Google is preparing to kill Waze

Moonrise2473@feddit.it to Android@lemmy.world – 54 points –
Google is laying off employees at Waze
theverge.com

Firing the sales team = less income = some higher up will see declining profits = it will be killed

90

Google kills everything it touches

https://killedbygoogle.com/ is a great site to see them all. It's A LOT.

Damn, I missed the news about Google domains. That sucks. Squarespace domain pricing is typically pretty high.

Switch to cloudflare, they recently started with domains

Yeah it’s super frustrating too because google was one of the few places that you could get a .dev domain, and square space isn’t exactly the most logical place for a developer’s sight

that’s okay! there are other great alternatives: the folks over at selfhosted@lemmy.world generally agree that porkbun is excellent (and i’d agree with them)

Wait are we sure about Google domains? I literally just saw an ad for it yesterday.

Marketing team didn't was aware yet or forgot to turn off the campaign when reassigned

For stadia, a game dev said that they were shocked by reading the announcement on Twitter, as they spoke with some stadia engineer about their game port to stadia only three hours earlier

Looks like when Google decides to kill a product, only a few managers know it

288 services dead

Pretty sure if this was any other industry there would be a lot of shit thrown, but because its Google they somehow get away with it.

Wait, why the fuck would they kill off Google Domains? It's incredibly competitive when you compare it to Namecheap and Porkbun imo.

Why are they doing this. Waze was such an amazing tool

They've integrated what they want into Maps navigation. Now they want you to switch and be happy about it.

Title is clickbait, they are laying off the ads department and using Google's.

I dunno, google has a long history of buying competitors then shutting them down, we are all just anticipating it this time.

Google maps is pretty damn good though - but I do like Waze for road trips

Well that is unfortunate, Waze is a great community that showed what is possible with crowdsourced information and keeping people from getting as many sepeding tickets

Crowdsourcing proprietary software - it ends the same every time. People should just do OpenStreetMaps instead

If you actually care about crowdsourced information, please consider contributing to your local area in OpenStreetMaps. There's way more to crowdsourcing than just avoiding speeding tickets!

Indeed. I update it regularly through OsmAnd. It even has a google traffic overlay. Waze users can slide over to Magic Earth and start reporting traffic, construction, and speedvtraps over there and automatically start using OpenStreetMaps!

To clarify, does Magic Earth let people mark cops?

If so I assume it only works well in larger cities?

Yes. The priblem with crowdsourced data, is it requires a crowd. This is why I encourage everyone to hype Magic Earth to people who love waze. I attached a screenshot of the available alerts.

Yes. The priblem with crowdsourced data, is it requires a crowd. This is why I encourage everyone to hype Magic Earth to people who love waze.

Then again, another great way to reduce speeding tickets is not speeding.

Seriously ?
Cop are master at putting trap in the worst area possible, like where it goes from 110 to 90 then 110 again over 200 meters.

Until cities started going "hey, why do they have more info about where our cops are than us" and threatened to sue. Last I heard, that feature was banned in several states.

Read the article... It's transitioning to a different ad team, so cost reduction when only one system for ads is needed. I don't think this will be cancelled since their community is actively keeping it alive.

But Google traditionally is operating internal teams as competing teams. So Waze has a great chance of being seen as a "competing" product to Google maps. A customer sent to Waze might be seen as a customer lost to Waze. For example Waze added first the integration with Spotify in 2017, never supported Google play music and only after years it supported YouTube music. If they felt that they were under the same company (they were acquired five years earlier), they should have been integrated Google play music first, Spotify second (or both, GPM was killed three years later).

Regarding the community, i saw a lot of mods doing a lot of unpaid work. And i mean A LOT, they are investing hours of their free time to improve maps for a multi billion corporation. But when I tried to login, i had the impression that it was abandoned since the acquisition. The interface design is very outdated and it's very hard for a regular user to find this place as it's not advertised anywhere (i got the link when I sent a correction to the map from the app)

And corrections appear to be unidirectional. Something that gets fixed or flagged in Google maps doesn't transfer to Waze, but the opposite happens.

Again on Android auto, Waze got split screen support 6 months after it was publicly announced and one year after it was available in the public beta channel on the play store. No communication between the two teams in the same company, the android auto team treated the Waze team as they were some independent company

Seeing Google history, i give 3 years max before they wind down Waze.

Magic earth seems pretty good.

HD traffic and report a cop. Also not google and privacy built.

https://www.magicearth.com/

I'm very impressed about it. I wonder how they're making money if they don't sell traffic data or ads or telemetry. Their server expenses aren't cheap

I had the same thought. So I emailed them and asked last year. Below is the reply:

Hello, We are glad that you like Magic Earth! Magic Earth is free for end users, but we have a paid SDK - you can check generalmagic.com for more info. We have partnerships with companies such as Selectric, Smarter AI, Absolute Cycling etc.

Oh for fuck sake.

Fuck Google. I used Waze since it didnt need a Google account and was still reasonably popular in my area.

If I have to use a Google account for this shit, I dont know what I'd do.

Is there anyone who didn't see this coming when they first bought Waze?

They surprisingly worked almost independently for a decade, i was expecting that it would be killed in 2015

Waze editor here. Based on the article’s content, this post’s title is a bit of an overreaction. Google would be a fool to kill off a platform with more accurate street maps than its core platform, maintained by a vibrant group of volunteers, at least without creating or migrating those tools over to GMaps.

Oh sweet summer child. Google could turn off waze with no warning. Are you going to switch to bing maps? If every waze member stopped using any google service as a result, would their bottom line be affected in any meaningful way?

Kind of an alarmist headline, and not at all what the article says.

Google: Google remains deeply committed to growing Waze’s unique brand

Also Google: And how are we going to achieve that? By decreasing the workforce that works on waze

Sorry to hear this, I really liked the social aspect of Waze where you could report things you saw on the road.

In my country Waze is the literal go-to app for drivers.

I'd like to see more Waze features integrated into Google Maps.

A lot of the data is shared back and forth, but yeah the tools are much better in Waze.

The reports of police and obstacles are also super useful and more plentiful then in Gmaps

And that is why Waze has to go away. It's giving people info on cops, so that's becoming politically inconvenient for Google.

But you can also report police speed traps on Google Maps too? (At least in the UK not sure if it differs by country)

Same. I'm surprised that they haven't merged the apps years ago. I thought it was only a matter of time, but Waze continued to exist for many years.

Waze is quite a different experience than Google Maps when driving, so it's made sense to keep them as two separate apps.

Google Maps is "I want to get from point A to point B in a normal way."

Waze is "I want the most aggressively quick way; no back street is too small for me."

I feel like OP has gone too far with the editorialised headline this time, as the only thing that's happening at this point is switching Waze over to use the standard Google ad platform rather than their custom system.

Now is the time to start encouraging Waze users to try Magic Earth!

It also has social reporting features, uses open street maps, and has a real privacy policy.

Nice, i hope it doesn't do like maps.me where they slowly enshittified the app

Later I'll check if it has android auto support (if it doesn't, it's DOA)

do you know when support for Android Auto is implemented and working fully?

Just tried it, Android auto support is present and looks well done

The Waze UI is soooo much nicer that GMaps on iOS 😢

Well, there goes my little Halo Warthog as me on my screen. :( Wish there was an app I can just customize that shit how I want.

The main thing I love about Waze which Apple Maps and Google don't have is the ability to have the always on speed limit.

I know Google shows the speed limit sometimes when navigating, I just liked Waze better because I can have it always on.

Shouldn't uneditorilised headlines be a rule around these parts too? Take your hot takes to the comments or the body text.

Genuinely surprised they let it live this long. I expected when they acquired Waze that they would gut and dump.

I wonder if anyone predicted this when Google bought Waze...it's not like Google has a history of killing major projects when they acquire them.

I'm shocked to hear. Waze was even updated to properly work with Android Auto's new layout.

I much prefer Waze with Android Auto than Google Maps.

Google Maps reads out every single word and highway number and repeats itself over and over again with directions within seconds of itself. Waze just tells you to turn left or right.

Plus you can report cops, potholes, construction, etc with Waze on the fly with a few touches on my dash screen. Maps only seems to have that if you use Android Auto on the phone screen. Doesn't work in my car.

I'll miss Waze.

Is there a decent open source alternative for navigation?

Can recommend Organic Maps, works great. Its Open Source and with OSM data. But its offline only so you need a lot of free storage space and don't get stuff like live traffic infos, ratings etc.

I've been trying them out. Its pretty good and has a decent OSM editor built in. My main wishes for it would be better integration with ORS routing and some sort of social mapping (ideally federated on ActivityPub using Place objects and notes) for stuff that is not long lasting enough for OSM (for example Waze like traffic and obstacle reporting) as well as discussions for OSM objects since there really isn't a good place for that either.

osmand - https://osmand.net/ - is open source, their plus app that has more features and android auto support is paid on the play store though.

How do we kill Google?

DuckDuckGo

DDG has to get a lot better before that's going to happen, sorry.

DDG has actually been a lot better when searching than Google ever has for me. The top posts aren't always ads, I don't have to keep rephrasing everything to find what I'm looking for, it's been great.