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About Waze

Waze is a free navigation app for your GPS equipped smartphone and provides the following features:

  • Spoken turn-by-turn directions
  • Spoken street names (Text-to-Speech)
  • Real-time traffic reports
  • Real-time Gas Prices [a]
  • Toll road avoidance [a]
  • Free regular updates to the map that you can help make are installed automatically
  • Search for destinations how you like: entire address at once, category, place name, landmark or use the addresses from your contacts
  • Integrated destination search with a massive country-wide database and Google
  • Support for apps to insert destinations into Waze, such as Localscope
  • Support for multiple languages
  • Gaming elements for fun

^a Accuracy dependent on user contributions

Social Networking

Many Waze editors and users find an entire social networking aspect of Waze that they didn’t realize existed.

From inside the client app you can:

Other features include:

Drive with Waze on

Waze gets better when you just drive around with Waze turned on.

  • The easiest way to improve Waze is just drive around with Waze turned on. Every time you travel, even if you are not using Waze to guide you, turn it on. You don’t have to do anything. Waze will use the information from your journey to calculate average road speeds at the time you are driving, check for errors and improve road layout, and learn the direction of roads and which turns are allowed. However to avoid errors, these automatic updates need many, many accurately recorded routes before making an automatic change.
  • When you later use Waze for directions, you’ll benefit from better routes using the information you helped collect
  • You don’t need to make special trips with Waze. In fact Waze works best on your regular trips and commuting
  • With Waze on, you’ll get free road reports on local traffic conditions automatically
  • If you travel to areas that are unmapped in Waze, you might try recording a new road. Just one button starts you on a map-making trip.

Getting started

If you have problems, try and find your own solution or ask the community for help:

If all else fails, you can email Waze with your problem

You can make Waze even better

You can make Waze better for yourself and everyone else

Problems, bugs and limitations

Waze is a fun and sophisticated navigation app. In most developed countries Waze provides superior navigation information over commercial GPS applications. Like any developing application, there are issues and complications that are being worked to resolve. Many of them are cosmetic and do not prevent a fully gratifying experience when using Waze.

Temporary issues are tracked in the official Waze server status and issues page.

Note that Waze Bugzilla, a tool previously used for bug reporting, is no longer in use. The Waze community used to report and tracks bugs and problems in the Bugzilla application. At the time, it was the best place to identify any currently known issues. There is no official replacement for Bugzilla.

Some of the more common issues include:

  • Routing distance is limited to about 1,000 miles (1600 km) distance. To route to longer distances, select a point between your origin and destination less than this limit.

  • When you request a route, the client device app assumes you are continuing in the same direction you last traveled. This is often desirable, but can lead to unnecessarily longer routes when you have a choice of direction from your starting position. If you start driving the other direction, it will recalculate the route.

  • Issues and limitations on your supported model smartphone

  • Odd routing: Waze has been known to make short detours. In these situations, Waze instructs the driver to turn off a road, only to have the driver immediately return to it. Ostensibly, this shortens the route, but it produces routes that many drivers consider unreasonable, and the time savings are often dubious. Editors can often work around this using the Detour Prevention Mechanisms.

Development plans and priorities

Waze is growing fast in features and popularity. This is not a complete list of development areas, but should reassure you that Waze is aware of your concerns and is working to make things better.

Current development focus includes:

  • Upgrading the worldwide infrastructure, allowing Waze to support the growing number of users while making the service more reliable
  • Bug fixing
  • Integrating features to generate revenue for Waze
  • Releasing the same features for Android and iOS
  • Supporting correct routing of authorized vehicles on Carpool, HOV, Transit lanes. Waze currently supports taxis, and private vehicles.

Recently completed:

  • Upgrading the World servers, which has increased the reliability and speed of editing maps
  • Improved the routing in areas of Private Roads and Parking Lot Roads
  • ASR (Automated Speech recognition)
  • TTS (Text to Speech voice guided: turn-by-turn instructions that announce the street names for upcoming turns) in multiple languages
  • Gas price integration
  • POI category search
  • Toll Road avoidance
  • Time of day turn restrictions
  • Time of day road directional changes
  • Implementing road blocks and road closures

Technical information

Have fun going your own Waze.