Check-ins and rating places get easier with Google Maps 5.5 for Android

(Cross posted from Google Mobile Blog)

We’ve made it easier to check in and out of places, rate various locations, and get transit information with Google Maps 5.5 for Android. This release adds ‘check in’ and ‘rate and review’ buttons to Place pages, the option to edit your home/work address for Latitude, and redesigned transit station pages.

Read below for more details about the new features, which we hope will improve your user experience, a topic we take very seriously as there are now more than 200 million users of Google Maps for mobile across platforms and devices worldwide.

New check-in and rating buttons added to Place pages

Now when you open a Place page from your mobile device, you can check in to places with Google Latitude or submit a rating or review by clicking on two new buttons at the top of the listing.

This past week I had the chance to explore the Computer History Museum during my visit to San Francisco from across the pond in London. Once nearby, I could quickly open the museum’s Place page and check in.

When I was ready to leave and head to lunch, in a few seconds I could go back to the Place page and rate the museum – which certainly earned the 5 star rating it received from me.

Update home and work address for your Latitude Location History

Last month we released the Location History dashboard for Latitude which estimates how much time you spend at home, work, and everywhere else. If your home or work address changes, or you’d rather set a different address to represent ‘home’ and ‘work,’ you can now edit these addresses within Latitude.

Change home/work location from Location History dashboard

View the redesigned transit station pages

It’s been about two years since we added transit directions in Google Maps for Android. Since then, we’ve increased the coverage from 250 cities to more than 440 and counting - the most recent being Washington, D.C. To make it easier to plan your transit route, we updated the transit station pages in this release to better organize the information you need.

Each page now includes a list of upcoming scheduled departures for different lines, all the transit lines serving the station, and links to nearby transit stations.


Download Google Maps 5.5 for Android here to try out the new check-in and rating buttons, update your Latitude Location History home/work address, check out a transit station in a nearby city, or just make sure you have the latest version of Google Maps for Android. This update requires an Android OS 1.6+ device anywhere Google Maps is currently available. Learn more in our help center.

Posted by Luis Sigal, Software Engineer

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Pinger’s TextFree Surges On Android: User Growth Now Matches iPhone

Pinger’s TextFree, the app that lets users send and receive free text messages and phone calls using real phone numbers, has a new best friend: the big green Android robot.

We’ve been tracking TextFree’s staggering growth for some time now — CEO Greg Woock says that TextFree users now exchange 1.5 billion messages and 45 million voice minutes each month, making it one of the top 10 carriers in the US. And that usage has led to some big opportunities for advertising: he says they’re closing in on 2 billion monthly ad impressions.

TextFree rose to prominence on the iPhone, but the Pinger team released a version for Android as well in February. And now, just a few months later, Android users are signing up for TextFree at the same rate as iPhone users (this ignores iPod Touch users, who make up a big chunk of the user base, but it’s still very rapid growth).

Android users are currently sending 5.5 million messages a day (and they also send 2 million messages via Facebook chat, which is integrated into the app). Growth is doubling month over month across key metrics like the number of users and messages sent. And the Android version only supports free texting — it doesn’t have the free voice calls that launched on the iPhone in December, which makes the feat all the more impressive.

Woock also discussed how Pinger’s mobile phone number strategy has worked out for them. When you sign up for TextFree you’re given a unique, real cell phone number, which means you can send and receive text messages with anyone (i.e. they don’t need to have the app). And now that the app has been out for a while, there’s a trend emerging: teenagers who used TextFree on their iPod Touch as what is essentially a VoIP phone are now starting to transition over to ‘real’ Android phones, and they’re taking their TextFree number with them.

Finally, Woock says that the company will have more news on the way very soon, including new support for international users (he didn’t get into how that will work — but he says it’s “totally unique and dead simple”).

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