IssueTracker

Back in September 2021, Google applied changes to the Street View API allowing faster publication of new imagery in selected countries, and while I'm personally satisfied with this change, unfortunately, people have been reporting problems related to Street View coverage throughout the world since then.

From what I understand from these sources: https://virtualstreets.org/index.php/2021/09/12/a-new-google-street-view-update-happened/ and https://support.google.com/maps/thread/132766700/since-september-street-view-is-broken-everywhere-and-this-is-quite-problematic?hl=en, the changes seemed to have caused a lot of breaks in coverage, which involved thousands of blue lines becoming separated here and there, and in some cases making navigation very difficult while viewing Street View imagery. On top of that, when roadways not covered on Street View receive blue lines leading to new images, those blue lines are not drawn correctly as the data is mostly incomplete.

After the API changes were applied, it also caused some countries to lose Google-contributed coverage completely. The most affected countries were Vietnam and Switzerland, whose new images had previously been released in November 2020 and June 2021, respectively. The imagery has not been restored since then.

Lastly, the API changes also came with a huge Street View update that added imagery such as Japan's first Gen 1 coverage and extra Gen 3/Gen 4 content in North America, among other updates worldwide. This update was especially important because some of those images provided new coverage and quality updates to existing coverage, thus making it related to another large update released on October 8, 2020. Unfortunately, unlike that prior update, the 9/10/2021 update was thought to be very buggy, and on March 1, 2022, the data was subsequently deleted. I was largely expecting the data from that update to be permanent, and I'm not very satisfied with the removal because it does not make any difference. It actually has to do with the API itself.

These problems likely reduce the quality of the Street View service and have been lingering around for months without any fixing. The API will most likely need to be inspected for errors and, if any, correct them ASAP so that the deleted imagery can also be restored afterwards.