Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

No, I won't. I've seen this page before and I've disabled a lot of the stuff that I'm uncomfortable with having them track. Google does a lot of shady creepy stuff, but I think just linking to your activity timeline doesn't add much value. How about writing a blog post about which items you found most surprising instead?

I do wish we had was better controls. For example, if you disable location tracking, Google Maps won't remember any address you visit. Why can't it be cached locally? If I regularly visit an address on my phone, it should be included in my autocomplete. I don't need cross-device history or tracking, I just want my damn phone to remember places I've visited previously without uploading it to the cloud. Taking an all-or-nothing approach seriously harms the user experience.

Despite it taking years, I've gradually been migrating away from my hard dependency on Google services. With that being said, if I were locked out of my gmail account I'd be seriously fucked. Maybe some day I'll reach the point where that's not the case.

I think the Google Maps annoyance after activity tracking is disabled is designed intensionally. To force users to give up the control with easy to click buttons.

I too dislike how many of Google's consumer services are being increasingly gated on the location history permission, which I too have disabled and which therefore means I can't use those services.

However, having worked at other parts of Google (not on Maps or location stuff), I'd guess at a much more prosaic explanation than that kind of conspiracy: the product managers / engineers / tech writers / UI designers don't want to maintain the complexity of both code paths and UX flows indefinitely if most users are happy to share their location server-side in exchange for the conveniences and features that enables.

You and I aren't happy to do that, but we on Hacker News aren't representative of most consumer-product Google users.

I find it interesting that the engineers' laziness may just happen to translate to an "evil" win for the company.

> I too dislike how many of Google's consumer services are being increasingly gated on the location history permission, which I too have disabled and which therefore means I can't use those services.

Huh? Google Maps works fine for me despite having disabled location services. It nags me nearly everytime I open the app to "enable location services to proceed", making it sound as though it is required, but I just click "No" and get on with it. Haven't noticed any missing features.

One example of a Google consumer service that needs location history is the Google Assistant. on my Google Pixel phone, that has fully replaced the older non-Assistant OK Google system which didn't require location history.

I kinda want to move away from Google Services but wow, some of them will be hard to replace.

Google search has been awesome for me when logged in, Maps is irreplaceable; as well as Inbox :/

Maps is the only thing I rely on - I would be welcome for a replacement.

On Android there is OSMand and Openstreetmap in general. The only problem being that address search is not great and there is no context search. You can get an app called AddresstoGPS, which anonymously queries Google's search and let's you output GPS coordinates to OSMand or similar.

As for Google Mail - There are many great E-Mail hosters like ProtonMail, coupled with your favorite E-Mail client it has no downsides, unless you miss tight Google Products integration.

I have just installed OSMAnd to give it a try but well; there is a lot of features to cover :

- navigation

- address search (not the first time I hear it is awful in OSM)

- pictures of places

- live traffic data, both streets and public transportation

- great search (like gyms near me)

- colored points of interest on the map. Kind of an hidden feature but that's immensely useful when you know it is there and you don't know the city you are in.

- reviews

It might take 5 or 6 apps to replace it entirely.

As for inbox, their spam filter is top notch and I like the automatic tagging system.

edit : just started trying OSMAnd, wow it is extremely laggy on my high end phone.

Ye, it is not as smooth in scrolling as GMaps, though more feature rich. If this bothers you, there is an app called Maps.Me. it is minimalistic, has smooth scrolling like Gmaps but not as feature rich as OSMand and has a non-free (as in freedom) map data service behind it.

But if performance of osmand bothers you, this is the place to go.

First I've heard of Maps.Me, did a quick test of the adverts+binaries removed fork on F-Droid ('Maps') and it looks good.

>non-free (as in freedom) map data service

As in, it's all OSM data but not directly from their servers? Or is maps.me adding extra some extra info to the displayed map?

When you download map data from Maps.me, it loads them from the maps.me servers. But that's to be expected. openstreetmap.org isn't going to be hosting those files. Maps.me also includes some hotels from booking.com

Thanks, I see the hotels now - they're also the first thing on the discover page (binoculars icon).

I wonder if OSMand could make use of maps.me code to speed up their rendering - or perhaps it's not possible without cutting out information/features.

For gmail, what you really need is to own your own domain. Not every expensive, and once you do, you can move your mailbox wherever you want.

What would alleviate your dependence on gmail? Maybe there's a product out there.

I'd be interested to hear how eg fastmail is or isn't an alternative for someone who feel locked-in to Gmail.

In my mind it's mostly a creepy and half-assed webmail provider with crappy imap support. But I've never really used Gmail all that much (because: creepy evil ad company and email is an obvious bad combination).

I've been working on webmail that only receives messages, doesn't send any. And I've been using it to signup on websites with, it works really well for the purpose because anything that ever arrives was sent by a computer.

I bring it up because it feels like that's a primary reason why people might be trapped on gmail is just that all the websites they are signed up on are linked to it.

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