Google Maps is free, and the price is that it remembers. Every search, every route, every restaurant you tapped on a Friday night is stored, and in principle can be found again. In practice, finding “that kebab place near Banani we went to in Ramadan” has meant scrolling back through a chronological history that grows by a dozen entries a day. A new section spotted in the Android app by Android Authority, Your recent places, is Google’s attempt to make the archive usable.
What it looks like
At the top of the section are four filters: Area, Category, Saved and Maps history. Area narrows the list to a neighbourhood or city; Category splits it into Food & drink, Culture, Shopping, Sights and Hotels; Saved shows only places already on one of your lists; Maps history is the old full timeline. Beside every entry sit a bookmark icon — one tap adds the place to a list — and a three-dot menu with the option to delete it from your history. So the kebab place becomes: Area → Banani, Category → Food & drink, done.
Why it matters more than it sounds
Most people use Maps as memory without admitting it. The address of the clinic, the shop where the phone was repaired, the hotel in Cox’s Bazar that was actually good — all of these live in Maps history rather than in anyone’s head, and a better index for that history is a real improvement to daily life. The ability to delete individual entries also matters: it is the first time Maps has made pruning history as easy as browsing it.
The setting to check
While you are in there, look at what Maps is keeping. On Android: profile picture → Your data in Maps → Location History and Web & App Activity. Location History (now called Timeline) is off by default on new accounts and stored on the device; Web & App Activity, which records searches and places you tap, is usually on and is what feeds this new section. You can set it to auto-delete after 3, 18 or 36 months. A recent-places page is useful precisely because Google is recording everything; deciding how long it should keep that record is the other half of the feature.
Google has not said when Your recent places will roll out; features found in the app’s code usually ship within a few months.
Source: Android Police, via Prothom Alo.
