I realise that Google places ads in the native Gmail environment. However, when using a third party front end to embed the Google services, how does the company make money off that? When I use Thunderbird to access Gmail or the Google Calendar or when I map my Google Drive to the file explorer, how can Google profit from this kind of use?
This still causes you to have a Google account and probably use it for other purposes too, during some of which you will see ads.
Unfortunately this seems all to plausible. Despite Firefox and ad blocking in general, there’s very few services that rival Google’s Android and (in my opinion) none that can honestly rival Maps at present.
I rarely use Google Maps (you really should check out OpenStreetMap and OsmAnd), but I use Android and YouTube a lot.
Can you tell/show me how/where I can use OSM as a replacement for Google Maps. I’ve given OsmAnd a try and found it lacking.
I ran a few tests such as searching for my local library. Unfortunately I had to use the exact wording (“Stadtbibliothek”) rather than simpler, more common wording (“Bibliothek”). The Google map found it immediately. Similarly I searched for a local Café, which I easily found in Google Maps (despite not capitalising anything). Meanwhile the business is not present in OSM, despite being the most popular Café in my town.
Additionally navigation doesn’t work for me for regions I haven’t downloaded. How would I go about getting it to work for navigation to places further afield that I haven’t downloaded?
OsmAnd is great. You should try Organic Maps. I’ve had better luck with the search.
I had similar results to you. In my case the deal breaker was navigation, because I need to be able to make changes to the route on the fly which these apps don’t allow. In fact, you need to tap like ten times through menus to finish a trip and search for something else.