In the past 18 months I've noticed Google Maps' navigation prompts being announced just slightly too late for comfort; e.g. I'm often nearly into an intersection at 30-40 mph when my phone tells me to turn onto the cross street. In that same 18 month timeframe I've moved to a new city so I'm acutely aware of this lag.

I chalk this up to Google Maps' overall bloat and sluggishness on my 2-year-old phone.

Would you happen to be playing audio through Bluetooth? My car has a delay for non-call Bluetooth audio which causes that delay for me and gets really annoying. I will often take the phone off car Bluetooth just for that reason.

On my phone it doesn't even get the audio prompts out when I'm playing music from the phone through bluetooth.

The music just cuts out for a few seconds, but there's no navigation audio.

I've turned off navigation prompts for that reason, and just check the "next turn" thing at the top every now and then.

What's even more bizarre is that for me, when using bluetooth audio I get part of the prompts, but other parts are missing. I I remember correctly, it leaves out important words like "left" amd "right". It works fine as soon as I turn off bluetooth.

I get the prompt starting, then the volume on the music is lowered.

> Would you happen to be playing audio through Bluetooth?

No, straight from the phone.

Last weekend I had a friend in the car using apple maps on a newish iPhone, and every prompt from his phone was around a second earlier than from my phone. At 35 mph, one second is 50 feet (15 meters). That's enough to turn a safe maneuver into an unsafe one.

Add to that when the only directional advice you do get is “Go north-east on <street name>”. It is not very useful if your biking or otherwise not able to see the screen.

Not a regular Google user, but you could try downloading the offline map for your city. Might improve responsiveness?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=google+maps+download+offline+maps

No. In my experience, the first thing that Google Maps does is send your location to Google, run an auction for local advertisers, then download a half dozen images of local "featured" businesses. On my old phone, Maps was snappy enough before they added that antifeature, and things went downhill from there. When I retired that phone last year, it could take over a minute just to show a map (often devoid of street names).

Now, I actually don't have a mapping app on my phone. It takes a little planning ahead, but I'm happier to do without.

For me at least it doesn't. Even just typing into the search field lags sometimes so that I have to stop a second to let the characters appear. Searching for a restaurant, clicking on it, reading the information can take whole 10 seconds and be so frustrating.

I use Google Maps many years already but it just became so slow in the last year or so. Maybe they just don't support non-high end phones anymore.

It's also slow on fast phones and feels like the ui thread is being blocked by something for several 100s of milliseconds. I stopped using google maps because of this. So annoying.

Do you know a good alternative?

I don't have a good alternative for points of interest (restaurants, ...), but for maps and routing I use https://www.locusmap.eu (with offline Locus Maps, Android only). For car navigation Waze, ironically an app from google, is also nice and has full congestion avoidance.

Same experience on a few years old lower end samsung phone. Rubbish.

Might want to try a dedicated GPS. Not too expensive, and they have nice features like talking you into the correct lane.

Also, no lag (especially wierd lags) and no interruptions from notifications, phone calls and similar.

Apple maps works offline while giving accurate timely route information.

They've been absolutely wrecking Google Maps's performance and UX on Android since around ~1.5-2 years ago.

Switch back to version 9.42.3, or possibly a couple releases later if you need the "Favorites" and "Want to go" features in addition to just "Starred". It's pretty snappy and a breath of fresh air.

Related, they released an update for GMail a while ago that bricked the app and made it not able to open on certain inboxes (I had 3 accounts on my phone, one would trigger this bug as soon as I switched to this while the others did not).

The only fix was reverting to the stock version, and it was AMAZING. So smooth. I had completely forgotten how fast it was while they boiled this frog's water over the years with their updates.

Tried, after force stopping and disabling (which reverts it to factory version, 9.72.2) on my Verizon Galaxy S7. Says "App not installed." when trying to install APK after running through the install process. =(

You'll need root for this. You should be able to use one of those system app removal tools, or Titanium Backup if you have it (you might be able to convert it to a user app first). You might need a reboot after you do that before you can install another version. At least that's what I did on my end.

I recently had to use my 8 year old Nexus S phone for a few weeks, and Google Maps wouldn't even load. Chrome and Firefox could barely load most web pages, though the older Android Browser could limp along on enough pages to be useful (HN was the only site that actually felt usable). The phone's got half a gig of RAM, and didn't seem terrible when I stopped using it full time four years ago, but four more years of software updates have completely destroyed the usability of almost every app, while barely improving functionality at all.

And it doesn't stop at phones. I kid you not, the main benefit of upgrading my early 2009 Mac Pro GPU was having a fully functioning Google Maps experience again.

Interesting. On older tesla cars, people complained about the maps and the older MCU1 cpu.

The telsa maps are based on google maps.

I heard there were two ways to speed up maps:

1) turn off traffic, which significantly slowed things down

2) switch from vector maps to satellite maps. Apparently the map tiles of the vector maps require costly rendering for display, but the satellite maps just required a blit.

#2 may also explain #1, I'll bet traffic requires rendering too.

Install "Google Maps Go". It is another product by Google without all the bloat and is much much faster.

As a counterpoint, Google Maps on my iPhone 3G in 2008 was not reliable at all for directions. Sure it was better than printing out MapQuest on sheets of paper, but Google Maps has gotten significantly more reliable over time.

The maps load pretty quickly for me (satellite data on the desktop is another story, for some reason). My problem is with the "featurite", which I humbly disagree is getting better. I spend so much time fighting with the UI to try to just see a map:

-The app always loads with an "Explore {your_location}" card that takes half the screen. I am usually at my suburban house, near which there is nothing worth exploring. Even when I'm somewhere else, my primary use of the app is to get directions to an _already determined_ destination. The card is useless 95% of the time, but obscures half of the map, which is what I want to see and is so important as to be the name of the application.

-If I so much as brush the screen with more than one finger, it enters its 3D map mode. Like the "Explore" card, this seems to be screaming "look what we can do!", but it ignores what I want to do, which is navigate using the bird's-eye paradigm that has been used by every other map since the dawn of cartography.

-If I search for a place and tap a result, I get a full-screen card with information about that place, but no map. I just searched for "pizza" and tapped the first result and got a large picture of a pizza. I already knew what a pizza looks like, but I still don't know where the restaurant is. If I swipe the card down and then tap the map to try to get a better view of the restaurant's location, I lose the location indicator on the restaurant and the map re-centers on my current location.

I could go on, but I feel like an old man shouting into the void.

I am on Google Fi network with ~35 Mbps of download speed on LTE. The overall speed on interaction within the app is slow. For example: When I click on Route Options to select "Avoid tolls" I always end up clicking on something else because the UI lag is almost always there on interactions. And the new features such as "Start AR" never opens for me and app crashes on that feature.

Weird. I have 10 Mbps at the moment and I have a 3 years old phone. I tried exactly what you said with Avoid Tolls. Every interaction has absolutely no delay for me.

I do not have "Start AR" at the moment so I cannot test that.

I wonder what "pretty fast" means for you. I have a 1gbit fiber connection and a beastly computer, and everything lags in gmaps, in both firefox and chrome (on a machine that can run Witcher 3 at 120fps in ultra)

I remember after the first big design overhaul it got significantly slower. I think we all just got used to the slowness since then. And some of us got faster computers and stopped noticing as much.

> How fast is your connection?

200 Mbps

Subjectively others view gmail as slow and you view it as fast. Lets make it objective.

On a dual core cpu from 2014 with an ssd running linux I opened first firefox 70 and then chrome 75.

In both cases I was logged into my google account. In both cases I opened and then closed gmail to ensure what could be cached was cached.

In each I then entered mail.google.com and measured the time between hitting enter and seeing what looked like a usable interface. Lets compare that to other local ways of accessing email.

Running mu find maildir:/Gmail/INBOX took 9 ms this is easy to measure as it happens in the terminal.

Creating an emacsclient frame takes about 150ms added to the mu query which takes about 9. Logically there is some time required to render the view but its quite small and challenging to measure so lets say aprox 200ms or 1/5th of a second.

Loading the old school plain interface html interface to gmail took aprox 1.5 seconds.

It took 10 seconds in either browser to load the "modern" javascript gmail view.

For reference this is about 7 times slower than the html view or 50 times slower than mu4e.

Reading

https://www.pubnub.com/blog/how-fast-is-realtime-human-perce...

> A response time of 100ms is perceived as instantaneous. Response times of 1 second or less are fast enough for users to feel they are interacting freely with the information. Response times greater than 10 seconds completely lose the user’s attention.

This is why the slow loading Gmail interface has a loading screen so it is perceptibly doing something rather than appearing to be frozen. After this the interface is fast enough in the context of web apps wherein the user expects a small delay between actions but not as quick as a desktop app which can trivially be perceptibly instant.

Interestingly the old interface despite using vastly less ram and loading much much quicker initially appears to say load a message slightly slower than the slower loading interface so the optimum web interface would appear to be the slower loading more sophisticated interface if you don't mind keeping that browser tab pinned and always running.

A desktop app is still on the overall the superior option.

Is your gmail experience objectively different?

Sure. I'm running Core i5 7600 / 16 GB RAM / Samsung SSD 750 EVO / GeForce GTX 1060. It takes around 3-4 seconds to open for the first time and it takes around 2-3 seconds to open for the second time. For both Chrome and Firefox. I don't consider it slow. After it opened, every interaction is almost instant. I recorded video to check exact timestamps, so you can check it for yourself: https://youtu.be/F7LPAIe0jhw

I don't know how could you expect ms-time response. I have 70ms ping to mail.google.com. It's just not possible for a web app to 9ms time response, unless you're living at data center. But as a web app, Gmail is amazing and pretty fast. I don't know why it's slow for other people, I'm not Google engineer and I don't have performance insights. I just telling that it's far from slow for me. Definitely not 10 seconds.

Your cpu is probably 4-6x faster than mine and not running in a mode optimized for battery life. You have twice as much ram and faster to boot with a faster ssd.

It's slow for others because a huge range of machines exist and tons have slower cpu, storage, or especially network.

Worldwide the majority is probably using worse machines especially in poorer countries than ours.

> Google Mail is quite fast for me as well... And I'm not even using some crazy fast computer, just old PC with Core i5.

If you want to see fast mail, go load the basic html version of Gmail. I have it bookmarked because it loads as fast as you think it should.

Regular google mail loads so painfully slow in comparison, they needed a splash screen.

It does not load painfully slow for me. 2-4 seconds to load and that's about it. I'm considering it acceptable.

> just old PC with Core i5.

with possibly 8 gigs of RAM?

Thats still WAY faster than most machines being used in the wild.

Sorry, your SV bubble is showing.