In the first week of November the first imagery taken from October was released by Google. Update 2021/11/12: first coverage from November 2021 is already available in many states of the USA. In October imagery from September was already being published as well. Sometimes it was only about two weeks between the imagery acquisition and its publication. With this we can ask ourselves the following question: is Google now publishing new data as soon as possible instead of waiting a few months between each update?
The answer seems to be yes. In the past days new imagery was published regularly and it is very likely that more coverage was released progressively since the September update. It may not be every day but at least multiple times per week, including both imagery update or newly covered roads.
Does this mean we will not see larger updates anymore? Not necessarily. Those regular updates currently occur in a few countries that usually get updated but it is possible that larger publications happen in other countries where cars drive but pictures are still not published. Currently the continuous updates can be found in the following countries (and this list keeps growing lately):
- North & Central America: United States, Canada, Mexico
- South America: Brazil, Argentina
- Europe: Portugal, Spain, France, United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Bulgaria
- Asia: Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore
- Oceania: Australia
In the meanwhile cars are still driving in many other countries where no update was published yet. Some countries such as Slovenia, Croatia, Austria or Romania do have 2021 imagery ready but the publication is currently blocked for unknown reasons: only a few places very close to borders with countries where updates are published can confirm the existence of this coverage. Maybe this will become available in a future larger update, possibly in December.
Having very new data is great however those continuous updates are not perfect: they usually come with broken blue lines, meaning the navigation is impossible. It seems that Google can’t publish quickly new data in its complete form, at least for now. It would probably be better to wait a bit and publish everything at once in less but more complete updates, like once per month.
It is also harder to track updates if new data is published very frequently. Previously when an updated happened we used to do a complete update report. With so many smaller updates it has become impossible to follow up. For this reason we are now planning to do monthly reports: during the month new publications are tracked and at the end of the month a report will be created along with comparative maps to display newly covered roads.
Since we don’t know if Google will still make larger updates, it is impossible for now to know if we will be able to create larger reports as well. In the meanwhile a complete report of the September update is still under work and will be published in the next weeks.
Thank you for reading and see you next time!