[rudian]

I’m confident it’s two reasons:

- too many street names make for a noisy/busy/ugly map, and we all know maps must be beautiful and nothing else

- streets don’t pay for ads, businesses do, so between the two they prefer showing the latter.

Technically now you can tap anywhere on the map once to place a pin and get more info; In practice tapping in Google Maps has become horrendous, it never does what you expect. One such example is tapping on a business near a “walkable area”: you can’t. The area will always focus instead, even if painted behind the business.