When Google Inc. announced it was adding free turn-by-turn navigation to its Maps app on Android, many of us, incorrectly it would appear, predicted a major blow to the paid navigation industry.
Google’s navigation actually turned out to be quite a nice complementary app to existing heavyweight options. While it didn’t have the same bells and whistles as those apps, it was often better at finding points of interest. If Google Maps could find it, then you could navigate to it – whereas the paid for navigation apps could only navigate you to those places where the owners had paid to be included.
As time goes by, however, Google navigation seems to be growing up and, with every passing update, seems more and more like a viable replacement for some of the paid for apps.
The latest update to navigation adds the ability to avoid heavy traffic while being directed to your destination.
This isn’t anything particularly ground breaking when it comes to navigation – except that many of the alternative navigation apps will only take traffic into consideration if you pay an annual subscription fee.
Google navigation will also take traffic into consideration automatically. The advantage of this is that you are not interrupted, mid drive, to ask if you want to navigate around traffic. Co-pilot, for example, will tell me that it has detected a “traffic incident” and then expect me to take a look at what the incident is before deciding if I want to avoid it.  While I’m flying down the road at (ahem) 70 miles per hour, it does not exactly seem like the safest thing to be checking my phone and considering routing options.
Of course, there is a downside to Google nav’s approach. Co-pilot will often pick up minor incidents and ask me about them – they can be ignored. Depending on how up to date the data is, Google nav may well redirect the user unnecessarily. Also, it is not clear whether it updates your route while you are en route. If it does then that would be a better solution, although it would also require a data connection. Overall, however, I think the safe option is, undoubtedly, the best one.
Google navigation with traffic control is now available for Android in Europe and North America and could well be another step toward rendering that paid for option obsolete.
