Google Maps is getting better at helping you avoid crowds

Google Maps for iOS just became a whole lot more useful.

A new feature in "Popular Times" in the most recent update (version 4.27.0 on iOS, version 9.44.3 on Android) gives you a rough idea of how crowded a specific store or restaurant is right this second.

Google Maps has had Popular Times, which uses "aggregated and anonymized data from users who have opted in to Google Location History" for some time. It displays how busy (or not busy) a business is, hour by hour, on a bar graph.

With the update, a live pink bar shows how busy a place is in real time; it appears as an overlay on the bar graph so you can compare to how busy the venue is on average (using collected location data from the opt-in users from "the last several weeks"): Read more...