Photo: Bogdan Popa/autoevolution
I have no idea what's happening to navigation apps these days, but the latest updates brought controversial changes or bugs that completely ruin users' experience.
Google Maps received a new color palette for its maps, making it hard to distinguish roads from the background, parks, and lakes, and chances are the search giant won't undo the update.
The latest Waze versions broke down the dark mode on CarPlay, making it dangerous to use the app at night, as the light visual style could make you blind for a second or two when looking at the screen. The workaround is opening the app on the iPhone, but picking up the mobile device when driving is a big no-no in the first place.
It looks like Waze causes more confusion in its user base, as a top feature went missing after the latest update.
The calendar integration no longer works in Waze, so users relying on the app to drive to their appointments must manually configure navigation.
If you've never used the calendar sync support in Waze, here's how it works. Once users configured the calendar integration, they could launch the application and see their appointments within Waze, with a shortcut to drive to the next meeting (as long as an address was previously configured for the appointment). Additionally, the destination of each appointment appeared in search results when looking for an address.
Based on the calendar data, the planned drives section also displayed the upcoming trips with relevant address info.
The latest update in Waze breaks down the feature, so users must launch the calendar, expand the appointment, find the address, open it in Waze, select a route, and then start navigation. The process is cumbersome and not as convenient as having everything performed automatically by Waze.
Surprisingly, not many people seem to complain about this bug despite the broken behavior spotted in August. It could be a sign that not too many users rely on the calendar integration in Waze, which made some believe that the Google-owned company intentionally removed it.
However, a Waze user says on Google's forums that they reached out to the dev team, and they acknowledged it's a bug. The most recent update caused the glitch, so the Waze developers are now working on a fix to bring things back to normal with the next release. No information is available regarding the release date, but the good news is that the calendar integration is here to stay in Waze. At least for now, that is, as Waze has previously removed several features suffering from low usage, including the iOS widget – which I enjoyed and used daily, but according to Waze, I was a very, very rare case.
The latest Waze versions broke down the dark mode on CarPlay, making it dangerous to use the app at night, as the light visual style could make you blind for a second or two when looking at the screen. The workaround is opening the app on the iPhone, but picking up the mobile device when driving is a big no-no in the first place.
It looks like Waze causes more confusion in its user base, as a top feature went missing after the latest update.
The calendar integration no longer works in Waze, so users relying on the app to drive to their appointments must manually configure navigation.
If you've never used the calendar sync support in Waze, here's how it works. Once users configured the calendar integration, they could launch the application and see their appointments within Waze, with a shortcut to drive to the next meeting (as long as an address was previously configured for the appointment). Additionally, the destination of each appointment appeared in search results when looking for an address.
Based on the calendar data, the planned drives section also displayed the upcoming trips with relevant address info.
The latest update in Waze breaks down the feature, so users must launch the calendar, expand the appointment, find the address, open it in Waze, select a route, and then start navigation. The process is cumbersome and not as convenient as having everything performed automatically by Waze.
Surprisingly, not many people seem to complain about this bug despite the broken behavior spotted in August. It could be a sign that not too many users rely on the calendar integration in Waze, which made some believe that the Google-owned company intentionally removed it.
However, a Waze user says on Google's forums that they reached out to the dev team, and they acknowledged it's a bug. The most recent update caused the glitch, so the Waze developers are now working on a fix to bring things back to normal with the next release. No information is available regarding the release date, but the good news is that the calendar integration is here to stay in Waze. At least for now, that is, as Waze has previously removed several features suffering from low usage, including the iOS widget – which I enjoyed and used daily, but according to Waze, I was a very, very rare case.
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