Google has been porting Waze’s best feature to Google Maps for a while now, but only in a limited fashion and only on Android. That’s the crowd-sourced incident reports feature that tuned Waze into a popular choice for people who drive a lot. Google has been adding support for some of the incident types available in Waze to the Android version of Maps, and users are about to get even more options. Better yet, all those reports are going to be available over on the iOS version of Maps.
If you’re not familiar with Waze’s signature feature, incident reports can improve navigation by providing real-time information about the traffic ahead and can help you choose a different route to avoid obstacles along the way.
Google announced that report crashes, speed traps, and traffic slowdowns will also be available on the iPhone, after having been introduced on Android a while ago.
As you can see in the animation above, it’s relatively easy to post reports while driving, and if you’ve been using Waze, you already know how it all works — just tap on the “+” sign and then Add a report.
Google also said it’s introducing four new types of incidents, which will be available on both platforms. We’re looking at construction, lane closures, disabled vehicles, and objects on the road. If you’ve been following Google Maps closely, you already know some of these features have been in testing on Android for a while now.
Google Maps for iPhone and Android will support all these incident reports later this week, as Google is making the feature available to all markets. If you can’t see them yet, it just means they haven’t been rolled out to your country yet.
