‘Google Maps Gets New Widget To Explore The Neighborhood’

Google Maps gets a new widget, with which you can easily explore interesting places in your area. The new widget comes straight into the Material You color scheme. At the moment, Google is still working behind the scenes on the software.

Google Maps Material You

Google’s popular navigation app Maps will soon get a new widget. 9To5Google discovered this in version 11.0 of the app, which is available in beta. You will be able to permanently place a Maps search bar on the home screen with which you can search any destination, shop or catering business, exactly as you can in the app. if you start such a search, you will immediately see the results in Maps.

Yet there is more, because as you can see in the screenshots, buttons are also visible below the search bar. With this you can easily navigate home by ‘pressing’ on Home. Other buttons include: restaurants, bakeries, supermarkets, pharmacies, hotels, gas stations and more. With these shortcuts you can easily discover all these places near you, so Maps uses your location.

No Personalization

As you increase the size of the widget, you will see more of these buttons. It seems that you can’t control which buttons you will or will not see in the widget, but there is a chance that that function will be added at a later stage of development. This widget is not yet active, and Maps beta testers are not yet able to use it.

Do you already see the Maps widget popping up in your list of widgets? Please contact the Androidworld editors and send us your screenshot. You can do that this way. The Maps widget is already equipped in the Material You colors, and Google is now making that theme available for more and more apps. This is an overview.