Google Maps Will Now Automatically Save Your Parking Spot on iPhone

Forgetting where you parked your car isn’t just a sitcom trope, although it’s fine for classic television. Even in the age of the smartphone, it’s all too easy to walk away from your car and have no memory of where you left it. It turns out that Google Maps has a solution, provided you have an iPhone.

As long as you run the app on an Apple device, Google Maps can automatically remember where you parked and display that information on the map. There’s no need to mark the location yourself, ask the app to save your spot, or take a photo of the side streets in case you forget: you can just glance at the screen to find a “You’re parked here” label.

The thing is, while some report that this feature is relatively new to them, others suggest that it has been available for a while. What gives?

How Google Maps Automatically Saves Your Parking Location on iOS

This feature works if you connect your iPhone to your car, whether via Bluetooth, CarPlay, or a USB cable. When you disconnect your iPhone from your car, Google Maps will assume you’re parked and automatically mark that location on the map. The feature will also work if you allow Google Maps to access your movement and fitness data, which lets the app know when you started and stopped driving. (You can check this setting in the Google Maps app settings: go to Navigationthen under “Automatically save parking”, tap Let maps use your movement to record your parking.)

You can also choose to set Google Maps location permissions to “Always,” which gives the app persistent access to your location data and also allows it to determine when you’ve stopped your car. You can change this option on your iPhone by navigating to t0 Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > Google Maps.

Is this feature really new?

This feature is really cool and I’m glad Google Maps supports it, even if Android users are inexplicably excluded at the moment. But you may also be wondering if this wasn’t already a feature? This is not the case her this is all new. Yet you may have even seen a slew of articles like this today, all reporting on this “new” Google Maps parking feature.

It turns out the answer is a bit complicated. Today’s media coverage is all referencing this LinkedIn announcement from Google Maps senior product manager Rio Akasaka. Only this message is, according to LinkedIn, a month old. Some comments are more recent, but others appear to be from the original posting date.

Potentially adding to the confusion, other navigation apps, like Apple Maps, already support automatically saving your parking spot, and while Google Maps also had the ability to save your parking spot for a time, it wasn’t automatic before. If you want the app to remember where you stopped, you need to tap your blue dot on the map and choose “Save your parking”. This is still the case on Android, since the automatic function only works on iOS.

Scrolling through comments sections on articles from outlets like The Verge or MacRumors, some users insist they’ve had this feature for a while, long before LinkedIn’s announcement a month ago. This commenter says they’ve had this feature for years, while this one claims they’ve had it for “ages.” So what does that give? Have at least some iPhone users had this feature for years? It’s possible that Google tested the feature with smaller subsets of users and only rolled it out en masse recently, but it’s not yet clear if that actually happened.

I’ve reached out to Google for clarification on the timeline for implementing this feature and will update this article if I get a response. Until then, I can only hope that Google is actively working on rolling out this feature to Android, because it really is. would be be something new.