Like everyone else, I’m a pretty busy person. I’m also surprisingly impatient for someone who is otherwise very laid back. Combine those two things with the fact that I live in the most populous county in the most densely populated state in America, and you’ll understand why I have grown to hate going to dinner. Even with a reservation, you often still have to wait to be seated at popular restaurants in my area. What’s more, there’s a trend at some of the most popular places where they take limited reservations, leaving most of the restaurant’s seating reserved for walk-ins. At these places, wait times for a table can be as long as 2 hours.
For these reasons, I feel like the latest update to Google’s wildly popular Google Maps app was made just for me, because it has a feature I’ve been dreaming about for as long as I can remember. At more than 1 million restaurants worldwide, the newly updated Google Maps app for iOS and Android will display average wait times.
Anyone who lives in or around a major metropolitan area where congestion is a part of life is going to appreciate this new feature. Here’s a peek at what the new restaurant wait times feature looks like in action on the iPhone X:
As you can see in the image on the left, the restaurant page in the Google Maps app still shows a graph representing how busy the establishment is on average from open to close. But now you can tap on the bar at any time during the day to see how long the wait will be, based on average wait times. I tested it for a few popular restaurants in my area, and results were mixed — it was accurate for a few places, but way off for other restaurants. It’s a brand new feature though, so I expect accuracy to improve over time as Google collects more data.
Restaurant wait times are great, but that’s not the only new feature Google added in its most recent update for iOS and Android. Here’s the full change log:
Thanks for using Google Maps! This release brings bug fixes and awesome new features to help you discover new places and navigate to them:
– See average wait times at over a million restaurants worldwide.
– Search and sort through reviews of a place.
– Get transit directions that tell you exactly which entrance you need to go into. This feature is available now in New York, Hong Kong, Taipei, Paris, Los Angeles, Delhi, Moscow, Singapore, Madrid, Barcelona, Kiev, and Budapest, with more on the way!
If for some reason you don’t already have Google Maps installed on your phone, here are the download links: iOS, Android
