Most of us in Lemmy know the importance of privacy and owning your devices in a big tech owned world (me included) but for once I thought to make the opposite question and ask if there are products by them that you actually use and enjoy them.
Important to say, I mean products you use even though there are alternatives, not monopolies like YouTube.
Google Maps is best-in-class IMO. Some other services come close but aren’t quite as good.
Maps is good but most of the time the algorythmically placed addresses are off. Then I moved to OpenStreetMap (Organic Maps on Android) and everything is exactly where it should be. But it relies on people adding all the things to it and some places are missing a lot of stuff, but it’s also easy to just add it yourself
Just recently started exploring openstreetmap and it is so nice to be sure that it is locally stored and not draining my battery to use it.
I love Google maps but recently the “Recommendations” and “Reviews for things close by” gets annoying. It’s.becoming intrusive that I might switch to other service. I just want A to B direction, not “A to B and everything in between you might like.”
I feel like it depends on where you are. I used to travel a lot for work and Google maps would be less reliable than Here maps. Kept taking me to unpaved roads that no one used or like dead-ends. It was even more useless in a lot of third world countries I went to. They are really good at navigating around traffic and their POI data is way bigger than any other mapping solution.
HERE maps is pretty good… It’s one of the only major competitors to Google Maps. I’ve used their APIs in the past.