As Google adds more Waze-like features to Maps, differentiating between the two gets more and more difficult.
Its all about the little features, likeWazes traffic jam estimationsandroad closure information.
Personally, I never found Waze useful until I lived in Seattle and Los Angeles.
The social features and crazy rerouting make sense in big cities with congestion problems.
But out of the box, Waze is still a bit baffling to use.
You have to dig into the options to let it truly shine.
you might sort of change this, though.
Head into configs > Navigation > Routing Styles and grab the Shortest option.
This will force Waze to find the shortest distance between two points instead of the fastest.
So, you might want to pop into the tweaks to customize whats shown on the map.
Head to configs > Display configs > Show on Map, then uncheck anything you dont care about.
This clears up the visuals to make it a lot easier to tell whats going on.
That means being on time for anything is pretty hard.
At best, this is a battery drain, and at worst, a privacy issue.
Thankfully, Waze has a power button.
Just tap the Waze icon in the bottom left, then tap the power icon.
Waze will enter sleep mode where it wont use the battery or contribute traffic data.
