I still use gmail and drive for work but otherwise I’m never logged into anything google at home. Today when I tried to expand on a restaurant’s hours it wouldn’t let me see them without logging in, although it still worked in incognito. This restaurant screenshot is just a random other example I tried, but for the one I was actually checking google had the correct hours while the official website hasn’t been updated in awhile and had the old ones (website said they’re still open for dinner but they’ve only been doing lunch for a year or so now)
Sure, go ahead irritating me when trying to use your service. Pushing me to log-in is THE way to drive me to other services. They have nothing to offer that’s worth/can justify logging in. nothing.
They probably don’t care if you use a different service if you don’t log in to use theirs. If you don’t log in they can’t easily monetize you by tracking your data and building a portfolio. Otherwise you use their resources at a cost and they don’t make money.
So threatening to leave for other services isn’t exactly a threat.
They still know who most users are even without a google login; they can monetize just fine.
For a long time google existed without an option to create an account
They don’t care, but in 10 to 20 years time they will hire consultants to figure out why their user base chose inferior products to their superior free service.
Except up-to-date opening hours, apparently
Man, this is accurate, but I tested Mapquest recently. I like that I can make my position icon a cute little rainbow unicorn, but also it couldn’t locate the second Walmart in town. I get the pharmacy at one and the tire place at the other. And the store itself for neither. Like, I really want to know the pharmacy hours here Mapquest.
There is two options: either you have a corporation so everything and they require a way to pay their employees (and most will want some profit), this is the Google way. Of course you can switch to an alternative of a less evil corporation, but you will still be part of that system. The other option is crowd sourced, where everyone who uses also provides a bit. If you use an app based on data from OpenStreetMap, you will find local information lacking. But the beauty is, you can easily contribute. I think Wikipedia is the biggest example of how this system can work. Personally I use CoMaps. Can recommend it, but there are similar options that are just as open source.
It is owned by System1 who is an ad arbitrage firm that buys cheap ads at one source (e.g Facebook) for a page containing expensive ads (e.g Google Ads) so be aware of that.