They have turned into absolute garbage, something I never thought possible.
I'm locked into Gmail, that's too big of a pain in the ass to switch, but everything else I try to avoid like the plague. From shitty hardware, to abandoned software to adinfested garbage, everything they are making right now is straight dogshit.
Google search has become some real garbage lately too. I can't search for anything without getting a full page of generic useless crap that was either written by AI or an incompetent author.
Yeah, this is what I'm talking about. I feel like we had all these things >10 years ago. It really feels like once they realized google+ wasn't going to win over facebook, they were done.
Oh Maps is an ad-fest all right. Nothing like needing to read a street name or see a particular business but Google says, “Oh no, I this is what you really want to see!”
Maps and earth are ok at best, other businesses were better but then google bought them ( cough waze cough ). Translate is meh and deepl is better. Android is okish, but only if you use stock, lineageOS or GrapheneOS with at most minimal google services. Gmail... I never use.
They were services that started out nice, but got bloated with ad and spying over the years that theyve become meh at most in my book, sadly
i do agree maps, earth, and translate are very good, and their open source counterparts are not nearly as good, but android is not entirely made by google, and (i believe) aosp is fully foss with no google crap. gmail is admittedly very nice to setup and use, but is pretty unremarkable, being essentially just another email provider, but free