Hacker News Reader

At some point, google were sabotaging any page visited through their domain using WP8.

It would proxy everything alla google translate and serve a text only version of the whole web under the pretext that "my phone's browser sucked and they were helping me".

But it's ok as long as you pretend to do no evil.

That's because there was /\bPhone\b/ in the user-agent.

From what I recall, the issue was with users having "phone" in their user agent rather than "Windows Phone 8."

Google Maps works OK (not great) if you install the official Google app and search for a place name. http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/google/220bfbf2-...

I've subsequently found that Nokia Here maps work every bit as well for me as Google Maps ever did when I had my Android.

Of course it doesn't matter much with the nokia mapping apps on the nokia phones being a better alternative.

Those apps are available on non-Nokia phones now too.