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Lol. I was coming to the comments section for this. There must be some challenge here that isn't immediately obvious because I feel that no one has solved this well.


I’m confident it’s two reasons:

- too many street names make for a noisy/busy/ugly map, and we all know maps must be beautiful and nothing else

- streets don’t pay for ads, businesses do, so between the two they prefer showing the latter.

Technically now you can tap anywhere on the map once to place a pin and get more info; In practice tapping in Google Maps has become horrendous, it never does what you expect. One such example is tapping on a business near a “walkable area”: you can’t. The area will always focus instead, even if painted behind the business.


Apple Maps does this really well (at least for NYC). It's the only reason I keep it installed, to look at street names while using Google Maps


> There must be some challenge here that isn't immediately obvious

the challenge is profit maximization, this to emphasize it is not a technical challenge (earlier versions of maps were good at this)




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