Google Maps makes it easier to save, share home addresses. How to use

Google just made it easier to save and share your home address on Google Maps with a new feature called 'Plus Codes'. This feature, which is an India-first, allows users to access their current location on Google Maps to find the Plus Code address for their home location and share it with others, the search giant said on Thursday.

Plus Codes, as Google explains, are “free, open-sourced, digital addresses that provide simple and accurate addresses for any place on Earth” including places that do not have an accurate, formal address.

Plus Codes were launched in 2018 and since then they have been adopted at scale by NGOs in India and also by the government. “Instead of street and locality names, Plus Codes are based on latitude and longitude and are displayed as a short sequence of numbers and letters, providing accuracy right up to the doorstep,” Google explained further.

Essentially, Plus Codes make it easy to discover and find businesses that are not well-marked out on the map, they also serve well for getting things delivered to friends and family without having to struggle with addresses, landmarks, or vague voice instructions.

“In addition to community-led efforts, we are also committed to empowering users to directly use Plus Code addresses for their daily needs. We piloted this feature in India a month ago, and are thrilled to share that over 300,000 users in India have already found their home’s address using Plus Codes,” said Amanda Bishop, Product Manager, Google Maps.

“We are looking forward to expanding to more types of places, and are actively looking for opportunities to partner with e-commerce, logistics, and delivery companies, to scale up the experience to more people across the world,” Bishop added.

Now, when users in India are saving a ‘Home’ location on Google Maps, they will see a new “Use your current location” option that uses the phone’s location to create a Plus Code that can be used as the Home address. The location precision has to meet some minimum thresholds to qualify though.

Plus Codes created are accessible under a new section at the top of the Google Maps app’s ‘Saved’ tab making it easier to find, copy, and share these addresses. The Plus Codes feature is live on Android and will soon be rolled out on iOS as well.

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