Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google Maps appears to be working on a new power saving mode for navigation.
- The mode would eliminate almost all UI elements and extraneous map labeling from your view.
- Power saving mode limitations could prevent it from working in landscape or with public transit.
When is the absolute worst time for your phone to be running low on battery? Halfway through filming your kid’s play? First thing in the morning when you realize you forgot to charge it overnight? While we could keep going for pretty much ever, high on that list would absolutely be “when you’re in the middle of navigating somewhere.” Thankfully, Google Maps could soon offer a new mode for dealing with exactly those kind of emergencies.
Cracking open the 25.44.03.824313610 beta release of Google Maps for Android, we’ve uncovered evidence of development on a new “power saving” mode. Here, a few text strings announce the feature and offer a high-level overview of how it works:
Code
<string name="POWER_SAVING_OPTION_TITLE">Power saving mode</string>
<string name="POWER_SAVING_OPTION_SUMMARY">To save battery, press the power button while driving. Only key information such as next turns will be shown.</string>
<string name="DIRECTIONS_POWER_SAVING_MODE_PROMO_CONTENT">To save battery while driving, press the power button</string>
<string name="DIRECTIONS_POWER_SAVING_MODE_PROMO_TITLE">New! Power saving mode</string>This all looks to work independently of your phone’s Battery Saver mode, with users able to manually activate Maps power saving directly in the app. Oddly, that looks like it’s going to happen through your phone’s physical power button, rather than part of the app’s UI. We were able to extract an introductory illustration for power saving mode that appears to highlight just this interaction:
AssembleDebug / Android Authority
Maps will display a message at the bottom of the screen when you activate power saving, but we imagine it will be pretty hard to not notice the change, as your screen goes monochrome and drops almost all of its UI elements.
Indeed, we worry if Google might have gone a little too far in the minimalist direction, removing even the name of the next street you’re turning onto. We wonder if that might not be set in stone, though, observing that there appear to be rectangles highlighting additional text regions in that intro graphic up above.
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Power saving mode in Maps looks like it will support walking, driving, and two-wheeler directions, but so far we haven’t been able to confirm that it will support public transit, as well. That might be a consequence of this low-text approach, as you’d have to know the number of the bus or train you need to get on — “turn up ahead” won’t cut it.
That said, this should still feature audio output, so perhaps voice navigation will be sufficient to pick up the slack and tell you where you’re going next — but what happens if you miss one of those announcements?
Finally, there’s one more surprising limitation we’ve spotted:
Code
<string name="MIN_MODE_LANDSCAPE_DISABLED_SNACKBAR_TEXT">Can’t use landscape mode when power saving</string>
We hope you like portrait mode navigation, because if you’re trying to stretch your battery as far as it can go, that might be your only option.
This all sounds like a solid idea, but the implementation we’re seeing as of this release is a little bit wonky, to put it mildly. Some of that may be due to our only partial understanding of Google’s intentions here, and we’re trying to connect the dots based on available evidence. Hopefully the picture starts becoming a little more clear in a future Google Maps update.
⚠️ An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
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