Pre-download google maps?

[croquagei]

Hi. I recently purchased my first android phone and have fallen in love with the google maps feature. Unfortunately living in Australia i have a horrible 200MB monthly cap on my data, google maps eats this up very quickly.

I read the link below and it says that maps now caches areas i often visit. I was wondering if there was a way I could tell the app to download the entirety of my city (& state) whilst connected to wifi so i wouldn't need to use data again.

Suggestions/comments?

Google Maps for Android goes 3D, finally works offline

EDIT: I know MapDroyd is a viable option, but i prefer google maps because of the location features.

 

[amlothi]

You have to move the map around to get it to download an area. Then, just don't clear your cache and it should stay there.

There is no way to define an area and tell it what to download.

 

[rsk11584]

i just tried scrolling through the map through an area in my neighbour hood, but after the net connection is switched off, it doesnt zoom down all is blurred cant we download from net till the last layer , zoom level of a particular area

 

[Teknologic]

i just tried scrolling through the map through an area in my neighbour hood, but after the net connection is switched off, it doesnt zoom down all is blurred cant we download from net till the last layer , zoom level of a particular area

Downloading every zoom layer MASSIVELY increases the memory usage of your app (after all there are over 10 layers in depth and you'll need thousands of the lowest layers to cover a mile/km..

The only way this could be done would be if google coded the specific option to chache tiles to SD card, but I don't even think they're legally allowed to do that...

 

[funpig]

I do not use a data plan. One way is to do as suggested above: zoom in and pan around to put the google map info into cache. Another simple suggestion is to download MapDroyd. You can select and download maps of pretty well any place in the world. The maps are less detailed but the advantage is that it takes up very little sd memory.

 

[amlothi]

I do not use a data plan. One way is to do as suggested above: zoom in and pan around to put the google map info into cache. Another simple suggestion is to download MapDroyd. You can select and download maps of pretty well any place in the world. The maps are less detailed but the advantage is that it takes up very little sd memory.

He doesn't want to use MapDroyd. He wants the location features of Maps.

The new vector graphics shouldn't use that much space, really.

The next generation of mobile maps - Official Google Mobile Blog

What zoom level are you at? Obviously, if you are at the World or Country level, it isn't going to cache ALL of the tiles for that area.

Maps tries to be smart and guess which areas you need.

You don't need to zoom all the way in, but if you zoom in to at least a street level, I've found that it caches enough.

 

[rsk11584]

i found mapdroid great i can zoom down to street level of major cities and the total size of india map is just some 30 mb, but mapdroid doesnt have search capability, but it has location capability you go to any place and click on my location it will point the location to that map, if mapdroid has search capabilities then it would be great, my idea is of a full fledged offline navigation system, just a full map of area and just gps, you should be able to search the location, calculate km etc, dont know when this will come , mapdroid should improve little much ;0

 

[Teknologic]

i found mapdroid great i can zoom down to street level of major cities and the total size of india map is just some 30 mb, but mapdroid doesnt have search capability, but it has location capability you go to any place and click on my location it will point the location to that map, if mapdroid has search capabilities then it would be great, my idea is of a full fledged offline navigation system, just a full map of area and just gps, you should be able to search the location, calculate km etc, dont know when this will come , mapdroid should improve little much ;0

Well, there are full-fledged gps apps available with offline maps, but they used to be very expensive, back before google released their navigation anyway.
I remember I tried a copy of navigon back before I had data and google enabled navigation I'm my country. It was actually a very good app.

 

[edwardjj]

Was looking for a 'solution' to this as well. Just came up with this:

How to: Pre-download a map area in Google Maps for Android | Stuff-Review

Google has heard our prayers!

 

[StratosWRC]

My V5.7.0 doesn't have this. Only labs are scale bar and measure.

 

[ironass]

My V5.7.0 doesn't have this. Only labs are scale bar and measure.

Make and model of your handset and the firmware it is running might be helpful.

 

[amlothi]

Zombie thread alive!


We already had a new thread here: http://androidforums.com/android-applications/370333-google-maps-offline-viewing-available.html