Debasis Mohapatra
Bengaluru, 21 July 2024
The competition between Google Maps and Ola Maps is heating up with both companies trying to allure developers, ecommerce companies, and individual customers to use their location apps.
Ola Maps has emerged as a challenger to Google Maps’ near dominance in the Indian market with its Founder Bhavish Aggarwal urging Indian users to try out its geolocation services. Ola Maps uses Aggarwal’s artificial intelligence (AI) startup Krutrim for providing mapping and location-based services for developers.
This month, Ola announced the transition of all these group companies’ operations from Google Maps to Ola Maps.
“After Azure exit last month, we’ve now fully exited Google Maps. We used to spend ₹100 cr a year but we’ve made that 0 this month by moving completely to our in house Ola maps! Check your Ola app and update if needed,” Aggarwal has said in a ‘X’ post. “Also, Ola maps API is available on @Krutrim cloud! Many more features coming soon – street view, NERFs, indoor images, 3D maps, drone maps etc!,” he has added.
As Ola Maps try to enter the burgeoning Indian market, Google has announced its decision to slash the pricing of Google Maps Platform by as much as 70% starting August 1, 2024.
According to reports, Google is also planning to partner with Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) under which it will offer additional discounts for developers building for ONDC for a limited period.
“This will result in up to 90% discount on select Google Maps Platform APIs that are used to drive ecommerce and adjacent use cases,” Google has reportedly said.
With Google slashing rates for its Google Maps offering, the pricing war between these two companies are likely to intensify in coming quarters.
Meanwhile, companies providing Google Maps-based offerings saw negative reactions from investors owing to the planned price cut.
The share price of CE Info Systems-owned MapMyIndia declined 5.83% this week due to investors’ worry over the revenue impact on the company’s navigation app ‘MappIs’ which uses Google Maps.
Mappls is one of the signature product of MapMyIndia, which includes mapping data, solutions for businesses, navigation systems for cars, APIs, or application programming layers to work with platforms such as Alexa, AI tools, and analytics.
