Get ready to listen to old hits in your car with a new smart event powered by navigation from Google-owned Waze. Starting this week, you can turn on retro mode in Waze to change the look of the app and experience music from decades past.
In a blog post, Waze cited '70s Disco, '80s Jazzercise, and '90s TI aesthetics as examples of how you can theme your ride. The tracks will also come with their own quirky radio DJs to liven up the radio show and navigate your ride (which sounds great or boring, depending on your mood).
In retro mode, you'll also be able to change your car icon to a flower pot, a 90's computer, or a Rad Racer sports car for more fun.
Waze has also partnered with music streaming service TuneIn to offer '70s music in the UK, '90s hits in the US and Canada, and '80s Alive in France.
To use this new feature, click on "My Waze" in the app and tap on the "Drive with the 80s" banner. The feature is available worldwide in English, French, and Portuguese.
Analysis: some users have other ideas
While this little event seems like a fun addition on the surface, many people who use Waze may prefer improvements to more useful apps. The navigation app often directs travelers to shorter routes to get them to their destinations quicker, but browsing the app's subreddit we found that some found it to be a bit buggy, with some users thinking development is in progress. slope.
A post from a Waze user, though a few months old, says exactly that. They lament that the app is "progressively worse at routing" or that the app changes routes mid-trip and adds more time to the trip. Users in the comments on the post mostly seem to echo those sentiments, with many others noting that they only use it to "find out where the cops and other dangers are."
This community seems concerned that Google is shelving development in favor of Maps, which would make sense given that it's the most popular mobile navigation app in the US. Some users are also dissatisfied with the point system the app uses to rank reports based on relevance, legitimacy and to prevent abuse of the system.
So, of course, let's take a fun walk down memory lane with Waze, but let's also make sure the path above is the best one, and that's the shortest distance from point A in the 1970s and point Current B of 2022. .