u/Sgt-Skunthole

Hi everyone, I’m looking for advice from anyone who understands how Google Maps handles new place submissions, especially in regions with border or territorial disputes.

I live in Guyana, and for almost two years now, every attempt I make to add a new place in Essequibo gets automatically rejected. This happens even when the place is real, active, and easy to verify.

Essequibo is currently part of a territorial dispute between Guyana and Venezuela, and I’m wondering if that may be affecting how Google Maps reviews edits in the area. I don’t want to turn this into a political post, but the issue is making it very difficult for people here to add legitimate businesses, public locations, and places of interest.

We have many new businesses and community locations that should be on Google Maps. I’ve tried adding proper names, categories, phone numbers, photos, and accurate map pins. In some cases, we even asked the actual business owners to create or claim their own listings, but those also get rejected.

The rejection usually happens no matter what we do, so it feels like there may be some kind of automatic restriction or review problem affecting the area. Even If we add the poster of the business, fill out every detail that we can including the lot number for the address, photos of the place without stripping any of the metadata for the images. It's still rejected.

Has anyone experienced something similar in a disputed region or low map coverage area? Is there a better way to escalate this to Google Maps or Local Guides support? Would posting on Local Guides Connect help, or is there another method for getting legitimate places reviewed manually?

Any advice would be appreciated, especially from Local Guides or people who have dealt with repeated automatic rejections.

Other notes: My account is level 7, I've been contributing for maybe close to 8 years now.

Also, Where I'm from, being third world country... people here aren't technically oriented. So getting people to help with contributions isn't an easy task, you'll find majority of the places added are just a handful of names.

So I'm currently on the hunt for a head unit for my car (2014 Toyota Fielder) and I'm in need of a specific shape of head unit. It's a 9" head unit but I'll need a custom fascia. The shape of it, top is longer than the bottom, it's not a perfect rectangle.

Anyways, I kept thinking about how I can mod these things to get the most out of them. One of the things that bugged me is that they come with Android versions sometimes lower than 9. But they fake the info page to show Android 15 and upwards. While it isn't a huge downside as the head unit does work... Sometimes I wanna test things out with random apps but the android version isn't compatible.

But I'm thinking about what you guys have done to your head units specifically Chinese head units?

I'm thinking about grabbing one, adding some thermal paste and buy some tiny heatsinks. Maybe figure out a way to solder a fan on (if it doesn't come with one already) to help with thermals. Where im from we don't have shops that can reball RAM chips so I doubt I'll be able to upgrade a cheap head unit with more RAM.

Custom firmware is atrocious. Id love to have dark mode or a better UI. Yes I know launchers exists but things like swiping down from the top that panel is sometimes too ugly and night drives it's too bright. Installing a third party panel sometimes doesn't even work well. I tried and it won't allow me to keep it as a default.

I'm hoping one day we can start an android head unit project and add those features Chinese head units have with canbus communication built in. Or features like button learning.

Thoughts?