An Android Auto update is being rolled out to “center” the map in Google Maps.
It’s not just you. If you’ve gotten into your car recently and started Android Auto, you may have noticed a change in the appearance of Google Maps. The change is that the map is now centered in the display as a whole, which places some UI elements above the map.
This change, which appears to roll out regardless of your version of Android Auto, appeared a few days ago and is now widely deployed to most users. This only affects Google Maps. In the image below, you can see that Maps now displays the driver’s location directly in the center of the screen, where previously it was, as shown above, on the side.
We were first alerted to this change on January 24 (thanks Sterling), and we’ve done some testing since. First, it depends on the size of your screen. On larger screens, the new UI “centering” is barely noticeable and doesn’t put any relevant information behind the destinations. On larger screensthis setting doesn’t really have any impact.
Most importantly, it has no impact on actual navigation. If you start navigation, the map moves backwards. Reddit user u/DaiaBu shows it perfectly in a quick demo. This is exactly the behavior we noticed in our testing.
Why did Google make this change in the first place? This remains unclear. Personally, my best guess is that it helps on the increasingly common square screens that are appearing in more vehicles. But given that Android Auto is used much more widely, this only makes the default, no-navigation view a little worse. This is, however, a purely aesthetic inconvenience, rather than having any significant functional impacts.
The latest Android Auto update, v13.6, does not change this behavior nor is it the cause. In our testing, we found that the Centered UI was active on Android Auto v13.4, but it only appeared after updating to the latest version of Google Maps.
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