I refer to them as "Be More Evil, Inc." now.

It reminds me of this conspiracy that was circulating a few months back that Apple Maps had "deleted" cities and places in Lebanon to culturally erase it for Israel's invasion.

In reality (which you could see by e.g. looking at Reddit posts from a few years ago), Apple Maps' coverage of Lebanon was absolute unusable dogshit the entire time. There were complaints about how it wasn't even usable for basic navigation in Beirut. The city of Tyre (which was misspelled "Tyr") was still there despite being one of the hardest-hit cities by Israel's invasion.

Which was, to be fair, staggeringly incompetent, but it was provably true. Apple Maps' coverage sucked so badly that, at a surface level, it looked like somebody took an erase tool to a competent map.

I think a lot of people don't realize how automated corporate maps applications are. Which can be a weakness for crowd-sourced data like OpenStreetMap when there aren't enough contributors, but that democratization is also a huge benefit that anyone can see and fix issues. The main parts of Google Maps that aren't automated are points of interest, and those are kept up-to-date thanks to the network effect where e.g. business owners see value in maintaining their information or users feel like they're helping out (read: doing free labor for a trillion-dollar corporation).

Where’s this fucking energy for Google removing sideloading from Android, for example.

To be fair, the average person doesn't know what sideloading is, while everyone will look at the map and see the changed name

Why is a lake name stored in code versus a database?

Yeahhhhh.... I was actually just thinking about this the other day, and kinda realized that a lot of people in my dad's generation cosplayed as lawn maintenance landscapers in their spare time, I larp sysadmin

But even just getting off the main Google search page is huge. So much of this is about adopting a posture of flexibility and taking responsibility for your data to some extent, and which companies you can and can't tolerate. So just rejecting the convenience of using Google as search is great.

Because now you don't feel so totally helpless—you've got an example of exercising your agency over your "digital life" and you can keep doing it as needed/desired with greater ease.

Main thing to realise is you're not going to find a drop-in replacement for Google that is some giant centralised search and auth platform strangely super-motivated to reduce friction between you accessing products online.

A lot of Americans would instantly jump to a Chinese competitor

I think this is pretty true. To expand:

I am stuck between a rock and a hard place. I have to either run my own email/hosting/storage servers and surrounding infrastructure with the tech understanding required to do so*, or give my data to someone else. Not having an email address is not realistic when it's the primary key for your bank, school, employer, etc.

*A decade or so ago, running an SMTP server was trivial. Now, it needs DMARC, DKIM, SPF, publicly trusted certificates, and maybe newer things I'm not familiar with in order to be able send email. These are not bad things, but they increase the requirements for self-hosting.

Right now, that 'someone else' is generally google or microsoft for most people, and those companies are so big they get to dictate how other tools I need to use work. They also freely sell my data or give it to the government - possibly without any sort of warrant via 'data sharing agreements'.

US-based data brokers are actively hostile to me. A Chinese data broker is less likely to care, since I'm further from their profit model: I'm unlikely to buy a Chinese cereal or make-up brand or visit a restaurant halfway across the globe. This only matters as long as US and Chinese data brokers don't share info, but I suspect there's friction there. If there's not, then there's no reason to NOT switch.

If I have to give my data to someone, then I'd prefer to give it to someone who doesn't directly impact or care about me the way google/microslop and the US government do.

I'd personally suggest Tuta over Proton simply because of the sketchiness of the Proton ownership and their conservative, business-first, citizens-second views.

Instead of recommending OpenStreetMap.org, I would suggest Cartes.app as the Google maps replacement (uses OSM data). It contains most features that Google Maps users are used to and will feel familiar to them. OpenStreetMap is more of the backend for mapping apps rather than a direct replacement for Google Maps.

Cartes for most features (satellite view, reviews, shareable links that work for anyone, etc.) and CoMaps for offline/driving directions.

Oh don't apologize for buying their subsidized data collection devices and then completely disabling the reason they subsidize the devices 😂

It's a kick in the nuts to Google every time GrapheneOS is installed.

Aegis is tits and it makes it easy to transfer TOTP codes back and forth between Aegis and KeePassXC.

Shizuku is on the chopping block. One of the change requests being made to AOSP is blocking adb connections on the loopback interface, "for security".

Good info, thanks.

I use Organic Maps and CoMaps mainly. Sometime Kagi Maps and FlockHopper (not sure what I under the hood of that one though). I prefer OSM generally.