Android Auto

Google Maps for Android Auto gets partial redesign to surface ‘Report’ button, hide suggested locations

Ben Schoon | Oct 22 2025 - 7:45 am PT

The Google Maps app for Android Auto is getting a partial redesign to better surface the “Report” functionality on smaller displays while also hiding suggested locations by default for some users.

Incident reporting arrived in Google Maps last year, with drivers able to report hazards, traffic, police activity, and more for the benefit of other drivers. The system works like Waze, but had one major downside on Android Auto. For vehicles with smaller displays, the “Report” button simply wouldn’t appear. Instead, the design of Google Maps at the time prioritized other buttons over the newly added “Report” option, meaning some Android Auto users were left completely unable to make incident reports.

Thankfully, this has now been updated.

Through the latest Google Maps updates for Android Auto, the “Report” button is now shown on more displays. Users started noticing the change over the past week, and we’ve also been able to confirm it on one display that previously didn’t show the button. This mostly affects drivers with displays in the 7-8 inch size, and the change has mostly come in the form of replacing the “Guidance Audio” button which has been relocated to the settings menu in Google Maps.

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Beyond that, another tweak in Google Maps for Android Auto is that more users are noticing that the infamous suggested locations menu is now hidden by default. This doesn’t seem to be a wide-reaching change, but there are quite a few user reports of the tweak.

Suggested locations in Google Maps can be helpful as they’re often based on calendar events or your driving habits, but they can also pull up random locations that you don’t need to see when you start the car. Users have been asking for Google to hide this functionality by default or make it optional for years, and it seems that we’re finally getting that change. It’s not widely rolled out, though, and we suspect it might be mainly for smaller displays. That said, if you are seeing this behavior, let us know in the comments below.