I live in the UK. A very simple 2D vector costing a few bytes could show the UK as a right angled triangle at minimum zoom. But no, got no 4G? Sucks to be you. You just see a grid. Why is there zero caching of any sorts in Maps apps, which presumably consume millions of gigabytes of bandwidth every day in traffic, and countless amounts of energy polling the same imagery twice?
Apple Maps has high-level view capability, and also the option to download areas for offline viewing/directions. When you zoom out, it'll show you the borders of the offline-available area.<p>Obviously satellite imagery and traffic data doesn't work, but viewing the map, and getting directions within the offline-capable mode do work.<p>Furthermore, with data turned off, cities and highways for places <i>outside</i> nominated areas work too.<p>For example, I have no offline maps for anywhere in Europe, but I can see a map of UK to a scale where the little distance gauge shows 100km, and it shows cities (and highways between) such as London, Leeds, Sheffield, Liverpool, Guilford, Cardiff, etc.
A lot of the comments rightly point out that you can manually download offline maps.<p>But why don’t these apps automatically cache a map at some coarse resolution?
They do? Like there's Google Maps which has offline maps, you can select an area or multiple areas to download and keeps it up to date when you are connected to Wifi
There was a feature for Google Maps, on Android; where you could tell it to download and keep a local copy of some small area so it could work without net.<p>As I recall it worked fairly poorly (still tried to load live urls) and wanted to re-download the cache once a day or more. It was not useful for the purpose.<p>I always took it to be "make as many people happy with the least effort," why continue to polish a product in ways like this that few will use or ever even notice is available?<p>Much better to spend effort inserting local businesses into peoples driving directions. They might've wanted to stop for coffee even if they told you a different destination.
Both Google Maps and Apple Maps have support for offline maps. They both work very well.<p>I do not have an internet connection on my phone yet I am as dependent on navigation systems as anyone else!
I just enabled airplane mode, opened Google Maps and I can see everything in detail (no satellite imagery though) using Offline Maps.<p>You mean it should automatically cache everything you ever look up including satellite imagery?