As is the case with many of its products, Google doesn’t have just one navigation solution for its customers. In addition to Google Maps, Google also owns Waze, which is very popular with users thanks to its crowdsourced incident reports that can make navigating unknown and familiar territories alike even easier than with Google Maps.
A few weeks ago, we found out that Google is working on finally bringing a version of the Waze incident reports that everyone loves so much to Google Maps, and it looks like incident reporting is now live in Maps. Before you get too excited, however, you should know the feature doesn’t work yet.
As Android Police explains, the navigation UI of Google Maps now contains a new button, seen in the following images. Just below the volume icon on the right, there’s a button showing a “plus” sign in a speech bubble. That’s what you’ll use to get to the Add a report menu, which is where you’d supposedly file an incident report.
However, the feature is not functional, so you can’t file any reports. Per Android Police, the feature is showing up across several countries, although it’s not working anywhere for the time being.
Previous Google Maps leaks revealed that you’d be able to report accidents as well as speed traps inside Google Maps, which sounds a lot like Waze navigation. But it’s unclear when Google will roll them out.
The fact that the Google Maps UI now accounts for incident reporting during navigation is a clear hint that Google is moving ahead with development. But the company has yet to make any announcements, and support for incident reports in Google Maps does sound like the kind of major feature that Google would want to announce properly. It’s also possible that Google has leaked the new UI by mistake, while testing incident reporting internally.
