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 unnecessary UI elements and map labeling from your view.
- Power saving mode limitations might prevent it from working in landscape or with public transportation.
When is the worst time for your phone battery to be low? Halfway through filming your child’s play? First thing in the morning, do you realize that you forgot to charge it overnight? While we could go on almost forever, the top of this list would absolutely be “when you’re browsing somewhere.” Fortunately, Google Maps may soon offer a new mode to deal with precisely these kinds of emergencies.
Opening beta version 25.44.03.824313610 of Google Maps for Android, we discovered evidence of development of a new “power saving” mode. Here, a few text strings announce the feature and provide a general overview of how it works:
Code
Power saving mode
To save battery, press the power button while driving. Only key information such as next turns will be shown.
To save battery while driving, press the power button
New! Power saving mode All of this appears to work independently of your phone’s Battery Saver mode, with users being able to manually enable Maps’ power saving right within the app. Oddly, this seems to happen through your phone’s physical power button, rather than through the app’s UI. We were able to extract an introductory illustration of the power saving mode which seems to highlight precisely this interaction:
AssembleDebug / Android Authority
Maps will display a message at the bottom of the screen when you enable power saving, but we imagine it will be quite difficult not to notice the change, as your screen becomes monochrome and removes almost all of its UI elements.
Indeed, we fear that Google has gone a little too far in the minimalist direction, even removing the name of the next street you turn onto. We wonder if this might be set in stone, however, observing that there appear to be rectangles highlighting additional text regions in this introductory graphic above.
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Power saving mode in Maps appears to support walking, driving, and two-wheeling directions, but so far we haven’t been able to confirm that it will also support public transportation. This could be a consequence of this low-text approach, as you’ll need to know the number of the bus or train you need to get on – “arrive at the front” won’t cut it.
That said, this should still feature an audio output, so perhaps voice navigation will be enough to take over and tell you where you’re going next – but what happens if you miss one of those announcements?
Finally, we spotted another surprising limitation:
Code
Can’t use landscape mode when power saving
We hope you enjoy browsing in portrait mode, because if you’re trying to max out your battery, this might be your only option.
This all seems like a solid idea, but the implementation we’re seeing from this release is a bit shaky, to put it mildly. This may be due in part to our partial understanding of Google’s intentions here, and we are trying to connect the dots based on the available evidence. Hopefully the picture starts to become a little clearer in a future Google Maps update.
⚠️ A Teardown of the APK helps predict features that might come to a service in the future based on current work code. However, these planned features may not be available in a public release.
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