go to the app store, download google maps, go into settings and select "offline area" and then click the map where you are.. it will download like a 20 mile type little map thing and click download. it'll keep that for 30 days.. i'm sure you'll have to redo it every 30 days too. go said that it would help with battery life.
Might just be a placebo effect. According to an engineer working at Google, it has no effect. https://twitter.com/samthor/status/752382144371003392
that thread of tweets is extremely low on evidence and seems highly full of crap though, i know many people including myself that this worked on... you can't "placebo" effect on a phone battery... i go out for two hours on a 100% battery, and return, with a 15% battery... download the maps, go out for two hours on 100% and return with 60% .... placebo works on people and their minds, not a solid inanimate object...
Just caught a wild victrebel infront of my house Catching So many weedles and other bug types lol #Maine
I decided to do some simple tests to check it out (the poster has some ethos as a google employee) using a program called Charlie. Basically, it acts as a proxy between my phone and the internet. It grabs every attempt to access the internet and displays it on the screen. If the app is grabbing data from the google maps server, it will display in the program. Once set up on my computer, I prepared my phone for the test. First, I force stopped the Pokemon Go app and cleared all data and cache. Next, I opened up the app (re-adding permissions and signing in since the app was as if it had been reinstalled). At this point, Google maps was cached and and using the offline maps feature for my home. If Pokemon Go were to be using Google's offline maps stored on my device, there should be no attempt to access any google maps urls. Instead though, Charlie reported this: Most importantly, notice the mobilemaps.clients.google.com url. This showed up immediately as the game showed the map. Pokemon Go had accessed the internet to download map data despite having cached data in Google maps. I did another test later where I deleted the cached map data to see how it responds. I got identical data. Pokemon Go accessed the same site to get map data and nothing new. This implies that whether or not there is cached data from the Google maps app, Pokemon go doesn't (nor can't) access those cached files. What about the battery and data savings that people are reporting after downloading offline maps? I decided to clear the charlie list, force close Pokemon Go (but not delete the local data) and rerun the app. The maps url did not show up this time. This implies that Pokemon Go is locally caching maps data after it fetches it. This makes sense and would explain the savings in data and battery. I imagine you didn't try to cache the map data until after using the game for a while (otherwise you wouldn't have had data to compare to). Pokemon Go would have cached this data for you and it would have appeared that the maps offline storage had had an effect. There are also a ton of variables that affect battery life beyond pokemon go and these could have also come into effect. Here is what shows up without wiping any of the data but force stopping the app. When I say placebo, I meant that something else was affecting it and because you had recently set maps to offline, you thought that was the cause. While that twitter thread is full of people giving vague opinions, this is actual evidence as to offline maps having no effect on data usage. With that said, offline maps is still extremely useful for the maps app and can save you data in that regard.
How does a placebo effect work in that respect though? A placebo effect would be having some terminal illness, taking medicine you're told will work (it might as well just be water in some cases), and your body fighting the illness successfully. You can't think your phone's battery will be used up less and that will happen - if that was the case I'd never have to charge the bloody thing and the battery wouldn't die after a full hour of usage. The battery is used up when playing Pokemon Go as your phone has to constantly refresh the map and your location, which is pretty taxing on the phone due to the GPS and everything being used. I'm also sure it has to do with the extra load on your data. Saving an offline Google Maps area would most definitely work to reduce the battery drainage - probably reduces strain on the phones CPU too. EDIT: Ninja'd by the above post. Yuo can probably disregard this pls.
Placebo was probably the wrong word but the rest of that post should be pretty accurate . The offline maps data is only used by the Google maps app (not apps using the Google maps service which goes through a url to get it) and therefore won't affect your battery usage unless you are using the Google Maps app.
i have noticed my game crashing less and less spinny pokeball since i downloaded the map. might be anecdotal but it literally fixed those problems immediately. i think the map would probably help when your phone temporarily goes offline or the gps is spotty but still working. it wouldnt show up in online data if that were the case would it?
It is most likely a coincidence. The Maps app does not provide the libraries to access the map data. Google Play Services provides all of the access to the maps on Android. It even provides it to the Maps app. The maps app simply implements its own feature for offline maps and stores it in a folder specifically belonging to the Maps app. Theoretically the Pokemon Go app could navigate to that file and try to parse it but it would be very hacked together and unstable. Even if it did do this, it would have no effect because it is grabbing its own data from the internet anyway nullifying any use it could have. To answer your question, no, accessing the offline maps data used by the maps app would not show up since it would all be handled on the device. Since requests to the maps servers do show up we can assume they are not using local data.
I thought people were kidding then when I checked the app store I was like OMG YES THE DAY HAS COME lol
Also still not available in the UK and no near release date in sight. I'm mildly interested in it too, which is a shame lol.
