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There's two Google apps I just can't live without: YouTube and Google Maps. There's simply no alternative to the amount of value these bring me. OSM is getting

There's two Google apps I just can't live without: YouTube and Google Maps. There's simply no alternative to the amount of value these bring me. OSM is getting good but it's just not there yet. I'm working on this in my area. I'd suggest to anyone worried about Google tracking to use Privacy Guard built into LineageOS, which aims to make each and every request for sensitive permissions explicit. A big benefit of free software is that we can also use useful proprietary apps without giving up control of our hardware.

amelius 7y ago
> There's two Google apps I just can't live without: YouTube and Google Maps. There's simply no alternative to the amount of value these bring me. Regarding YouTube, try using only their video widget, and not their recommendation engine.
oil25 7y ago
Check out NewPipe (https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe) to replace the proprietary YouTube client on Android. For Maps, thankfully it still works in Firefox, which entirely relieves me of Google Play Services and their proprietary apps on my phone.
xref 7y ago
Strong disagree on gmaps, especially with Apple Maps available for iOS users. Gmaps is strictly better, but not enough to balance their incentive to truly abuse that data against me.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  Apple is strictly worse on location data collection than Google, so you are not solving GP's problem. The OSM apps on Android are viable options for preserving privacy. Apple Maps is not.
  - xref 7y ago
    Huh? Android is the epitome of the surveillance panopticon. Google has every incentive to monetize that data for their ad sales targeting. Apple doesn’t. Beside that I’m a big fan/contributor/user of OSM (maps.me is my app of choice there). But if you want to go with one of the big, polished players, I chose the one that has little to gain and much to lose from abusing my personal data.
    - devinl 7y ago
      Apple's search ads are projected to be one of the largest online advertisers in terms of ads revenue in 2020 (they have larger advertising revenue projections than both snap and twitter). Device sales in general are dropping so they are expected to continue to invest in this area of their business. Given that Apple is a large organization known for their lack of transparency, I would be very surprised if they weren't already doing shady things with user data for targeting purposes.
      - millstone 7y ago
        Apple says in their "Approach to Privacy" that Maps usage "can’t be tied to your Apple ID" and that no ads can access data from Maps. These are strong unequivocal statements. We should all be very surprised if they're outright lying.
        yRetsyM 7y ago
        Can't is the wrong statement. The can be. Whether they choose not to or not is a different conversation, but technically they definitely can tie these together from IP address alone. I get frustrated with the hoodwink that Apple seems to be playing, as they move to services based revenue I have no doubt these lines are going to get blurrier and blurrier.
  - millstone 7y ago
    No. Apple is far far better. You can't sign in to Apple Maps. Apple doesn't know who or where you are, except via a random frequently rotating identifier. Google pushes you hard to sign in with your Google account, tracks your searches and location, and associates that data with everything else they know about you.
ekianjo 7y ago
Newpipe on FDroid completely replaced YouTube app and is much faster too. Never looked back.
commoner 7y ago
Google Maps is fully compatible with MicroG, a free and open source replacement for the Google Play Services client. MicroG includes UnifiedNlp, which was discussed in the blog post. https://microg.org/ https://microg.org/ https://lineage.microg.org/ https://lineage.microg.org/ At the moment, I recommend the previous version of MicroG (0.2.6.13280) since the latest version (0.2.7.17455) may have compatibility issues. If you're using LineageOS for MicroG, builds on or before June 2 use the previous version. NewPipe is like YouTube, but also with a background music player, a video/audio downloader, and no ads. It also supports SoundCloud. https://newpipe.schabi.org/ https://newpipe.schabi.org/ You can use NewPipe regardless of whether you are using LineageOS or MicroG. It's not available in the Google Play Store (or the iOS App Store) for obvious reasons, but you can download it for any Android device from F-Droid.
- VvR-Ox 7y ago
  NewPipe is one of "THE APPS" that make me regret a bit that I had to move to iOS again. The possibility to just download and listen offline and also to create playlists without an account are awesome.
  - olah_1 7y ago
    Just sharing Invidious (website version of NewPipe). It's amazing. https://invidio.us/ https://invidio.us/ https://github.com/omarroth/invidious https://github.com/omarroth/invidious
    - VvR-Ox 7y ago
      Thank you very much for sharing! I'm afraid atm it doesn't work for me (iPhone SE - iOS 12.3.1 - Firefox & Safari). Nevertheless their work is awesome and the idea to aggregate all the things and let user's enjoy them without having to promise their first-born to providers is just amazing ^_^
      - omarroth 7y ago
        Would you mind providing some more details on what issues you're encountering?
webmobdev 7y ago
Google Maps replacement: https://wego.here.com/ https://wego.here.com/ (It's pretty decent and was owned and used by Nokia before some German automobile companies bought it. Includes traffic data and voice based navigation. And they were offering offline maps long before Google).
- m0nty 7y ago
  I use this. Got fed up with Google Maps (in navigation mode) constantly trying to get my attention for things unrelated to driving. "We've found a faster route!" it would say, as if saving five minutes on a five hour journey is the least bit useful. Either I take my eyes off the road, fumble for the button to say "ignore that option", then try to re-focus on what I was doing, or it just switches me across to the other route anyway. It would do this multiple times in the journey. The wego option just does navigation, no distractions or foolishness.
  - axaxs 7y ago
    Same. Is there a way to disable this? I just had a 14 hour drive, so you can imagine how many stupid things it kept alerting me to. If my wife weren't there to squelch them, I'd probably have tossed it out the window.
    - m0nty 7y ago
      I looked for something to alter its behaviour, but there's nothing I can find. I think it's really dangerous, I'm not using Google Maps for navigation again if I can help it.
- mda 7y ago
  https://legal.here.com/en-gb/privacy https://legal.here.com/en-gb/privacy
- meruru 7y ago
  Maps.me is available on F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/
tarsinge 7y ago
> There's two Google apps I just can't live without: YouTube and Google Maps. Did you give a recent try to Apple Maps? Just finishing a few months road trip across the US and to my surprise I vastly prefer Apple Maps for the navigation and I now default to it. While in France I can't live without Waze/Google Maps because it's so efficient to workaround congestions in real time, I found it no better than Apple Maps in the US. Otherwise I agree there is no alternative for Youtube. The move from Gmail was the easiest, and Search to DDG not really hard (with the !g keyword still handy for tech or complexes searches).
- commoner 7y ago
  Apple Maps would be a solid alternative to Google Maps if it were released on Android, but it's only available on iOS. The parent commenter appears to be using Android (LineageOS).
- izacus 7y ago
  Apple Maps requires you to buy a device whos content is completely controlled by a single corporation and is fully locked down by pervasive DRM. It doesn't really fit the tone of the article.
- nvrspyx 7y ago
  Instead of !g, you can use !s to use Startpage, which uses Google results, but privately.
  - meruru 7y ago
    Or you can actually add the engines you use to your browser and skip the middle man.
sbr464 7y ago
Open question: Which Google Maps feature does everyone here use or value the most? Driving/walking directions? Reliability? Traffic? Street View? I imagine it’s a combination but curious in general what would a competitor need to master to change the conversation, if OSM isn’t there yet.
- beatgammit 7y ago
  For me it's mostly driving directions, followed by reviews. OSM does that, but the interface is a bit confusing since that isn't really it's focus, and AFAIK there's nothing like their reviews (maybe an optional integration with Yelp?). And when I'm looking up directions, it seems to expect coordinates or a specific address, though usually I only have the have to name on hand, which means a separate step to look it up. OSM has a ton of features, but the most useful ones to people who use Google Maps just aren't dead simple to use. Maybe they should make a directions-specific app. I'm not sure how good the directions are since I've only managed to use it a couple times before getting frustrated and switching back to Google Maps.
- autoexec 7y ago
  In my case it's street view. Directions I can pretty much get anywhere, but nothing beats virtually taking the drive yourself so you know what to expect when going somewhere new. I'd love to see a competitor who could make that experience a little smoother. Navigating in streetview is more like a slide show than a drive.
  - kbit 7y ago
    OsmAnd includes Mapillary, a crowdsourced Google Street View alternative! The idea is that over time, a collaborative database will become even more extensive than the one of a single company can ever be (just like OSM). For me, in Vienna, it already is at least as good. Regarding your point about driving being more of a slide show: Mapillary in OsmAnd can 'drive' you along streets quite smoothly. Of course, there are are some artifacts from deforming the images, but it doesn't 'move and load' like Google Street View, it continuously moves and keeps the images at a constant quality.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
fencepost 7y ago
You might look at Here maps, which used to also be the mapping solution on Windows phone.
opinologo 7y ago
After installing Netguard, I was dissapointing to see how OSM sends information from its app to Facebook.. So much for privacy I guess.. Just for clarification, I don't have Facebook installed in my phone, neither have a Facebook account.
- trickstra 7y ago
  Which app do you mean by OSM? OsmAnd? Try "Maps", the forked Maps.me with tracking removed
grumdan 7y ago
Still not as good as Google Maps, but I find maps.me (also open-source and based on OSM data) significantly nicer than the default OSM client for Android (I think it's called OsmDroid or something similar).
- maxerickson 7y ago
  There's no default or endorsed OSM app for any platform. The openstreetmap.org website is of course official, but it's not really an end user portal. OSMAnd gets lots of attention though.
dwighttk 7y ago
what does YouTube app do that the website can't?
sizzle 7y ago
Why can't we sandbox apps from accessing our device/data? Check this sandbox app out, does it work?: https://island.oasisfeng.com/ https://island.oasisfeng.com/
scarface74 7y ago
I don’t get what’s special about the YouTube app. I deleted it from my iPhone because it was irritating clicking on a video and it launching the app.

amelius 7y ago

> There's two Google apps I just can't live without: YouTube and Google Maps. There's simply no alternative to the amount of value these bring me. Regarding YouTube, try using only their video widget, and not their recommendation engine.

oil25 7y ago

Check out NewPipe (https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe) to replace the proprietary YouTube client on Android. For Maps, thankfully it still works in Firefox, which entirely relieves me of Google Play Services and their proprietary apps on my phone.

xref 7y ago

Strong disagree on gmaps, especially with Apple Maps available for iOS users. Gmaps is strictly better, but not enough to balance their incentive to truly abuse that data against me.

lern_too_spel 7y ago
Apple is strictly worse on location data collection than Google, so you are not solving GP's problem. The OSM apps on Android are viable options for preserving privacy. Apple Maps is not.
- xref 7y ago
  Huh? Android is the epitome of the surveillance panopticon. Google has every incentive to monetize that data for their ad sales targeting. Apple doesn’t. Beside that I’m a big fan/contributor/user of OSM (maps.me is my app of choice there). But if you want to go with one of the big, polished players, I chose the one that has little to gain and much to lose from abusing my personal data.
  - devinl 7y ago
    Apple's search ads are projected to be one of the largest online advertisers in terms of ads revenue in 2020 (they have larger advertising revenue projections than both snap and twitter). Device sales in general are dropping so they are expected to continue to invest in this area of their business. Given that Apple is a large organization known for their lack of transparency, I would be very surprised if they weren't already doing shady things with user data for targeting purposes.
    - millstone 7y ago
      Apple says in their "Approach to Privacy" that Maps usage "can’t be tied to your Apple ID" and that no ads can access data from Maps. These are strong unequivocal statements. We should all be very surprised if they're outright lying.
      - yRetsyM 7y ago
        Can't is the wrong statement. The can be. Whether they choose not to or not is a different conversation, but technically they definitely can tie these together from IP address alone. I get frustrated with the hoodwink that Apple seems to be playing, as they move to services based revenue I have no doubt these lines are going to get blurrier and blurrier.
- millstone 7y ago
  No. Apple is far far better. You can't sign in to Apple Maps. Apple doesn't know who or where you are, except via a random frequently rotating identifier. Google pushes you hard to sign in with your Google account, tracks your searches and location, and associates that data with everything else they know about you.

ekianjo 7y ago

Newpipe on FDroid completely replaced YouTube app and is much faster too. Never looked back.

commoner 7y ago

Google Maps is fully compatible with MicroG, a free and open source replacement for the Google Play Services client. MicroG includes UnifiedNlp, which was discussed in the blog post. https://microg.org/ https://microg.org/ https://lineage.microg.org/ https://lineage.microg.org/ At the moment, I recommend the previous version of MicroG (0.2.6.13280) since the latest version (0.2.7.17455) may have compatibility issues. If you're using LineageOS for MicroG, builds on or before June 2 use the previous version. NewPipe is like YouTube, but also with a background music player, a video/audio downloader, and no ads. It also supports SoundCloud. https://newpipe.schabi.org/ https://newpipe.schabi.org/ You can use NewPipe regardless of whether you are using LineageOS or MicroG. It's not available in the Google Play Store (or the iOS App Store) for obvious reasons, but you can download it for any Android device from F-Droid.

VvR-Ox 7y ago
NewPipe is one of "THE APPS" that make me regret a bit that I had to move to iOS again. The possibility to just download and listen offline and also to create playlists without an account are awesome.
- olah_1 7y ago
  Just sharing Invidious (website version of NewPipe). It's amazing. https://invidio.us/ https://invidio.us/ https://github.com/omarroth/invidious https://github.com/omarroth/invidious
  - VvR-Ox 7y ago
    Thank you very much for sharing! I'm afraid atm it doesn't work for me (iPhone SE - iOS 12.3.1 - Firefox & Safari). Nevertheless their work is awesome and the idea to aggregate all the things and let user's enjoy them without having to promise their first-born to providers is just amazing ^_^
    - omarroth 7y ago
      Would you mind providing some more details on what issues you're encountering?

webmobdev 7y ago

Google Maps replacement: https://wego.here.com/ https://wego.here.com/ (It's pretty decent and was owned and used by Nokia before some German automobile companies bought it. Includes traffic data and voice based navigation. And they were offering offline maps long before Google).

m0nty 7y ago
I use this. Got fed up with Google Maps (in navigation mode) constantly trying to get my attention for things unrelated to driving. "We've found a faster route!" it would say, as if saving five minutes on a five hour journey is the least bit useful. Either I take my eyes off the road, fumble for the button to say "ignore that option", then try to re-focus on what I was doing, or it just switches me across to the other route anyway. It would do this multiple times in the journey. The wego option just does navigation, no distractions or foolishness.
- axaxs 7y ago
  Same. Is there a way to disable this? I just had a 14 hour drive, so you can imagine how many stupid things it kept alerting me to. If my wife weren't there to squelch them, I'd probably have tossed it out the window.
  - m0nty 7y ago
    I looked for something to alter its behaviour, but there's nothing I can find. I think it's really dangerous, I'm not using Google Maps for navigation again if I can help it.
mda 7y ago
https://legal.here.com/en-gb/privacy https://legal.here.com/en-gb/privacy
meruru 7y ago
Maps.me is available on F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/

tarsinge 7y ago

> There's two Google apps I just can't live without: YouTube and Google Maps. Did you give a recent try to Apple Maps? Just finishing a few months road trip across the US and to my surprise I vastly prefer Apple Maps for the navigation and I now default to it. While in France I can't live without Waze/Google Maps because it's so efficient to workaround congestions in real time, I found it no better than Apple Maps in the US. Otherwise I agree there is no alternative for Youtube. The move from Gmail was the easiest, and Search to DDG not really hard (with the !g keyword still handy for tech or complexes searches).

commoner 7y ago
Apple Maps would be a solid alternative to Google Maps if it were released on Android, but it's only available on iOS. The parent commenter appears to be using Android (LineageOS).
izacus 7y ago
Apple Maps requires you to buy a device whos content is completely controlled by a single corporation and is fully locked down by pervasive DRM. It doesn't really fit the tone of the article.
nvrspyx 7y ago
Instead of !g, you can use !s to use Startpage, which uses Google results, but privately.
- meruru 7y ago
  Or you can actually add the engines you use to your browser and skip the middle man.

sbr464 7y ago

Open question: Which Google Maps feature does everyone here use or value the most? Driving/walking directions? Reliability? Traffic? Street View? I imagine it’s a combination but curious in general what would a competitor need to master to change the conversation, if OSM isn’t there yet.

beatgammit 7y ago
For me it's mostly driving directions, followed by reviews. OSM does that, but the interface is a bit confusing since that isn't really it's focus, and AFAIK there's nothing like their reviews (maybe an optional integration with Yelp?). And when I'm looking up directions, it seems to expect coordinates or a specific address, though usually I only have the have to name on hand, which means a separate step to look it up. OSM has a ton of features, but the most useful ones to people who use Google Maps just aren't dead simple to use. Maybe they should make a directions-specific app. I'm not sure how good the directions are since I've only managed to use it a couple times before getting frustrated and switching back to Google Maps.
autoexec 7y ago
In my case it's street view. Directions I can pretty much get anywhere, but nothing beats virtually taking the drive yourself so you know what to expect when going somewhere new. I'd love to see a competitor who could make that experience a little smoother. Navigating in streetview is more like a slide show than a drive.
- kbit 7y ago
  OsmAnd includes Mapillary, a crowdsourced Google Street View alternative! The idea is that over time, a collaborative database will become even more extensive than the one of a single company can ever be (just like OSM). For me, in Vienna, it already is at least as good. Regarding your point about driving being more of a slide show: Mapillary in OsmAnd can 'drive' you along streets quite smoothly. Of course, there are are some artifacts from deforming the images, but it doesn't 'move and load' like Google Street View, it continuously moves and keeps the images at a constant quality.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

fencepost 7y ago

You might look at Here maps, which used to also be the mapping solution on Windows phone.

opinologo 7y ago

After installing Netguard, I was dissapointing to see how OSM sends information from its app to Facebook.. So much for privacy I guess.. Just for clarification, I don't have Facebook installed in my phone, neither have a Facebook account.

trickstra 7y ago
Which app do you mean by OSM? OsmAnd? Try "Maps", the forked Maps.me with tracking removed

grumdan 7y ago

Still not as good as Google Maps, but I find maps.me (also open-source and based on OSM data) significantly nicer than the default OSM client for Android (I think it's called OsmDroid or something similar).

maxerickson 7y ago
There's no default or endorsed OSM app for any platform. The openstreetmap.org website is of course official, but it's not really an end user portal. OSMAnd gets lots of attention though.

dwighttk 7y ago

what does YouTube app do that the website can't?

sizzle 7y ago

Why can't we sandbox apps from accessing our device/data? Check this sandbox app out, does it work?: https://island.oasisfeng.com/ https://island.oasisfeng.com/

scarface74 7y ago

I don’t get what’s special about the YouTube app. I deleted it from my iPhone because it was irritating clicking on a video and it launching the app.