You are mixing up linkability/history and being an MPA/SPA.

Many websites simply have some session/state dependent page.

Google Maps cant even preserve state in their iOS app.

They are either the worst developers in the world or it is not simple.

I don’t rule any of the two possibilities out.

Some things you get for free with the correct architecture. For whatever reason, SPA does not have a great track record with their users.

> They are either the worst developers in the world or it is not simple.

Or they have a good reason to not do it (in some PMs mind).

At a guess, resetting the view, and displaying the nearest Domino's Pizza sponsored highlight pin on the map, could be one of them.

My biggest gripe with Google Maps is when I pan to a specific area, hundreds, or even thousands of miles from my current location, then search for something like “restaurants” and it pans me back home and searches there, so I then have to go find my distant location again and click the search here button.

If this is an intentional choice, all in an effort to show me more local ads… ugh. I really hope this isn’t the case.

I hate that too. Even when it is just across the one city, it is a major pain in the ass.

Google Maps makes it really hard to explore your travel destination, or I am holding it wrong. That and the lack of weather integration are my main issues with it.

I have one of those!

https://datasette-tiles-demo.datasette.io/-/tiles/basemap?no...

I wish I could take full credit but it was a PR by dracos: https://github.com/simonw/datasette-tiles/pull/16

The author states that MPA are not a solution for everything. Sure google maps don’t fit the MPA model but I’ve seen a lot of projects that would be much better using current browser features instead of react.

the web app already supports history navigation.

that has nothing to do with an mpa

these days there's a "copy link" button for directions which you can save / share

Which converts your waypoints into addresses and then on load tries to find those addresses. The result is utterly unusable in a remote setting like a forest service or BLM roads.