Waze can send traffic information to a central server without users doing anything special on their devices. Otherwise, it can’t send and receive traffic reports that are eventually used for generating routes to a certain destination. This makes perfect sense, as the crowdsourcing engine needs the app to be online.
Waze offline modeCompared to Google Maps, Waze can do its magic as long as an Internet connection is available. Google Maps can automatically update the offline maps when the app is running. Instead, it requires them to select a region from the map, and more often than not, this is smaller than an entire country. The region selection process isn’t exactly the best, as Google Maps does not allow users to download offline maps for a whole city or country. This is why you need to make sure you download offline maps covering a region that’s as large as possible. Google Maps can provide navigation to a certain address as long as the entire route is within the offline maps.
