> I genuinely want to know what lead Google to not support Maps offline properly
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.
> designers like to say that users are always right?
It'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.
This lowbrow criticism is really old. Google doesn’t do much offline for the same reason almost no one does offline anymore; it’s hard and the number of users affected is very small.
Do you honestly think Google is looking at the number of maps users that go offline and saying, “We absolutely need their data!” rather than “Eh, not worth rearchitecting everything for.”
Not to mention they have done a lot for it even if it’s not perfect. There’s a dedicated team doing their best with it. It’s just not worth giving a lot of attention and resources.
Google could certainly design a basic offline mapping app. They even have offline mapping in their app today.
I’m actually not even sure what the complaint is actually about since I don’t use offline myself, but I know that Google Maps is a massive app with tons of teams all working on a myriad of features in parallel and a huge dependency tree. So I’m not surprised at all if there are a bunch of features with online assumptions baked in.
As an egregious google maps power user, these are the ones that bother me:
1. Offline maps don't actually download all the destinations in the mapped area
2. Google maps is bad at displaying densely packed businesses - this is an issue online as well
3. No offline bike or transit directions
These are the 3 I checked immediately in organic maps, and all work significantly better there.
I think your point is reasonable, but I'm also a very high income person who thinks nothing of buying data plans when traveling internationally and has an unlimited plan in the US. I routinely meet people while traveling who have the opposite set of financial priorities, organic maps is probably a great choice for them.
Offline maps in Google have been blocked also by map data license terms - their providers just dont want to allow this, as they want to sell it as premium thing.
It isn't very difficult to log the events to disk and send them later. In fact I would be shocked if they didn't do this already. Offline support wouldn't noticeably affect the data they receive. In fact it may help it if people are using the app more and the event delivery is more reliable.
One real reason could be ads. Unless they are pre-loading ads for offline display than offline browsing will not produce revenue.
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.
> designers like to say that users are always right?
It'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.