When I open a link with directions embedded (such as the one below) on a mobile phone, it defaults to text/list view instead of the map view, even when trying to use parameters in the URL to force it to map view.
You can test this by either opening it on a mobile device, or forcing your browser’s user agent to iphone/ipad. To do this with Chrome on a Mac, open the terminal and paste the following in:
/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome -user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10″
Is there some way to force it to open into map view instead of list/text view?
I searched Stack Overflow and the Google API forums but was not able to find a solution (two other users asked similar questions, but they went unanswered and given I am new to the site it will not let me up vote their questions). Preferably there would be a way to do this via URL parameters, but I am open to other solutions as well.
This may not exactly answer your question, but after updating to iOS 6 I’ve had the same problem on existing iOS apps that referenced
maps.google.com. I found the solution is to referencemaps.apple.com(changegoogletoapplein the URL). I tested this on iOS 6 Safari and found that the new URL works as expected and opens to the maps view in the new Apple maps whereas the old Google reference now opens to the list/text view as described in the OP.I am guessing that when Apple ripped out the Google map library it caused the side-effect that the iOS version of Safari is now treated by Google as any other mobile platform.
Reference: Apple Safari Map Links