How Much Does is Cost to Create a Navigation App like Waze?

Why Choose Waze as an Example?

Since the earliest car navigation apps, the applications people use have changed quite a lot. Many new additional features have become a standard in the industry. The Waze location tracking app was one of the pioneers of this new generation of guiding applications.

Waze was initially released as FreeMap Israel in 2006. In its core, the main target of this project was to create a full and free user-supported and updated map of Israel 🤩. Later, the app evolved and transformed, but the main features of free access and the ability to set up points of interest have stayed there. Waze is one of the top free tracking location app for iPhone, that helps many users in finding routes and traffic updates.

These main aspects, also including a great monetization method and several new features, have led to a subsequent deal between Google and Waze in 2013. The IT giant paid $996 million to acquire the company, which meant that each employee gained around $1.2 million. It remains one of the biggest deals in the IT sector in Israel.

Today, Waze is the second most popular app for location tracking in the world (beaten only by Google Maps). Such a great history of success makes the company and the app they've created a great example for you to aim for. So, what do you need to know to make a navigation app like Waze, and how should you proceed?

Features You Need to Include to Develop a Navigation App Like Waze

As we've already covered, there is a lot more to modern navigation apps than just being able to hook you up to the Global Positioning System. If you want to develop an app that tracks location like Waze, you have to learn how does Waze work and which features make it so popular. So, here are some of the most important features.

GPS and Maps

Although there is an abundance of new features, you cannot skip navigation if you would like to build an app to track location. Waze is equipped with a great navigation engine that not only determines your relative position and calculates the best route towards your destination, but also analyzes such data as the speed of your car and user reports (more on that later) to determine the points of interest for you to avoid (such as spots with heavy traffic or locations monitored by the police). The Waze maps also work offline, so the user doesn't need to worry about getting stranded someplace without an Internet connection. So, as we said, you can't build a navigation app for Android and iOS without implementing navigation.

Voice Recognition System

Driving requires maximum attention from the driver. If the driver is distracted for even a moment, it can cause an accident, so you need to make sure that this will not happen. You should consider implementing a voice recognition system in the app that allows drivers to build routes using voice commands and not be distracted on the road. You can use various tools to make a geolocation app with voice recognition system, including the Google Cloud API, HERE iOS, Android SDK, Google Directions, and others.

Social Media-Like

These features became the biggest advantages of the Waze app, and soon got picked up by its competitors 😉. Basically, they've made social media for drivers - you're able to create an account, share your driving experience, inform other drivers about dangerous or otherwise curious sections of the road, and you can evaluate the usefulness of a comment by giving it a like.

Recent updates allow you to share the prices of goods at a particular establishment, which means that the company plans to further develop these features. So if you decide to create a navigation app for Android, building your own social network for drivers will be a great solution.

Drive Planning

This outstanding Waze feature basically unites the app with a calendar. Before you decide whether to add this feature during iOS app development, let's consider its purpose. Thanks to this feature, users can plan their driving more thoughtfully and carefully and get notified on the time and a date of a planned ride.

You can also add the information about the journey you're planning to your Google Calendar or Facebook to inform your friends that you'll be away or to entice them to join you. All in all, it's a great feature that reinforces the role of Waze as the best truck navigation app. To successfully make a custom navigation app for Android and iPhone, you should certainly add the drive planning feature to it.

Carpool

This is more of a recent feature that has obviously been inspired by the popularity of such applications as Uber and Lyft. The name of this service is Waze Ryder, and what makes it different from its competitors is that it's made mostly for carpool - it analyzes the popular courses the driver makes and suggests a passenger that needs to get someplace along one of that courses.

To successfully make navigation application for Android, you should add this feature to your application. It is surely not as great of a basis for a business opportunity as the apps mentioned above, but it is enough for a driver to pay for gas and passengers can save some time, connect with the other person and maybe join them on the road regularly.

Monetization

Although this is not the biggest and the most important element of the location tracker application, we need to talk about the way Waze gains money. As with most other free apps, they sell advertising spots. However, the way they incorporate them is a bit different from anything else. Their promotion is based on where the user is located at the moment. So, any shop or coffee place can buy a spot, so they'd be able to draw attention to themselves while a person is driving or walking past them. It is a very creative way to highly increase the relevance of ads.

The Cost of a Waze App Clone

Before you start to make a GPS navigation app like Waze, you should know that there are several various criteria that affect its development cost. And although we listed all the most important features your app should include, there are numerous things we didn't mention that heavily impact on the overall price of the app, such as:

• The design of the app's interface;
• Voice control for a safe driving option;
• UX optimization;
• Moreover, before you start to create a navigation application like Waze, you need to think of some unique features, and it's impossible to include them in the business plan at this stage.

All that said, you can still make a rough estimate for a Waze app cost. Professionals estimate that such an app requires around 1,000 hours of work to produce. Which means that, depending on where you are, an average cost to create a GPS navigation app like Waze would start at $47,000 and increases proportionally to the complexity of the application. We took an average rate of $47 per hour to calculate this.