Obviously satellite imagery and traffic data doesn't work, but viewing the map, and getting directions within the offline-capable mode do work.
Furthermore, with data turned off, cities and highways for places outside nominated areas work too.
For example, I have no offline maps for anywhere in Europe, but I can see a map of UK to a scale where the little distance gauge shows 100km, and it shows cities (and highways between) such as London, Leeds, Sheffield, Liverpool, Guilford, Cardiff, etc.
I use that all the time in areas with no cell service
In airplane mode the search prompt in maps even changes to "Search Offline Maps".
I can't search with an offline map in Thailand, but it works fine for an offline map in Australia: https://imgur.com/a/DA803mj
Search just finds whatever matches sorted by distance so it may not fit one's needs.
But why don’t these apps automatically cache a map at some coarse resolution?
I do wish the apps were a bit less stingy about letting you choose to fully offline large areas more easily though. The detailed road information is helpful when you don't have signal and if you travel for work it's often outside what a single box will capture. E.g. Google Maps lets you offline as much as you want (as far as I can practically tell) but you have to do it in many about-indiana-sized-rectangles instead of just saying "save these states" or being able to zoom out farther to a region directly.
Zoom into some location you've never looked up before, in some country you haven't been to. Turn on airplane mode. You can pan around and the nearby areas will still be there. Zoom out, and previously cached tiles will still be available. Go to some other part of the world, and a coarse resolution version of their polygons should still be visible.
I think as of a few years ago, it also auto-caches tiles along a navigation route, but I can't find the announcement stating that anymore :(
That said, if you don't like what Google Maps does, there's lots of other choices. Here maps (from the Navteq/Nokia lineage) had pretty reasonable downloading options when I was using it on WP and is available on platforms that lived.
I think I would go for 1 month cache. Balance the possibility of change with the likelyhood of no change.
As I recall it worked fairly poorly (still tried to load live urls) and wanted to re-download the cache once a day or more. It was not useful for the purpose.
I always took it to be "make as many people happy with the least effort," why continue to polish a product in ways like this that few will use or ever even notice is available?
Much better to spend effort inserting local businesses into peoples driving directions. They might've wanted to stop for coffee even if they told you a different destination.
In recent versions, it will also auto-cache tiles along the way if you navigate somewhere far away, even if you don't explicitly tell it to.
Both features have saved me from getting lost many times...
I do not have an internet connection on my phone yet I am as dependent on navigation systems as anyone else!
At least not 24/7. I’m happy to submit myself to silly nonsense for a paycheck, which is pretty close to the definition of having a job!
I’m also a songwriter and I need to be observing the real world and not the mediated representation. It’s my job to create the mediated representation! And with killer guitar solos!
You mean it should automatically cache everything you ever look up including satellite imagery?