Turn by turn navigation costs roughly 2 MB an hour. Google publishes no figure of its own, and only one test we could find states how it was measured.
What navigation costs
One published test states its method. WhistleOut ran ten trips on an iPhone 7, averaging forty minutes and twenty two miles each, with turn by turn navigation running and a data monitor recording the result. It found 0.73 MB per twenty minutes, which is about 2.2 MB an hour.
The same test found that Waze used less than half as much data as Google Maps and Apple Maps used more. All three use so little that the difference does not matter on a trip.
The test is several years old and ran on a phone from 2016, so treat 2 MB an hour as the order of magnitude rather than a precise number. Even doubled, it stays under 5 MB an hour.
Why other pages say 5 to 10 MB
Search this question and 5 to 10 MB an hour comes back from dozens of pages. None of them says who measured it, on what phone, or over what route.
We could not find a test behind that figure. It appears to be one page copying another, and in practice it makes little difference: at either rate, navigation is a small part of a trip’s data.
Satellite view costs more, because it loads photographs instead of vector tiles.
Offline maps and download sizes
Offline areas are where the data goes. Reported sizes range from a few hundred megabytes for a city to well over a gigabyte for a large region, and the app shows the exact size before you confirm the download, so read it there and download on wifi.
To save an area, search a place, tap its name, then More, then Download offline map. To draw the boundaries yourself, tap your profile picture, then Offline maps, then Select your own map. On Android, the offline maps settings also decide whether downloads can use mobile data.
Offline areas expire. Once an area is fifteen days or less from its expiry date, Maps tries to update it over wifi, so check the dates before you fly.
What offline mode does not cover
Offline, Maps gives driving directions but no transit, cycling or walking directions, and no live traffic or alternate routes. Directions only work if the whole route sits inside the area you downloaded. Google also blocks offline downloads for some countries and regions, so try the download at home before you rely on it.
How much data to budget
Navigation is a small part of any trip. An hour of driving a day for a fortnight comes to about 30 MB, less than ten minutes of Netflix on its default setting. Video and downloads are what fill a plan, and how much data a trip uses adds up the rest.
Every Atli destination has a 1 GB plan that lasts seven days, set up in the WhatsApp or Telegram chat. At about 2 MB an hour, navigation alone would take hundreds of hours to use it up.
Google publishes no figure. The hourly number comes from WhistleOut’s iPhone 7 test, the only one with a stated method.
