iPhone Tips: Don’t Use These Google Maps Features

Some of Google Maps’ handy features are best left untouched. In this week’s iPhone tips, we’ll show you how to turn them off!

iPhone Tips: Don’t Use These Google Maps Features

While you can use all of Google Maps’ features safely, we believe that there are some features that you should disable. That’s why we’re showing you how to do it in this week’s iPhone tips!

1. Turn off all notifications

Google Maps tries to proactively assist you with all kinds of notifications. In practice, they are often just annoying and distract from what you actually use the app for: navigation. In this week’s iPhone tips, the advice is to simply turn them off. You do this as follows:

  1. Open Google Maps;

  2. Tap your profile picture at the top right;

  3. Tap on ‘Settings’ and scroll down;

  4. Tap ‘Notifications’.

Here you see a considerable list of notifications that you can actually all turn off. We do not expect you to miss anything. If you do, you can simply turn individual notifications back on here.

iPhone Tips: Don’t Use These Google Maps Features

2. Don’t use Location History

Number two of these iPhone tips is about your location history. It is of course quite fun to look back where you have been with your iPhone in the past period. You can do that if you have the function Location History enabled.

At the same time, it also means that Google knows exactly what you’ve been up to. If you value your privacy, you’d better disable this feature. It will also save you quite a bit of mobile data. Here’s how to disable it:

  • Open Google Maps;
  • Tap your profile picture at the top right;
  • Tap ‘My Data in Maps’;
  • Scroll down a bit and tap ‘On’ under Location History;
  • Tap ‘Turn Off’ and then ‘Turn Off’ again;
  • Tap ‘OK’.

You can then choose to delete your location history that has been saved so far. If you want to do this, tap ‘Delete Activity’. If you don’t want to do this, tap ‘OK’.

location history

3. Disable showing satellite map

The ‘Satellite’ map type in Google Maps may look nice, but it is not very practical when navigating. There are so many elements on the screen that only distract you from the road.

Also, this setting uses a lot more mobile data than the ‘Standard’ map type. That’s why we recommend that you turn it off in these iPhone tips, if you haven’t already. Here’s how:

  • Open Google Maps;
  • Tap the icon at the top right (a diamond with half a diamond underneath);
  • Under ‘Map Type’, tap ‘Standard’.

You also have the option ‘Terrain’ here. Here in the Netherlands it looks like the map type ‘Standard’, but abroad it often doesn’t. That’s because ‘Terrain’ shows height differences in the landscape and of course you hardly have those here.

iphone tips

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