Google Maps Update Looks Just A Little Bit Worse On Most Android Auto Screens

An update to Android Auto is now rolling out that “centers” the map in Google Maps.

It’s not just you. If you’ve stepped into your car and booted up Android Auto recently, you might have noticed a change to how Google Maps looks. The change is that the map is now centered to the display as a whole, which places some UI elements on top of the map.

This change, which appears to be rolling out independent of your Android Auto version, popped up a few days ago and is now broadly rolled out to most users. It only affects Google Maps. In the image below, you can see that Maps is now showing the driver’s location directly in the center of the display where it previously, as pictured above, was off to the side.

We were first alerted to this change on January 24 (thanks Sterling), and we’ve done some testing in the time since. Firstly, this is dependent on your screen size. On larger displays, the new “centering” of the UI is barely noticeable, and doesn’t put any relevant info behind the destinations. On wider displays, this tweak doesn’t really have any impact at all.

More importantly, this doesn’t have an impact on actual navigation. If you start navigation, the map moves back over. Reddit user u/DaiaBu shows this perfectly in a quick demo. This is exactly the behavior we noticed in our tests.

Why did Google make this change in the first place? That remains unclear. Personally, my best guess is that this helps on the increasingly common square displays showing up in more vehicles. But given that Android Auto is used far more broadly, it just makes the default, non-navigation view look just a little bit worse. It’s purely an aesthetic downside, though, rather than having significant functional impacts.

The latest update to Android Auto, v13.6, doesn’t change this behavior, nor it is the cause. In our testing, we found the centered UI to be live on Android Auto v13.4, but it only showed up after updating to the latest Google Maps version.