Lane guidance, directions spoken on time, and a voice you can choose

Testers on iPhone last had build 10 and on Android release 7, so this covers everything since. Most of it started as an email from one of you.

New: lane guidance

As you approach a turn or an exit, a band appears under the instruction showing the lanes the way they are painted on the road. The lanes to be in are white; the rest are grey. It shows up on arterials and highways, where the map data describes the lanes, and not on every residential corner.

Tell us whether it appears early enough to change lanes calmly, and anywhere it is wrong.

New: directions spoken where they should be

You told us turns were announced late, and that there were fewer prompts on the approach than other apps give. Both were true. Directions now come in up to three stages: an early warning on fast roads, the main prompt with the distance, and a confirmation just before. The distances are tuned to the road, about 3 km, 800 m and 400 m for a highway exit, 100 m and 20 m for a city turn.

New: a better voice, and your choice of it

The voice reads "16 AV NW" as "16 Avenue Northwest" now, not letter by letter. It also picks the best voice installed on your phone instead of the plainest, and Settings › Spoken directions › Voice lets you choose; tap one and it says a sample line.

Apple does not ship a Canadian English voice, so English defaults to the best American one. French uses Amélie. Your phone may have better voices than it uses by default: on iPhone, Settings › Accessibility › Spoken Content › Voices lets you download them, and they appear in our picker after a restart.

Fixed

• The arrow moves smoothly. It jumped once a second along the route. It now glides between fixes and stops cleanly when you do. It trails your true position by about a second, on purpose, so it never overshoots a stop line.
• You can read the street you are on. The route line was drawn over street names, so the one road you most wanted to read was the one you could not. Names now sit on top of the line.
• Nearest first. Search results were in the map provider's relevance order, so your local grocery could lose to a branch across town. Results are now sorted by distance from you.
• Live charger availability. It had never actually been switched on. It is now: charging stations show how many connectors are free.

New: count me as a user

Once a day, the app tells us this phone opened Maple Maps. No location, no searches, nothing about where you went. A tick, so we know how many people are out there and whether they come back. It is on by default and there is a switch in Settings to turn it off. The privacy policy explains exactly what is sent.

Canadian-owned

Added from your suggestions: Wild Lot distillery in Prince Edward County, ErgoCanada and Micwil Group in Saskatoon, Rocky Mountain Phoenix in Red Deer. And two Windsor crossings: the Gordie Howe bridge gets a solid leaf, since it is owned by a Canadian Crown corporation that sets the tolls; the Detroit–Windsor tunnel gets a hollow one, being half owned by Detroit.

A note on last Thursday

Search stopped working for several hours. Hundreds of you opened the app at once and we ran through the day's free allowance from our map provider. The map kept drawing, so it looked fine and simply could not find anything. We are on a paid plan now and we cache the common searches, so it will not happen that way again. Sorry to anyone who hit it. The first week has the longer version.

Known gaps

• CarPlay is built but waiting on Apple's approval, so it is not in this build. Android Auto is built too, with the car-screen map still unfinished, so it is switched off rather than shipped half-done.
• Transit directions are not in the app and are not planned for launch.

Reply to the build's feedback or email hello@maplemaps.ca. Screenshots help enormously.