Google announced late this morning that it has acquired Waze, the Israeli company behind the popular crowdsourced navigation/traffic app of the same name. Seen by many as a defensive move, Google’s main reason for the purchase may be to keep it out of the hands of Apple or Facebook, although there are other possible reasons as well.
According to the official announcement, the “Waze product development team will remain in Israel and operate separately for now.” And it sounds like some of Waze’s features may show up in Google Maps:
We’re excited about the prospect of enhancing Google Maps with some of the traffic update features provided by Waze and enhancing Waze with Google’s search capabilities.
IMHO, the Google Maps Navigation app is far from user-friendly. There are simply too many steps for common tasks and anything out of the ordinary is really buried. Will Google clutter up the app with Waze-like features? What do you think?
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