With Google Maps Insights, You Can Track Your Monthly Movement

Is Google watching you? Of course. The pro is that you can watch your own activity with its tools, too. Google Maps starts rolling out its new Insights feature that summarizes your travelling last month. At the end of the month, you can see where you have been, how long you have been there, how long a distance you have traveled on foot or by some transport.

So far, it’s only available on Android devices. It’s not been announced publicly whether it will hit iPhones and when it will if it ever does.

To reach the new feature, you need to do the following.

1.   Run Google Maps on your phone.

2.   Tap the photo in the top right corner to open your profile.

3.   In the pop-up menu, choose Timeline.

4.   Among other options, choose Insights.

In the Insights tab, you can see your stats by months. For any given month, it shows you the distance you have walked or driven, or made in public transport. It also shows you how much time you have spent in cafes and restaurants, stores, or other points of interest. Finally, for each month, it shows you the details of the day you have been the most active.

Another new feature to come is about your trips, hence the name – Trips. It will also be available in the Google Maps app for Android, and maybe later for iOS. It will show you similar insights about your travels around the globe, and, as tourism is recovering and vaccination takes place, it may be highly demanded among users returning to their nomadic lifestyle.

It may require a manual update if the “Insights” tab does not appear. But if updating does not help, all you can do is wait. Users in Germany and the UK were the first to start receiving the update. It’s not clear yet how fast it will spread in other countries. Even within one country, the update schedule may make some users wait much longer. But, as previous updates showed, it won’t take very long for this one to reach the majority of users.