[yakshemash]

I know you're making a bigger point, but just in case you are still wondering: have you tried to touch the highlighted satellite option again to unhighlight it? Some of the items in that menu enable and disable layers. Satellite is one such layer. Keep in mind that some of the layers are mutually exclusive, so you can't have public transport layer and traffic layer, which probably makes sense as it avoids cluttering by layers which are rarely needed simultaneously. This was confusing to me until I got a hang of it. This has been the case on Android for a while, but I have never tried the iOS app, so its behavior may be different. Besides that, I get your pain about pins being dropped whenever the map is touched (or clicked on desktop) to get rid of drop-downs and menus.