there doesn't seem to be any monetization going on.

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