Five Google apps have drawn comparisons to childhood pastimes that predate smartphones, according to Users Who say the tools replicate experiences from their early years.
Google Earth lets users fly over terrain and zoom into street level, mimicking the hours many children spent poring over printed atlases and road maps. Physical maps were a staple of school classrooms and family road trips through the 1980s and 1990s, before GPS navigation made them largely obsolete.
Google Arts & Culture
The app gives users access to high-resolution images from more than 3,000 museums and galleries worldwide, according to Google. For children who visited museums on school trips, the experience of moving through collections of paintings and historical artifacts translates directly to the app’s interface.
Street View, built into Google Maps, places users inside a navigable 360-degree photograph of a physical location. The feature replicates the childhood habit of wandering unfamiliar neighborhoods and memorizing local geography on foot.
Google Lens
Lens uses a device camera to identify plants, animals, landmarks, and everyday objects in real time. The tool mirrors the behavior of children who collected insects or pressed flowers, then reached for an encyclopedia to identify what they had found.
Google said Lens can identify billions of objects across categories including food, clothing, books, and nature. The identification process takes less than a second on most current Android and iOS devices.
Google Sky Map, originally developed by Google and now maintained as an open-source project on Google Play, overlays constellation names and planetary positions onto a live camera feed pointed at the sky. Children who used cardboard star wheels — circular paper tools that map visible constellations by date and time — will recognize the core function immediately.
Historical context
Printed star wheels date to at least the 16th century and remained a common educational tool in science classrooms well into the 2000s. Digital versions began appearing on early smartphones around 2009, when Google released the first version of Sky Map for Android.
Google Photos uses machine learning to sort images by face, location, and date, then surfaces memories from past years automatically. The feature reproduces the experience of flipping through physical photo albums, a household ritual that declined sharply after digital cameras displaced film in the early 2000s.
Statista estimated that people worldwide stored approximately 1.8 trillion photos digitally in 2023, compared to an estimated 86 billion photos printed annually at the peak of the film era in the late 1990s, based on Kodak's historical production data.
Google Maps launched in 2005. Google Earth followed the same year after Google acquired Keyhole Inc., the company that originally built the satellite imagery platform.
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