Photo: Google
Google Maps and Waze are two of the most popular apps on Android Auto, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that everything’s running exactly as expected.
In fact, I’ve seen plenty of reports in the last few weeks indicating that Google Maps and Waze no longer work correctly on Android Auto, as they often fail to determine the location of the user and follow them on the map.
Needless to say, such a behavior more or less makes navigation apps rather useless, as not being able to determine the location also means that they’re providing users with inaccurate directions to a specific destination.
A member of the Android Auto team, however, suggests the simplest workaround that you can think of: enabling location access for navigation apps on the mobile device 24/7.
In other words, what could cause the GPS tracking issues in Google Maps and Waze on Android Auto could be incorrectly configured permissions, as these apps obviously need access to your location data to be able to tell where you are. If they’re blocked from getting your location, they could end up displaying a totally random point on the map that has nothing to do with where you are when launching the apps.
So what the Google engineer suggests is giving these apps background location permissions.
On Android, you can do this from Settings, then go to Apps & notifications, tap the app that you want to edit, such as Google Maps or Waze, expand the Permissions screen and go to Location. Next, you need to configure Google Maps and Waze to be Allowed all the time to read location information.
Needless to say, there’s a chance that this doesn’t fix the location tracking issues for everybody, especially if the configured permissions aren’t the ones to blame for the whole thing. However, giving this very simple trick a try is definitely worth it, especially if nothing else works right now.
Needless to say, such a behavior more or less makes navigation apps rather useless, as not being able to determine the location also means that they’re providing users with inaccurate directions to a specific destination.
A member of the Android Auto team, however, suggests the simplest workaround that you can think of: enabling location access for navigation apps on the mobile device 24/7.
In other words, what could cause the GPS tracking issues in Google Maps and Waze on Android Auto could be incorrectly configured permissions, as these apps obviously need access to your location data to be able to tell where you are. If they’re blocked from getting your location, they could end up displaying a totally random point on the map that has nothing to do with where you are when launching the apps.
So what the Google engineer suggests is giving these apps background location permissions.
On Android, you can do this from Settings, then go to Apps & notifications, tap the app that you want to edit, such as Google Maps or Waze, expand the Permissions screen and go to Location. Next, you need to configure Google Maps and Waze to be Allowed all the time to read location information.
Needless to say, there’s a chance that this doesn’t fix the location tracking issues for everybody, especially if the configured permissions aren’t the ones to blame for the whole thing. However, giving this very simple trick a try is definitely worth it, especially if nothing else works right now.
Google News