> Google has sat on its hands the last couple years with Google Maps: it has hardly improved at all, and outside of their move to jack up prices for API users, I haven't heard of any real changes.
It's a pretty mature product, so you'd expect the pace of signjificant change to be much slower. And large, noticeable change (like a redesign) is a poor metric, as it often feels like a PM getting their wings at the expense of user experience, including muscle memory in an app as useful as Maps.
Despite these caveats, I can think of a new feature off the top of my head: a heatmap of all photos I've ever taken appearing on Google maps. I just moved to New York and it's been both useful and delightful to rediscover where I've been from a new perspective, driven by the serendipitous photos I took over the last decade of sporadic visits.
Yet another new feature I just remembered is Live View compass calibration. Anybody who lives in a big city can relate to how irritating compass quality is around large buildings. The ability to calibrate my compass in two seconds via camera recognition of the street scene is a huge quality of life improvement.
Im usually hesitant to disagree with other people's opinions, but it really sounds like you either have no familiarity with Google Maps or are stuck in a 2010 Apple vs Google fanboy-war view of the world. The reason Maps is so wildly popular is because it consistently pushes out user experience both improvements that are straightforwardly (if incrementally) useful and occasional larger "cool" (and also useful) features. To get as wildly wrong an interpretation as yours (of Maps as somehow stagnant) reeks of willful ignorance.