waze to force close

Well we gave Waze a try for the last couple of days and it wasn’t that great. Before we go into detail lets first talk about what Waze is for

Well we gave Waze a try for the last couple of days and it wasn’t that great. Before we go into detail lets first talk about what Waze is for. The idea behind Waze is to crowd source a lot of things, mostly live traffic updates, but also including map generation/correction, reporting hideouts for police, etc, etc.

We installed the new app on our Android just recently and got it to work. For a while that is… before it decided force close – multiple times. While the app was running we saw that the speed at which it downloads maps is very slow. Sometimes you’re just staring at a blank map. Could it be our own network speed? Don’t think so. Google Maps was working just fine at the time.

Also finding a destination address wasn’t very easy. We had to enter the address correct down to the comma and even then it took a while to find it. The first 3 times we tried this Waze just decided not respond and force close.

We still went ahead and used the application. Once we had our route setup Waze correctly identified a traffic congestion on our way. Since we had no other route at the time we drove right into the congestion and decided to report the situation. This was a breeze. Waze is actually pretty good at collecting data from you. It is just not very good at running smoothly. When you’re reporting a certain event you even have the option the snap a photo and upload it.

Oh, one more thing. After we force closed out of Waze the last time, it just didn’t turn off the GPS receiver – consuming lots and lots of battery for no reason.

Even though Waze is not yet ready for prime time (at least for the Android platform) the promise of Waze is still pretty good. Think about it. All the maps on Waze are user generated. All the traffic info is also user generated. This could be big – once the glitches in their software are fixed and they have more people using it.

And one last thing. Now Google is also crowd sourcing their live traffic updates.

waze to force close