Waze Won’t Copy This Google Maps Feature Despite the Obvious Benefit

Waze has recently received a major feature update with functionality that’s been requested for years (I’m looking at you, speed bump notifications), and many people hoped it’d be just the beginning of a longer series of improvements that’ll keep coming to users this year.

It’s not, as Waze has recently confirmed that its 2024 roadmap has already been finalized, so some of the features that users requested won’t make their way to the application until 2025 at the earliest.

One of these suggestions is support for route ratings at the end of navigation.

If you’ve never used Google Maps, you probably have no idea what route ratings are and how they are supposed to improve navigation in the long term.

When you use Google Maps and arrive at the destination, the application displays a route rating screen (and a trip summary panel that includes data on your journey – this is another highly requested Waze feature, but the company has also pushed this one back) to let you tell the company how good or bad navigation was for this journey.

Theoretically, Google can use your rating to improve its routing engine, trying to provide each user with better routes.

Some people believed a similar approach would also fit Waze, so they asked the company to add route ratings at the end of navigation when using the app. Waze never acknowledged the development of this feature but didn’t reject the idea either. However, a recent update for this feature request suggests the company at least looked into it, as its status was changed to “currently not planned” due to the 2024 roadmap being finalized.

A member of the Waze team says the feature could still make its way to the roadmap in the coming years, albeit it’s obviously too early to tell if the route ratings would indeed receive the go-ahead.

Route ratings would help Waze refine its routing engine and get more data on certain suggestions. For example, while some routes might be a couple of minutes faster than others, users might not like the suggestion and rate it accordingly when they arrive at the destination. The reasons for the bad rating could vary from the complexity of the route to the number of turns or extra miles they needed to travel to arrive at the destination only a few minutes faster.

Meanwhile, the good news is that Waze is still looking for feedback, with the application getting more features based on the requests submitted by users. The support for speed bump warnings is living proof, although the Google-owned company needed approximately one decade to introduce these notifications in the app. The first request for the feature was posted on its feedback platform more than 10 years before it was eventually integrated into the app.