Simply put, Google Maps continues to offer the best experience for getting around town. While Apple now provides their own mapping service on the iPhone and iPad, their app falls short in a number of areas. Google steps up to the plate to take over where Apple Maps fails. Here’s how.

Google is known for search, right? After all, thats how they got started. It stands to reason then that their maps app would provide location search. Just type in a business, address, or contact and Google Maps will pull up a list of possible results. Click on one and you’ll get more details. This feature provides vastly better search results than Apple Maps. Street View is another feature that Google still owns the market on and it’s available within the app

Live updating traffic information is another area where Google Maps shines. Once a location is selected, Google will display multiple routes that you can take sorted by time. It will also color-code your results by traffic congestion with text ranging from green, orange, and red for heavy back-ups. Once you are on route to your destination Google will continue to adjust your arrival time based on changing traffic patterns. You can leave the app and still receive on-screen notifications for your next turn. Switch between public transportation, car, and bicycle routes and times. Users can also log in with their Google account to save destinations and have access to their contacts. Google Maps is free so you might as well try it out to see if you like it as much as we do!

Google Maps is just one of our favorite navigation apps for iPhone and iPad. We’ve collected all of our favorites here. And if you’d like to see more of our top app selections in different categories, just head on over to our Best Apps Series.

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Here are a couple of our other picks of the best navigation apps for iPhone and iPad:

ETA – The quickest way to navigate to your favorite places

Short for Estimated Time of Arrival, ETA puts the drive time to your favorite places in Notification Center and on your Apple Watch. You can add places you visit often from within the ETA app on your iPhone. Then once the widget is enabled you'll have these shown for quick ...

HERE Offline Navigation – iPhone GPS without the internet

HERE Offline Navigation offers a great solution to downloading maps for navigating to places when you don't have an Internet connection. This is one of the biggest let downs of Apple maps and Google maps, since they do not allow navigation when you don't have a connection. This might be ...