Google Maps on Android is almost entirely unusable now. It's so god damn slow on my Sony Z5c running Lineage. The combination of Maps and Google Services updates has thrown any type of efficiency out the window.
New releases should use less memory and be faster, especially if they do the exact same god damn thing! Google doesn't care, because they expect users to migrate to newer phones every two years. I don't want to generate more e-waste, have repaired several things on my phone several times and don't want to just consume consume consume.
It'd be nice if there was some company to take up that space and create more tools that run on older devices, but unfortunately there'd be no real way to make money at it; no one is demanding it em mass.
I pay for Google Music, and doing so gets you access to the Youtube Premium + the youtube app /w no ads. But despite the two applications being related, the UI teams don't appear to be on the same page, which has resulted in the 'thumbs up' and 'thumbs down' button to be in opposite placement depending on which app you're using. It's infuriating if you've already basically built in muscle memory from Google Music.
I'm not sure why you think such a company needs to exist. Almost all apps run fine on my Samsung Galaxy S5, except for anything made by Google or Samsung. With Samsung I think their software engineering is incompetent, but I think with Google there's probably a lot of pressure to "just make it work" that the engineers mostly test on the latest and greatest Android. Plus I'm sure there's an unspoken rule not to allow older phones to be too useful for too long.
OSM fortunately doesnt have this problem, nor does Mapscii.
For your phone try OSMand if you haven't already, you can find it on FDroid
This isn't how Apple works. They make money from hardware sales - so there is a native app version of Apple Maps for both iOS and macOS. (And, with the recent updates, it is pretty damn great.)
Then they added a little Street View guy
By making a pullout hamburger menu on the side, they were able to add: * Traffic * Google earth/globe integration * Notifications * Location Sharing * Your maps (used to be an entirely different site) * Your contributions * Your timelines * Multiple sharing options * Transit - including schedule exploring * Bicycle - including topographical elevation changes
And that's before you get to languages, tours, tips and tricks, settings, history, and ability to provide missing data.
Oh and every location, with contact information, photos, and menus.
You don't have to like the design aesthetic, and you can complain that all these features made the product unusably slow, but the re-design was NECESSARY to add the new features.
Sad but true. Redesign is also a great way for managers to increase their budgets.
"If it ain't broke, redesign it."
On slower hardware it goes like thus: Start maps, wait for all the bloat, dismiss the pointless bloat you just waited for, do this two or three times for the GUI to catch up. Now you have slow maps! A truly horrendous experience!
On fast hardware the UI is still very bloated but sure it works, it just isn't pleasant to use.
They should fork it, one clean version and one tourist version. But I guess the changes have not been to make maps better, it has been to sell more ads. So now when those two incentives are the on collision course we will never see a good maps application from Google anymore.
Regardless I agree with your sentiment. I'm betting we'll come full circle at some point - or else they'll lose their maps users to some equivelant of duckduckgo.
But they should get demoted for making good products bad.
Product managers at Google (and everywhere else) don't get promoted for leaving good products alone.