It’s hard to imagine what our life would be like without a smartphone. It hasn’t been that long, but the phone solves so many daily tasks for us and is such a good companion for gaming, entertainment, photography and even work that we forget that this isn’t always the case. like this.

In fact, smartphones themselves have evolved a lot in a short time, and functions that we believe have been there forever haven’t been available since the inception of every operating system. Today we’re going to focus on the best feature of Google Maps, which curiously did not come to the fore. And if We mean Google Navigation.

Shortly after the release of Android, Google targeted GPS navigators

There are very interesting software cases that need to be launched in an application but are not ready to accompany software or functions that have not been started. One of the most extreme examples is the iPhone App Store.Since Steve Jobs launched the phone without an app store, his solution was for users to use webapps, the hackers finally opened a store and the following year they already had the App Store.

On Android we had shopping centre Since the first version with Android 1.0 (it was called Android Market, not Play Store), and what came with the first version of Android was Google Maps. The legendary HTC Dream came with apps like Gmail, YouTube or Maps, but… Did you know that 2008 Maps does not have a navigation option?

“Simply” (in quotation marks because even then it was a success) allowed us to see maps and data such as our GPS location, but it was an everyday thing, like asking the route from point A to point B. could not start.

Navigation devices like TomTom were still very popular in 2008 and 2009but with the introduction of Google Navigation, mobile phones started to take up space. With the release of Android 2.0, Google Maps 3.1.2 came with the aforementioned Google Navigation along with different improvements.

Below we leave you a thirteen-year-old video where Google shows how the Google Maps Navigation beta works:

It wasn’t as smooth a navigation as we have now, but It was a very important step. Deployment of mobile phones to replace autonomous GPS. It also added data such as Google Maps Navigation, 3D views, voice directions, voice search, and traffic or interest data.

The company had a relationship with Motorola at that time (two years later, Google bought Motorola for $12,500 million and soon sold it to Lenovo for 2,910 million), and Google announced on its blog that it was the first mobile phone with this new app. It would be the Motorola Droid.

The service started in the United States but spread to the rest of the world and soon became a phenomenon. As we said, GPS has done a lot of damage to the navigation industry because behind it, besides Google photographing every corner of the planet, Google Maps Navigation was completely free to use: We didn’t need to buy software or pay for updates.

The rest is history: Maps slowly got so big that Google itself had to split the app for phones with Android Go, and currently Google Maps is one of the most popular apps for getting around the city, both of which are history. Our vehicles provide transportation from city to city.

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