A few significant ones have recently emerged reliability issues in Waze on Android Auto: the application seems to suffer frequent freezes when opening, while in other cases it happens that the user’s position and driving directions are not updated during navigation. Waze, which has been owned by Google for several years, rolled out a fix two days ago – at least in theory, but early feedback isn’t particularly encouraging.
The version being distributed is 4.92.0.1, and has so far only reached a subset of users enrolled in the Beta testing program: it is formally defined as a “release candidate”. There is no other information on possible other news. It’s not entirely clear, but it seems that Waze’s problems coincide with the distribution of the so-called Coolwalk, the new Android Auto interface entirely in Material You and with a marked focus on the split screen. Google has been working on it for quite some time, but its rollout only started in the last few weeks.
Waze is not yet compatible with Coolwalk, even if some hints of support have appeared in the latest Betas; but it is “a spot” – not only is it limited to a few users, but it also tends to appear and disappear after a few days. For context, it’s worth mentioning that Google recently decided to bring together the development of Waze and Maps into a single team; it is possible (but it is an unfounded theory, we would like to underline) that the change at an organizational level has caused some small hitches which we see ultimately having repercussions on the service.
