[suggestion] waze backend

[hewliyang]

Waze provides (?) a public facing API that you can POST to for free. The returned data is richer including

• $\text{path}=[ (\text{lat}_1, \text{long}_1),...,(\text{lat}_n, \text{long}_n) ]$ : can reconstruct the geometric path on a map
• events along the path (same as those in-app popups when you are choosing a route)
• total toll cost

see https://github.com/hewliyang/waze-traffic-api/blob/main/waze.ipynb

[Thevesh]

Absolutely insane - I wonder if this is intentional on their part.

Regardless, some impressive reverse engineering there!

Have you checked the output against Distance Matrix / Directions, out of curiosity?

[hewliyang]

Absolutely insane - I wonder if this is intentional on their part.

Slow 3G & Network tab did the job since the request was made on the client. I found other similar repositories here on GitHub afterwards and it seems like the interface has remained the same for at least 2 years now, so I guess they don't really care too much.

Have you checked the output against Distance Matrix / Directions, out of curiosity?

It matches up to what I've experienced personally (when driving). Waze is always more optimistic than GMaps. As a sanity check you can query both via the API & in-app simultaneously and theoretically it should match up.