Now Google Maps is in the club of the three most downloaded apps of all time on Android smartphones: here are the others and how many downloads
No need to deny it: Google Maps has changed the lives of all of us: having such a powerful navigation app available on any Android smartphone, pre-installed, and what’s more free, has allowed us to easily and quickly reach any place we were looking for, in the most diverse places in the world.
It has also changed the way we travel: not knowing a city before booking a plane ticket is no longer madness, we can simply arrive at the airport and open Maps to understand where we are, what we have nearby and choose where to go. The adoption of Google Maps around the world has been universal, so much so that Google’s navigation app has now surpassed a historic milestone: it has been downloaded more than 10 billion times since it was launched back in 2006. The apps in the 10 billion club can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and now one of those fingers is Google Maps.
Google Maps: a well-deserved success
Reading Maps reviews on the Play Store you’ll always find a few negative ones, because not everyone likes the app. Yet, everyone uses it and the app continues to evolve relentlessly. In the last few years, Google Maps has added information about public transportation, augmented reality walking, emergency information about fires and natural disasters, and even COVID-19 information.
Even before that, it calculated the time needed to reach a location, which has become more and more accurate thanks to the integration of information about traffic, accidents and construction delays.
But the most incredible thing about Google Maps is the speed at which downloads are growing: the 5 billion mark, in fact, dates back to March 2019.
The 10 billion club
Not many apps have made it into the 10 billion club. In fact, they are very few: just 3 and the third one is Maps.
Before it, only YouTube and Google Mobile Services have succeeded, i.e. the famous Google services that are missing in Huawei smartphones and that serve to standardize the user experience among the various Big G apps.
You may believe that these apps have reached these figures only because they are pre-installed on Android smartphones, but that’s not the case because not all apps pre-installed on Android have reached 10 billion downloads. Gmail, for example, is stuck at half the downloads as is Google Drive and even the Google Search app for searching.