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by jeromeflipo 3636 days ago
I disabled every control on this page months ago.

Unfortunately, the Google Maps app won't remember searches unless you're logged in and share your entire location history. There's just no way to keep a local history of places in Maps.

I'll get rid of Google Maps as soon as Maps.me let me stream OSM maps instead of downloading packages one-by-one.

3 comments

Yeah, this is one of those extreme punitive peeves about the way Google has written it's products. It's either "we get all your data" or "even you don't get your data on the same device". There's no good reason not to let location history work on the local hardware.
A very good reason for Google though - they want your data. As is not providing full API to their service.
I voted with my wallet, bought an offline navigation app and disabled Maps.
And I applaud that, even if I wouldn't do the same. People need to understand that in a competitive market, you vote with your wallet. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
I guess people don't want to bother or say it costs money and yet they spend more on clothes/booze/magazines per month.

Same for email/calendar/contacts, 10 GB hosting + own domain = couple less beers per year and don't miss Gmail a single bit.

Machine learning/AI active on phone? By someone with policies like this? I'd rather use a fliphone and carry a small laptop around. Oh wait, maybe all we'll be left with will be Chromebooks sigh...

I'm interested, what app?
After testing couple trial apps, decided for Sygic. Found it reliable enough for EU, gets updated quite often. Main feature that was also important is that it supports downloading maps per country. Some other navigation apps at the time didn't, so you had to store multiple GBs for whole EU, which was a PITA on the Nexus phone at the time (no expandable storage - another display for Googles crazy bubble of downloading everything). On a phone with optional SD storage I own now, it asks where you want to put maps at install, so no space wasted on internal storage.
Maps.me is owned by mail.ru, so guess who will have your location data from it.