How to Download Offline Maps on Android

This is the fast way when you already know roughly where you are going. Open Google Maps, search a place (a town, an address, a landmark), and tap its name at the bottom of the screen to open the place card. On that card, tap the three-dot menu or look for the Download button, then tap Download offline map. Maps shows you a shaded box of what it will save and the file size. Tap Download and let it finish before you leave Wi-Fi.

The box it offers is generous. Searching a city usually grabs the whole metro area plus the roads leading out of it, which is often all you need for a weekend.

When you want to control the exact region, for example a whole route between two cities rather than one town, use the manual selector. Tap your profile picture or initial in the top right, then Offline maps, then Select your own map. You get a rectangle over the map that you can pinch to zoom and drag to reposition. Pinch out to cover more ground, pinch in to shrink the file. The download size updates live as you resize. When the box covers what you want, tap Download.

One area can run from a few hundred megabytes to well over a gigabyte for a large region, so do this on Wi-Fi unless you enjoy burning through mobile data. You can save several separate areas and they all live together under that same Offline maps screen.

By default the map saves to internal storage. If your phone takes a microSD card and you are tight on space, you can point downloads at the card instead. From the Offline maps screen, tap the settings gear (Download preferences) and choose SD card under storage.

Two honest caveats here. The card has to be formatted as portable storage for Maps to use it, and on most phones running current Android that is the normal default. Second, switching the storage location does not move maps you already downloaded; they stay where they were and you re-download anything you want on the new location. So pick your storage spot before you download a big batch, not after.

Worth noting: many recent phones, including every Pixel and a lot of Samsung Galaxy models, have no SD slot at all. On those, internal storage is your only option, so keep an eye on free space before saving a large area.

Offline maps live inside the Google Maps app, not the operating system, so the steps are identical on a Pixel and on a Samsung Galaxy. The profile picture is top right on both, and Offline maps sits in the same menu.

The differences are around the edges. Samsung Galaxy phones in the mid-range and budget lines often still include a microSD slot, so the SD card storage option above is genuinely useful there. Pixels do not have the slot, so that toggle will not give you anything. On Samsung you may also have Maps installed alongside Samsung's own location stuff, but the Google app behaves exactly as described regardless. If you rely on a phone mount and voice prompts in the car, the offline route still reads turns aloud the same way an online route does.

Here is the rule that trips people up: offline routing works only when the entire route, start, finish, and everything in between, sits inside an area you downloaded. If your trip runs off the edge of your saved box, Maps will ask for data to calculate the part it cannot see. So when you save a route, make the box cover the whole corridor, not just the two endpoints.

Your phone's GPS does the positioning. That hardware does not need a SIM or Wi-Fi, which is why a phone in airplane mode still shows your blue dot moving down the road. Pair that with a downloaded map and you get real turn-by-turn driving directions with voice. For broader help choosing between this and dedicated tools, our roundup of GPS navigation apps for Android compares the offline behavior of several options side by side.

Offline maps are for driving, full stop. A few things go dark the moment you lose signal, and it is better to know now than at a confusing junction:

• No live traffic. Maps cannot see jams or accidents, so it will not reroute you around them and the colored traffic lines disappear.
• No lane guidance. The visual that tells you which lane to be in for an exit is an online feature and goes away.
• No walking, cycling, or transit directions. Only driving routes calculate offline. If you are on foot in a new city, plan that part before you leave Wi-Fi.
• No Street View, no live business hours, no reviews refresh. You can still search saved places and see basic info.

For getting your bearings on foot when even the map is not loading, a simple compass app can be the difference between a confident turn and a wrong one.

Downloaded areas do not stay forever. Each one needs refreshing within about 30 days, otherwise the data goes stale. Google Maps helps here: once an area is inside 15 days of expiring and your phone is on Wi-Fi, the app tries to update it on its own in the background. You usually do not have to think about it.

If you want to be sure before a trip, open Offline maps, tap the area, and update it manually. You can also rename areas there or delete ones you no longer need to claw back storage. The practical habit: download or refresh the night before you travel, on home Wi-Fi, so you leave with current data rather than a map that is about to lapse.

Google Maps offline is plenty for most road trips. But if you spend real time off-grid, hiking, overlanding, boating, the driving-only limit and the rectangular boxes start to chafe. Purpose-built navigation gear and apps store topographic detail, trails, and routes that Google Maps does not carry offline. We cover that ground in our look at Garmin's Android GPS tools, which are built around the assumption that you will not have a connection. For the wider category and how the pieces fit together, start at our navigation and auto hub and work outward from there.