Google MapsCopied

Google Maps turned 15 in February 2020, by which point Google said more than a billion people were using it. For the birthday Google shipped product updates, five tabs including Explore and Commute, and a new icon that it said reflected the evolution of how it maps the world.

The old icon was a folded paper map. The new one keeps only the pin, filled with Google's four colours. Google framed the change as a shift from getting you from point A to B to also helping you explore places and get things done. A party-themed car icon appeared in navigation for a limited time as a birthday extra.

Jen Fitzpatrick, senior vice president for Maps, said the mission had expanded from how do I get from here to there to helping people discover places and things to do, and that the icon was updated to reflect that journey. The app gained five tabs along the bottom at the same time. By then Maps covered more than 220 countries and around 200 million places.

The work was done in-house.

Ars Technica described the change with a shrug. The icon was no longer a map at all but a pin, and like Google's other recent icons it followed a formula: take a simple shape, fill it with red, blue, green and yellow, and call it a day. The redesign around it was mostly reshuffling. The bottom bar went from three tabs to five, adding Saved, Contribute and Updates, none of them genuinely new, and the hamburger menu disappeared. The pin is a better symbol for what Maps had become, a place finder rather than a map, but it is also one more piece of a family that was starting to blur together.

The pin is the right symbol. Nobody unfolds a paper map anymore, and the pin is what users actually see inside the app. The problem came later in 2020, when Google rolled the same four-colour treatment across Gmail, Calendar, Drive and Meet, leaving a home screen full of similar shapes in the same palette. Maps survived it best because its silhouette is the most distinct, but on its own the 2020 icon was a sensible update that simply arrived first in a family that later became hard to tell apart.