Earlier this month an announcement that Google Maps and YouTube will be available offline later this year was made at the Google I/O event in San Francisco.

Forget a bad connection and long loading times – the last thing you need when trying to get directions or, perhaps worse, watching that cute cat video – Youtube and Google Maps are set to go offline later this year. This will mean that users will no longer have to be connected to the internet in order to access a route or watch a clip. There is, however, a catch, and a pretty big and deflating one at that…

Google Maps And Youtube Offline: What's The Catch?

Before you go getting all excited over the announcement about Google Maps and YouTube offline, unfortunately, this function will be more useful to the incessant planners and devoted cat watchers out there, since in order to use this offline service, you have to stream a clip you want to watch, or save your routed journey on Google Maps, before you head out onto the internetless streets.

Otherwise, unless you use your internet data, you'll still have to roam around directionless, unless you pop into a coffee shop with free instant wifi, of course, or go old style with an actual, foldable, paper map.

There's yet more bad news too - if you do decide to stream a YouTube clip before you head out, it will only be available to watch for 48 hours. And whilst it's great that you won't need to suck down expensive data or have super reliable connectivity every time you want to navigate somewhere, the announcement of Google Maps and Youtube offline is arguably not very useful for the spontaneous folk amongst us.

However, as Spotify users who use the offline function to listen to music will be aware, this new advancement does have its benefits. It will be good for train journeys, where your connection may dip in-and-out, and as for maps, if you do know where you're heading to a day earlier, but are unsure of the way – for an interview for instance - this offline function, which includes turn-by-turn directions, is brilliant.

YouTube And Google Quick Facts

YouTube has more than 1 billion users, and 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute.
YouTube is localised in 75 countries and available in 61 languages.
More than a million advertisers use Google ad platforms; the majority of these advertisers are small businesses.
Google processes over 40,000 search queries, not every day, or even every hour or minute, but every second. That's 2,400,000 a minute, 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.