The amount of fun you can get out of Google Maps Street View is endless. Between the frequent Buzzfeed articles detailing the same funny/creepy locations to check out, the searching for your own house, and the attempts to find funny place names, Maps is more than just a navigation service. With that being said, though, most of the funny stuff has been done on a PC, as the desktop implementation of Street View is a little more feature-rich. That is until now. The Google Maps Android app was just updated to fall more in line with the browser implementation of Street View.
Previously, Street View in Google Maps on Android was triggered by opening a location’s listing or dropping a pin. Now, as spotted by 9to5Google, nestled underneath the “Map Type” and “Map Stacks” categories is a new category: “Explore,” of which Street View is the only inhabitant. Tapping this option will highlight all observable streets in blue. Once there, all you have to do is tap on the desired location in the street and you’ll be instantly shown the associated street view. For areas that don’t have Street View available, they’ll just appear in the default color, depending on which map type you’re using.
It’s a quality-of-life improvement for Android users, though I doubt that too many of us asked for it. Nonetheless, it’s nice to see Google paying attention to the finer details and bringing all mediums via which Google Maps can be accessed up to standard.
This latest feature is enabled on version 10.23.4 and above of Google Maps for Android. You can download the latest release from the Google Play Store. For iOS users, it has not yet been rolled out, so we will have to wait and see if Google brings it there as well.