Update 2022/07/27 edited 2023/06/09: Google officially announced Street View in India. However this is not official coverage as everything is done by a local Indian company: Genesys. Google only uses their data, which doesn’t qualify for official coverage. The quality is also largely under what one should expect of Street View in 2022.
Google may attempt providing their own cameras, notably the new small camera under development, to Genesys however the odds are quite low as most of the country is now covered in low quality imagery already. The only hope is a future update using gen 4. In the meanwhile the wait for an official Google Street View coverage in India is still going.
Update 2022/07/26: Google published new coverage in India, mostly very small coverage without any navigation available, in six cities: Amritsar, New Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai and Vadodara.
Update 2022/07/25: the remaining coverage in Hyderabad is now removed. There is no more coverage left in India from this update.
Update 2022/07/22: The coverage in New Delhi is now removed as well as most of Hyderabad’s. The only remaining blue line is now in Hyderabad. The data itself still exists, only the blue lines are removed. The links under the pictures of this article should still work though they may not in the future.
Update 2022/07/21: Google already removed a large part of the data, notably everything in Bengaluru is gone. No official statement was done by Google about India so nobody knows what is actually happening.
Today a very surprising update happened on Google Street View, and for good reason as Google officially released street coverage in India. This is a first since previously only landmarks such as universities, monuments and railroads were covered.
The coverage is quite small: only a few streets in New Delhi, Bengaluru and Hyderabad were published. On top of this, the imagery was made using a third-party camera, similar to the first 2021 coverage in Bangladesh or the 2019 update in Alaska. This camera is not made by Google and the quality is quite inferior.
Pictures were made between December 2021 to May 2022:
- Bengaluru only has December 2021
- Hyderabad has January 2022 and May 2022
- New Delhi has April 2022 and May 2022
While this addition is quite small and not with the best quality, this is still a major event for Google. India is a very big market, one of the biggest, and Google attempted to implement Street View for more than a decade. In 2011 cars were already driving in the country. Unfortunately the government prevented Google to publish the pictures and since only landmarks could be covered thanks to partnerships with archeological sites or universities.
But with this small update, things changed as this shows Google can now publish coverage in India. This may be a test or a way to Google to check reactions and hopefully a first step towards a more extensive coverage with gen 4 imagery in the future. If Google gets all the authorizations then there is no doubt more cars will be sent to cover more cities and areas as many Indian uses Google services daily.
For now it is unknown what will happen next as Google does not make announcements about Street View additions like it used to do in the past. It is hard to think Google would only publish a few streets in such large cities and doing large-scale coverage with only this small camera seems unimaginable. Also every time this camera was used, a gen 4 coverage was created later like in Alaska or Bangladesh.
As usual nothing is confirmed for the next so remember to follow us on Twitter or Instagram and join our Discord server to get the latest news and developments.