Mountain View, California-based giant Google has launched a new feature for Google Maps users in India. The new feature allows Maps users to save and share their home address with Plus Codes. This will help users get precise digital addresses of their homes that they can use for faster deliveries of their food, medicine and packages, without sharing landmarks or spoken instructions. Users can also share plus codes for their addresses with their friends and family for easy navigation. So while this is a handy feature, you might be wondering what these “plus codes” are? We’ll tell you.
Plus codes are free, open-source digital addresses intended to provide accurate location information. Plus codes for your home can be generated from Google Maps. There are street addresses for people or places that don’t have one. The Plus Codes on Google Maps are based on latitude and longitude and are displayed as alphanumeric codes with numbers and letters. Google says that people with a plus code can receive deliveries, access emergency and social services, or simply help other people find them. These are much shorter than traditional coordinates with only 20 alphanumeric characters and are easier to share. Plus codes also work whether you are online or offline. Plus codes are not available for public access because a nearby place is not available on the app and no one browsing the map will be able to see it.
To use Plus Codes, the Google Maps app shows users a new option “use your current location” while saving a “Home” location. This will use your phone’s geolocation to generate a Plus Code. This purpose of this is to let people know your exact details without having to share your name and email address. If you already have a location saved as your home on Google Maps, you can open the plus code next to the location for precise details.
Plus codes were introduced by Google in 2015 as a solution to find hard-to-find places around the world. In 2020, Google Maps introduced the ability to allow users to share their current locations with Plus Codes by tapping the blue dot on the app.
India is the first place where Google has introduced the new feature with Plus Codes. It is currently only rolled out to Android users, but will be available to iPhone users in the coming days. Google says that since the feature was tested in India about a month ago, more than 300,000 people are already using Plus Codes for their home addresses.
ALSO READ: How to Update Your Work and Home Address in Google Maps.
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