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Comment by exodust | Hacker News Reader

You know what Google Maps needs? Offline downloadable map functionality. They had that feature, then removed it, then put it back... now I honestly don't know where it's at.

Browsing offline maps is a breath of fresh air, it's so much quicker. Obviously you wouldn't download the whole world, only your home city or whatever. But it's lightning fast to zoom and pan around an offline map compared with connecting over mobile bandwidth.

Browsing maps in Airplane mode should be possible. It's a map after all, not a website.

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It's mostly a question of storage.

Here's a great tool for getting a feel:

http://tools.geofabrik.de/calc/#type=geofabrik_standard&bbox...

Z=18 is rarely used, so for Z<=17 you're looking at roughly 300MB for raster tiles a city the size of Calgary. You also don't get routing information with purely raster data.

You could try vector data which would be smaller, but then you have to display it, which can be computationally expensive if you want it to look pretty, and you'd lose the snappiness you're seeking.

You've just told us a good-sized city fits in about 1/200th of my phone's storage. I'll take a dozen.

Actually, you could fit the entirety of the state of Washington in <50% of my phone's storage.

I'm not seeing a problem.

>Actually, you could fit the entirety of the state of Washington in <50% of my phone's storage. I'm not seeing a problem.

Well, most people don't want to lose even 20% of their phone's storage in a single app, much less 50%.

And that's just for those satisfied to only have info for one state. What about people regularly travelling between 1-2 states?

That said, I question the OP storage math. At least with vector information, I know that something like Navigon's GPS/map app, can store the whole of US (including the smallest of towns and cities) in around 1GB.

The OpenStreetMap vector data for Calgary is about 6.2MB-20MB, depending on the format.

Vector data has a much smaller footprint in most cases, but takes lots of processing to render, and even more if you need to be able to zoom around the map. Rendering the US down to z17 as raster tiles allows for efficient processing, but could easily get into 10s of GB (which makes sense, since it is creating thousands and thousands of png images). The size grows exponentially with each zoom level though, so if you only need something like z12, you might be able get it into the 10s of MB range.

I wasn't saying I would want the entirety of Washington on my phone. Quite the contrary. I was pointing out the sheer area that fits in that amount of storage. It's 71,362 square miles.

If you're traveling regularly between two states, you'd want your origin city, destination city, and your route with maybe a couple miles on either side. Say a 250-mile route, and 200 square miles at either end. I bet it fits in <2GB.

You demonstrated quite eloquently that in this case, offline is superior.

With the new version (v8 in Android) of Google maps, just click on the search and scroll down to end.

There is an option "Save map to use offline". Alas, it has an expiry period of 30 days.

Just discovered google maps on my ipad only lets you save an offline map if youre logged in. Nice job Google, you've managed to make signing in to google a requirement even for offline functionality.

It does, "ok maps"

Not anymore. They became reasonable again and both the search and any selected location description has a "save for offline use" button at the bottom.

But you can't search the resulting map or get directions. I have an Android phone, and the last good Maps for it was version 6. I do two things: (1) use copilot GPS with the whole U.S. and Canada (takes 1.8 GB); (2) keep my old Galaxy Nexus with Android 4.2 which cannot be upgraded and has Maps 6.

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