The Google Maps group planning feature is available for Android and iOS

Google is currently deploying a "Group Planning" feature on Google Maps on Android and iOS.

The Internet giant first announced the group's planning at its annual I / O developer conference in May, but it took the company nearly five months to prepare the new social feature for hours. of prime listening.

Go to social

Google Maps under its original appearance was a simple application to help you find your way from A to B. But over the years, it has become a complete set of tools offering detailed information on where to eat, tourist attractions, business contacts, etc. . As such, Google Maps has become an essential component of the social life of users, which is why the company now incorporates dedicated social features into the Google Maps application.

In a group setting, it can be difficult to choose the pub or restaurant to book for a great evening. But Google Maps will now allow you to create a short list of places by dragging candidate sites to a small floating bubble on the side of the screen. This list can be shared with your friends via any email application, which can then vote for their favorite option … or launch other options.

Above: new Google Maps group planning feature

Interestingly, all members of the group can also delete places added by someone else, so that things could be a bit spirited …

This latest expansion comes over a year after Google added another important social feature to Google Maps, deploying a new tool that lets you create lists of places and share them with your friends who can choose to follow as pubs or parks.

Now, however, Google Maps has become a little more collaborative and useful, and should help move users away from Google's strong ecosystem and away from the many third-party social survey applications. Google actually acquired a popular polling service called Polar in 2014, and the team was assigned to work on Google+. However, it is unlikely that the acquisition has a correlation with this latest feature deployment.

Group planning is officially taking place on Google Maps for Android and iOS from today, although some reports dating back to this week suggest that it has actually started being deployed sooner. In any case, you must update the latest version of Google Maps to use this new feature.