Now you can download an area of the world to your phone, and the next time you find there’s no connectivity—whether it’s a country road or an underground parking garage—Google Maps will continue to work seamlessly.

Whereas before you could simply view an area of the map offline, now you can get turn-by-turn driving directions, search for specific destinations, and find useful information about places, like hours of operation, contact information or ratings.

Roughly 60 percent of the world is without Internet today, and even where online access is available, it can still be spotty.

It means that quick and easy access to information is still not possible for a majority of the population.

This is a huge problem, especially as people attempt to navigate and explore the world around them, so Google Maps is taking steps to help people across the globe in finding directions and get where they’re going.

This could be done even when they don’t have an Internet connection.

You can download an area by searching for a city, county or country, for instance, and tapping “Download” on the resulting place sheet, or by going to “Offline Areas” in the Google Maps menu and tapping on the “+” button.

Once downloaded, Google Maps will move into offline mode automatically when it recognizes you’re in a location with spotty service or no connectivity at all.

When a connection is found, it will switch back online so you can easily access the full version of Maps, including live traffic conditions for your current route.

By default, you will only download areas to your device when you are on a Wi-Fi connection to prevent large data fees.

Source: Google Maps Official Blog
Photo: TechRadar