<story><title>Organic Maps</title><url>https://organicmaps.app/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bertil</author><text>I genuinely want to know what lead Google to not support Maps offline properly. It’s truly staggering how, even when I do everything I can to say: save this journey, don’t delete the map around it, don’t delete the journey, just passively show me where I am next to it, it will gleefully delete everything.&lt;p&gt;I once met their lead designer (who had just changed to work at another FAANG) and… boy was that &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; a conversation I wanted to have. You know how designers like to say that users are always right? Well, not that guy. Literally 45 minutes of monologue, none of it about connectivity, being lost or unfamiliar languages. Just how people were wrong, wrong reviews wrong and how they couldn’t read information properly unless they had ‘a mission’. “What if the mission is finding their way in a new city where they don’t have connection?” Didn’t care. Not a real mission.&lt;p&gt;A little later, he was told that the company he was now working for throttled wifi every Wednesday to encourage empathy. That was not a conversation he wanted to have.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tazjin</author><text>I had a bizarre encounter when working there, also Maps related. I lived in the UK at the time and my post code just didn&amp;#x27;t exist in Google Maps. I did some digging, and found out that in fact no post codes in the UK had been added in quite some time.&lt;p&gt;Eventually I found out why: There was some lead dev on Maps, who refused to allow new imports of UK post code data because he thought they were &amp;quot;wrong&amp;quot;. They were seeing data with multiple post codes for the same building!&lt;p&gt;For the record: This is valid in the UK, as there&amp;#x27;s a maximum number of households per post code or something like that.&lt;p&gt;Not sure how that ended eventually, left a few years ago, but I just checked and those post codes now exist.</text></comment>
<story><title>Organic Maps</title><url>https://organicmaps.app/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bertil</author><text>I genuinely want to know what lead Google to not support Maps offline properly. It’s truly staggering how, even when I do everything I can to say: save this journey, don’t delete the map around it, don’t delete the journey, just passively show me where I am next to it, it will gleefully delete everything.&lt;p&gt;I once met their lead designer (who had just changed to work at another FAANG) and… boy was that &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; a conversation I wanted to have. You know how designers like to say that users are always right? Well, not that guy. Literally 45 minutes of monologue, none of it about connectivity, being lost or unfamiliar languages. Just how people were wrong, wrong reviews wrong and how they couldn’t read information properly unless they had ‘a mission’. “What if the mission is finding their way in a new city where they don’t have connection?” Didn’t care. Not a real mission.&lt;p&gt;A little later, he was told that the company he was now working for throttled wifi every Wednesday to encourage empathy. That was not a conversation he wanted to have.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jesterson</author><text>&amp;gt; I genuinely want to know what lead Google to not support Maps offline properly&lt;p&gt;Very simple answer - they want to know everything you do online. As Google Maps is provided for free, you are the product. Convenience of the product (you) is not a priority whatsoever.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; designers like to say that users are always right?&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s just smoke and mirrors. Unfortunately IT breeds a number of people who have ignorant position they have the right to tell people how they should interact, conveniently forgetting the service will be used by all groups of people, not just IT geeks.</text></comment>