[mulmen]

You're right of course, the cloud certainly has great advantages and isn't going anywhere. I still struggle to find an application where my personal data needs to be sent to a cloud service to provide the level of convenience we have today.

I would rather none of my map usage or geolocation data ever went to the cloud. Yes, Google does aggregate a lot of valuable information but that could be consumed by personal devices directly instead of giving Google the ability to combine our travel habits with our eating habits and our browsing habits.

Bus arrival data isn't big or complex, Google just aggregates it which is why you go to maps but they don't actually put a GPS/Cellular device on every bus (excluding android phones >_>). They aggregate location data from the bus operator sources. I don't need to know where every bus in the United States is at every moment like Google does. I just need to know when my bus is reaching a stop near me. My home server could easily hit the same services Google does to get arrival data per stop or even just stay up to date on all the routes in my area or city.

Bus arrival data is public so there's no reason for me to store it locally but my usage of that data is personal and is something I want to own and control end to end.