Google Maps on Android not rotating to match direction of travel

If you’ve recently found yourself spinning in circles while using Google Maps on your Android device, you’re not alone. A peculiar bug has been frustrating users for months, and it seems like Google Maps has lost its sense of direction — literally.

For many Android users, the once seamless experience of Google Maps rotating to match your direction of travel has been replaced by a stubbornly fixed north-up orientation, even with the “Keep the north up” setting disabled. Whether you’re strolling through the city or embarking on a grand adventure, it’s as if Google Maps has decided that north is the only direction worth acknowledging.

This problem is especially irksome in walking mode, where the map’s refusal to rotate can turn even the simplest navigation task into a frustrating exercise. You’re forced to manually zoom, pinch, and rotate the map to figure out which way to go, which is about as fun as assembling IKEA furniture without the instructions.

Android users have taken to forums like Reddit and the Google Maps community to voice their discontent. Reports suggest that Maps on various devices is stuck in fixed north orientation, from Google’s very own Pixel lineup to popular brands like Samsung, Xiaomi, and Huawei. The bug first reared its head several months ago, and despite the growing number of complaints, Google has remained curiously silent.

Some users have discovered a temporary workaround: uninstalling the latest updates to Google Maps. Reverting to the factory version seems to restore the map’s rotation function, albeit with some caveats. Notably, once you’ve restored the factory version, you’ll want to disable auto-updates for Google Maps, or else the buggy version might sneak its way back onto your phone.

Unfortunately, this workaround may not work for everyone. In some cases, like mine, uninstalling and reinstalling the app didn’t fix the issue. Worse still, the factory version of the app kept crashing, making it impossible to test whether it could rotate maps correctly. For those who find themselves in this boat, downloading and installing an older APK version of Google Maps might be a potential solution, though it’s a bit more of a tech-savvy fix.

Interestingly, I don’t have this problem on my iPhone, and other users are not experiencing it either. Google Maps is rotating without any problems on iOS, leaving Android users feeling like they’ve been left out in the cold. It’s one more reason for the iPhone-toting members of your family to give you that smug look as they breeze through their travels.

While we wait (and hope) for Google to address this issue, Android users are left to muddle through with a buggy Google Maps experience. If you’re one of the unlucky ones affected, you might want to keep an eye on updates — or, better yet, avoid them altogether until this issue is resolved. And if you do decide to tinker with Google Maps settings or older APKs, proceed with caution.

On the brighter side, Google Maps recently rolled out incident reporting to Apple CarPlay users.