• @tabular
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    235 months ago

    Will the old method of breaking up a company work enough on modern tech companies? Will the 2nd best map software ever catch up in market share?

    • @[email protected]OP
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      5 months ago

      If you switched most people from google into DDG without telling, most would hardly notice, I venture. Mapping is different.

      • @[email protected]
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        95 months ago

        Just apple maps and bing under the hood though.

        What we really need is some non-super monopoly competition like osm

      • @tabular
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        5 months ago

        Perhaps, though I am dubious (when it comes to things like searching for business open hours or street view).

        However it’s not like choosing which restaurant to go to. They just type their search in the Google browser textbox and use the same search engine they’ve always used, the default. They’d need to encounter a failed search and think to try another.

    • @[email protected]
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      145 months ago

      If they forced them to split Waze off and make it independent again it probably could, it’s probably the only non default app I see people use regularly

      • @TheRedSpade
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        45 months ago

        Oh, did they actually keep Waze? I assumed they bought it to kill it.

        • @[email protected]
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          15 months ago

          Shockingly they kept Waze around. It sounds like they believe the Waze brand is too strong to be worth killing off in favor of maps, but they have been implementing new features into each and cross pollinating between the two

        • @[email protected]
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          05 months ago

          I think they might be using it as a beta testing ground for their back end features, the brand is also pretty valuable in and of itself. The traffic avoidance is much more aggressive than Google maps

    • @[email protected]
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      65 months ago

      Just spinning off Android would shake up map software. It’s how they get traffic and other data.

      • @tabular
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        45 months ago

        Many apps for Android rely on Google Play Services which I don’t know exactly what it’s doing but collecting data is a good bet.

        Do we end up with worse maps then?

        • @[email protected]
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          5 months ago

          In the short term? Possibly.

          In the long term, it opens up space for competition, which is better for end users, advertisers, small business, and more.

        • @[email protected]
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          15 months ago

          By my understanding google play services is basically just shared libraries and APIs for doing stuff and not as tied into Google specifically as its name might suggest

          • @tabular
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            15 months ago

            Wikipedia suggests it gives access to certain information which all look like data Google would want to track. I don’t think I’m crazy to assume Google is doing something fucky while it gets values when requested on by an app, or whenever the heck they want.

            Disable it and it will bitch notifications every often, every day, and that can’t be disabled. It claims it need to be on for your phone to work but not so in my case when I only use apps from F-Droid (like a dialer, text message, calculator, Lemmy client).