How to Use Amap (Gaode Maps) in English: A Foreigner's Guide (2026)

The first week I landed in Shanghai, I opened Google Maps outside my hotel, watched the little blue dot float into the middle of a building across the road, and quietly panicked. Google Maps does not work properly in mainland China, and no amount of restarting your phone fixes it. The app almost every local uses instead is Amap , known here as Gaode Ditu (高德地图). The good news for the rest of us: since early 2025 it finally speaks English. Here is exactly how to set it up and use it without a word of Mandarin. Why does Google Maps not work in Shanghai? China requires all maps to use a scrambled coordinate system (the offset is nicknamed the "Mars" system), and Google never licensed the corrected local data. So Google's pins land anywhere from a few meters to a couple of hundred meters off, which is useless when you are trying to find a specific door. Amap and Apple Maps both use the correct China data, which is why your dot actually sits where you are standing. Is Amap available in English? Yes. In January 2025 Amap rolled out an official English interface (along with more than a dozen other languages), the first of the big Chinese map apps to do so. Menus, buttons and the…