Even the best software sucks

I rant a lot about user experience.  If you know me, you've probably heard me ramble on about it.  And when I talk about user experience, I don't just mean a slick UI.  There are a lot of aspects to user experience, like performance, responsiveness, obviousness, etc.  I'm not going to go into all of that here, as this is a rant about traveling.

I recently embarked upon a cross-country drive with my family to attend my wife's family reunion.  It was a good trip overall, except for one thing.  Google Maps!  Oh, how I have learned to hate thee.  Now, don't get me wrong, I love Google Maps.  It's saved my bacon on more than one occasion.  There have been times where it has wrong information and has led me astray, but that's understandable.  It's a difficult task to keep that much map data up-to-date and accurate with how frequently things change in our world.  What happened to me was far more annoying.  I use the built-in turn-by-turn navigation feature of Google Maps when traveling by car, and it's almost always been great.  However, a recent update has made it extremely unstable.  It crashes every hour or two.  No notification, it just silently exits and my phone eventually goes to sleep if I don't notice in time.  This wouldn't be a huge deal, except for two factors that the developers seem to be unaware of:

1. Google Maps actually does crash.
2. There are areas of the country that have unreliable or nonexistent cellular data signals. 

You would think this would be common knowledge, but I guess over in California, they have miles and miles of reliable data signals, and they never, ever leave their little bubble.  There's no other explanation for a few of the behaviors of Google Maps.  Let's go into them:

Google, Google, where art thou, Google?

After restarting from a crash, Google Maps forgets that you were mid-navigation.  I can understand that it doesn't want to just assume you didn't exit on purpose.  That's fine. But it could pretty easily prompt you.  "I see you were in the middle of a trip.  Resume?"  This would have saved me from so much pain that I might have forgiven the fact that the app crashed approximately 40 times on my trip.  This would depend upon Google Maps actually storing ANY trip data on the phone itself, which apparently it does not or else you wouldn't have to do the following.

Houston, I'm broadcasting in the blind.  Is anybody out there?

To restore your trip, you have two options.

1. Type in the destination again.  Wait until it finds it.  Click on the navigate link.  Pick the route.  Click navigate again.  Wait for it to get the GPS sorted out.  Go.
2. Click in the search box.  Wait for the recent history to appear.  Click on the navigate link, etc, as above.

So option 2 would be acceptable, if a bit tedious, if Google Maps actually kept your recent history on your device.  Alas, no, it does not.  It has to go out to the internet and get your history so you can start your trip again. Did it never occur to the developers to follow basic mobile app development guidelines and assume that the data connection is unreliable?  I can understand that Google has to spy on everything you ever do and wants to store that data online, but there's absolutely no reason it doesn't also keep a local copy that it just asynchronously updates when the internet reappears.  No data connection?  We got you covered.  But, no, that isn't how they do it.  There's nothing quite so infuriating as having the map die a few miles before a turn in the middle of nowhere and you furiously are trying to get it going again before you miss your turn, only to see a "no connection" error when trying to start the trip again.  Why isn't the trip already downloaded?  Don't you know what local storage is for?  It got to the point where my wife just loaded the trip in Waze on her phone as a backup, and while having the same directions parroted to me from two devices within seconds of each other was kind of amusing at first, it was also a sad statement about how badly Google Maps was performing for this trip.

To err is program

To me, this is just a basic feature of a navigation program that should have been solved years ago.  I'm not even getting into nice-to-have features like displaying speed limits on the map.  Seriously, why isn't that a thing?  You already have the data or you wouldn't be able to calculate how long the trip takes.  So, instead of asking for the bare minimum of caching the trip after you search for it, and not requiring an internet connection to see your recent searches, I'm going to one-up that and say what Google Maps really should provide: the ability to pre-cache an entire trip from your cushy, safe, wifi connection at home that never needs to touch the internet again the entire trip. It should download the entire route and all maps within a reasonable distance of the trip (say, 1 mile on both sides of the road, to cover pit stops and small detours). I've got gigabytes of free space just begging to be used for this. Bring it on, Google.  Based on the difficulty of your interviews, even your HR interns should be capable of providing these features.  They aren't that difficult to program.  Now, where's that bug tracker...