Awful change, basically killed GMaps WV overnight.
CoMaps (or any other FOSS navigation app, for that matter) is not a replacement in this context.
Unfortunately so.
As much as I don’t want to use any Google services, Maps is unfortunately not easily replaced, because it all comes down to user-submitted content.
If you want to look up a restaurant and see photos of the venue and the food, Maps is where that content is.
Google absolutely know how valuable this is and how much leverage they can get with it by the manner they’ve implemented the change.
I use FOSS wherever I can, but we don’t get to choose where other members of the public put their content. Most of the time I can choose to opt out. I consciously don’t have Facebook or Insta for example, which leaves me at a disadvantage at times because an increasing number of businesses think it’s fine for their only web presence to be a Facebook page - with no actual website of their own.
And it’s in those times especially I find myself being pushed to Google maps just to find a user-submitted picture of the menu so I can even see what they’ve got.
Wow it’s so much cleaner. And we can just turn this on all the time?
You don’t love random selfies of strangers that come up in photos of pinned locations?
My favorite is random pics of someone’s kitchen because they live nearby.
ActivityPub review system? I don’t want to figure out how to make that right now. Somebody else?
So they really just removed the only features that made their propietary service better than the foss ones? I can check public transit with the official app, and do everything else thats navigation related with OSM. Insane move
They didn’t remove it, just require that the user be signed into a Google account to see reviews & images.
great! hopefully there is room for others to start to grow
Fuck google.
