





Google Maps quietly added a sweet new feature that will help you remember where you parked. Just park your car, open up Google Maps, and tap on the blue location dot. You'll be presented with a new menu offering to "save your parking," which lets you store all the information you need to find your car again.

The new interface will save your current location and slap a big "P" icon on the map. This wouldn't be enough for a multistory parking garage, though, so you can bring up a new interface that lets you save a ton of information. You can adjust the dot location, add photos to your parking spot, and type notes. If there's a parking meter, you can even set a "time left" field that will count down the time remaining.

After filling out this info, Google Maps will spawn a notification reminding you that you have a saved parking location. The notification and the "P" icon on Google Maps will stick around until you open the parking information and hit "clear " or until you save a different parking spot.

This new "parking saving" feature is a lot better than Google's last attempt, which existed in Google Now. Now would try to automatically guess when you parked via Android's "activity recognition system" (it looked at the GPS and marked down where you hit 0 mph). It kind of worked, but it required way too much trust in Google's magical algorithms for something as critical as a parking reminder. Purely GPS-based parking saving was also useless in those big parking garages, where GPS doesn't work and won't tell you what level you are on. This new proactive version lets you store all that extra info and gives you the peace of mind knowing that the information will actually be there when you get back.

For now, the new feature seems to be working only on Android Google Maps v9.49. There are almost no feature differences between the iOS and Android versions of Google Maps, though, so we'd imagine it will hit iOS once the new version successfully navigates the app store's update process.