Google Maps wants to help you beat the heat while walking

While Google Maps is a great tool for navigating new areas in your car, bike, or public transit, it also offers excellent walking navigation, cleverly fetching commonly used pedestrian routes. Google is now working on a feature that is expected to make walking navigation that much easier by specifically letting you avoid sunny spots on your route.

An APK teardown of Google Maps (version 25.45.02.826664481) by the folks at Android Authority has uncovered an under-development “Prefer shade” toggle for the navigation app. Before we get into where the toggle will be located, here are the strings discovered in the app that specify what it’s supposed to do:

‘Prefer shade’ should appear within Trip options

Based on the code found in the app, it appears that Google Maps may also let users navigate in areas that offer sunlight, so it may not be designed exclusively for shaded paths. Furthermore, one of the strings mentions the number of minutes spent in sunlight.

The Prefer shade toggle will be located in the Trip options menu, accessible from the navigation interface. When live, it will sit below the existing toggles to display wheelchair-accessible paths or those that avoid ferries.

While it doesn’t function as intended at this time, we expect to hear more about it in the near future. We also don’t know exactly how Google will power this new functionality, though we imagine the trove of data at its disposal would be leveraged in some form. Android Authority speculates that LiDAR scanning could be involved in some fashion, which is also a strong possibility.

Google won’t be the first to come up with an idea like this. Sun tracking apps, such as Sun Surveyor, do a decent job of allowing users to plan future events based on the sun’s alignment. Meanwhile, the free app Veyil tells you which side of the bus/train to be on while traveling between two cities. However, having a feature like this built right into Google Maps will undoubtedly make things convenient for everyone across the globe.

In addition to this under-development feature designed for walkers, Google announced some major upgrades to Maps’ navigation experience this week. Prominent among these is improved integration with Gemini, which unlocks the ability to understand complex commands, including setting up reminders for future events (using Google Calendar), right from Maps.

We also know that Google Maps is working on a power saving mode for navigation, which effectively conserves battery on your device by eliminating all color and enabling a fully monochrome interface during navigation.