Re: How To Download Offline Google Maps On Iphone
Eliane Lebouf
With offline maps in iOS 17 and later, you can use Maps for information and navigation even when you don't have a Wi-Fi or cellular connection. Offline maps include details like hours and ratings on places, turn-by-turn directions for driving, walking, cycling, or riding transit, and estimated arrival times.
Offline maps do not sync across your devices. Offline maps are only available in select areas. An offline map for a specific region is not intended for use in all regions. Features vary by country and region.
Apple Maps has improved leaps and bounds over the last decade, but one area it has always been lacking is offline use. Google Maps and others have let you download maps to be available offline for a long time.
With Apple Maps on iOS 17, you can now save a region of the map locally on your iPhone. As long as you stay inside the bounds of the downloaded map, you can get turn-by-turn directions entirely offline; for driving, walking, cycling, for transit. You can also simple pan and zoom around the map in the Maps app, with no waiting for things to load. Offline maps also include POI data like opening hours.
With a map downloaded, when no network is available, Apple Maps will use the downloaded map if applicable for your current location. When internet is available, Maps will always look up data over the network to incorporate information like realtime traffic.
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It can be a good idea to have a map of an unfamiliar area, like a new town or hiking path, in case you don't have Wi-Fi access or a cell signal. Here's how you can download a map to use offline.
An outline will then appear over your map, which represents the area you'll download a map for. You can resize this outline until you're satisfied and then tap Download. A banner will announce when your map has finished downloading.
From here, you can access settings like updating the map and an Only Use Offline Maps switch near the bottom of the page. If you toggle this switch on, you'll see Using Offline Maps across the top of your map when you use it. You can then tap this banner to get back to the offline maps settings page, too.
Using offline maps was similar to using the Maps app when online. You open your Maps app, type in where you want to go and hit Go. You can also select your mode of transportation and whether you want to add any stops along the way.
When you're on the road, offline maps act similarly to online maps. The map follows you and shows nearby restaurants and businesses. If you're driving, offline maps will also show you the speed limit for the street you're on. Siri will read out directions the whole way, telling you when to turn and where your destination is on the street.
There are a few differences between offline and online maps. The biggest issue is it won't know exactly when you'll get to your destination. When you look up directions, offline maps will display an estimated time of arrival, but they can't take into account real-time traffic patterns since it's offline.
When I used offline maps to find my way to a downtown restaurant after an NFL game, for example, offline maps told me it would take me about 15 minutes to get to my destination. In reality, it ended up taking me about 40 minutes to fight through traffic and get to dinner.
That leads to my second issue with offline maps: If you veer off its path, it takes a while to recalibrate and find you again. When getting through the traffic mentioned above, I took a few impromptu turns down side streets and offline maps still showed me where I turned off the path for a minute or so.
Otherwise, offline maps take things back to the days of physical maps. You may not be able to predict how much traffic will delay your drive, and if you take a wrong turn it might take you a second to figure out how to get back, but you can get to your destination... eventually. Pack some snacks just in case.
For more Apple news, here are the features in iOS 17.5 and our iOS 17 cheat sheet. You can also check out how to download the second iOS 18 developer beta now and why you might not want to install it just yet.
I am confused about "only use offline maps" settings. I'm turning it on because I want fast preloaded maps, and I don't want my phone to use any data in area where my map is cached. Is apple maps smart enough to not use data if the map is cached?
iOS 17, just use my saved maps when I'm in that area without impacting my data rates. If I venture outside of that area, please use the data to populate a new map. Why is "only use offline maps" even an option?
Edit: Additionally, I believe that off-line maps is not used whatsoever when online maps is on. The only current benefit to offline maps is that it will automatically switch to offline maps only when your phone detects that you have no cellular connection. But even with 1 bar of super weak connection, it will still try to use online maps so even that aspect is not very seamless.
The "Only Use Offline Maps" setting is designed for situations where you have a limited or no data connection. When this setting is enabled, Apple Maps will only use the offline maps that you have downloaded, even if you are connected to Wi-Fi or cellular data. This can be useful if you are traveling to an area with poor or no internet coverage, or if you want to avoid using any data for navigation.
However, if you want Apple Maps to use the most up-to-date information, you should keep the "Only Use Offline Maps" setting turned off. This will allow Apple Maps to use real-time traffic data, incident reports, and other information to provide you with the most accurate and efficient navigation.
I understand how it works, but it's just plain old bad UX in my opinion. Phone should be always looking for downloaded data and leveraging it, me as an user should not care whether I have turned on some option or not, if I have previously downloaded the data.
Hello @IsmaelChivite Developed a survey form with Survey123 Connect V3.13.234 and enabled Standard map option, published vector tile and mobile map package .vtpk for offline use, but got feedback from end users who are using iPhone 8 with iOS 14.8.1 that they can't download the offline map but got message: "There are no compatible maps available online to download".
How can I get offline maps on to my iPhone for geocaching? (kuwait specifically since I'm traveling there). I will have data/phone turned off but I will use the phones GPS system..just need some maps.
The official Geocaching App for iPhone can be used offline, but you have to save the caches you want to look for to your favorites first. Go to each individual cache's page from within the App and click on "Add to Saved List" to save them to your favorites. Then you choose to include images or not and pick the maps you want to save (street, topo, satellite). Keep in mind you cannot have Google Maps chosen in the App's settings...those can't be saved. Any cache in your saved list can then be searched for offline.
With the official Geocaching app you can upload your PQs via Wi-Fi and use them offline. As for offline maps with a smartphone thats always an issue. You may want to invest in a decent hand held GPSr. You'll get better durability and much longer battery life.
In addition to the above comments, you can also change your map preferences in the Menu -> Settings to openstreetmaps or Bing maps to save the street or satellite maps for offline use. Google's API prevents us from allowing to save Google maps for offline use.
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Before I travel, I search for caches in areas I'm goIng to visit and do a search from there. "get next 30 results" a few times so I gather a decent area of where I'll be, then save the lot to a favourite list. In the list view there's the save option at the top, saves time! Wifi at hotels/airports is fantastic as I can upload finds or search for another area...
This project is no longer maintained. However, it reads directly from osm.pbf files and renders the maps successfully. You will have to manage the size of the region you want to map, because this implementation seems to hang and eventually crash if you try to load an entire country into it. I used a 25mb osm.pbf file for a subset of the LA region and it worked great. I think the rendering engine needs optimization.
This is an open-source C++ library for offline rendering and routing with vector maps. It is actively maintained (see their mailing list). I had trouble getting it to compile on Mac OSX but maybe you will have better luck. Seems to be a very capable, powerful, and portable library. They've gotten it running on Fedora, Moblin, Ubuntu, Debian, Windows, Qt, and Mac OSX/iOS.
The size of the database heavily depends on what information you want to store. OSM has really a lot of different features of which you will need only a small subset. If you just need POIs then you can filter out all highways, landuses, lakes and rivers, power lines and maybe building outlines. This can be done by dropping all elements with the corresponding tags and as a consequence the resulting database will be much smaller. osmfilter might be of help.
There is a long list of OSM-based applications for iOS of which some are open source. And there is a wiki page about vector tiles. But keep in mind that tiles usually just represent a visual map without containing information about POIs or other features.
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