> If Apple were a different company, it would've made maps available for use on web browsers and non-Apple devices. That could also help in a more rapid improvement of maps as opposed to the mostly-useless state it's been in (except for a few countries and regions in certain countries that Apple likes and works more on).

Try https://satellites.pro/plan/world_map# - you can switch between Apple Maps, OSM, Mapbox, Google Maps, Yandex and Esri

I wonder how they do that, that doesn't look like a use case that Apple is OK with.

But anyway, I didn't realise how bad Apple Maps was. It's miles away from OSM and even from Google Maps, at least in the places I looked up in France (so not like in remote areas of Mali or the Amazon forest).

It's pretty shocking. I checked near some Apple commuter stations (where they presumably have employees living and actively using the service / have access to good data) and noticed it was missing entire parks and roads.

The situation on other countries is much worse though. Some countries are missing entire islands. In Mongolia, they don't have province (aimag) borders, and some provinces are even missing labels for their capitals! Worse, there's sparse recognition of district (sum) labels, but some of them seem to have recognized the sum centers as distinct towns, butchered the transliteration, and then marked them before the aimag capital, as happened with "Hovsgol" (Khövsgöl), Dornogovi.

Startpage is now owned by System1. It’s an Adtech company. I personally know some people who work/worked there and they do not recommend using Startpage for privacy reasons anymore.

I understand this, yet recently switched to startpage anyway due to massive captcha fatigue... Startpage will block you occasionally if you search at too high frequency, but it never gives captcha and blocks way way less than google presents captcha. Captcha has gradually rendered Google completely unusable to me due to being stuck on mobile internet or public wifi+VPN... both of which causes continuous captcha unless you allow them to track you... it's basically a ransom - let us track you or no search for you.

I like DDG, but for many things it's still not good enough.

> The "Google can't arbitrarily take it away" is a good argument, but "I'm no longer part of their ad ecosystem, being tracked all around the internet" requires a lot more effort than just avoiding using google.com, youtube.com, gmail.com, etc. I'm not saying that the current transitions are useless, but that there's more to it.

This becomes much easier with uMatrix + uBlock Origin extensions for Firefox!

Apple Maps is available on the web, DDG uses it for it's own maps

I was going to mention this too. However, to be fair to the parent commenter, Apple Maps on the web is only a recent development, it lacks a ton of the features of Google Maps on the web, and its world-wide coverage isn’t great. There’s also the fact that there’s no direct web interface for it, so if you were going to tell someone using a browser to “just use Apple Maps”, they would have to jump through some mental hoops to find a way to do that.

All that said, I’m optimistic and hope they move in that direction.

It looks like their only price tier is "free with your Apple Developer subscription" or "contact us"—I wonder if their terms allow you to use it with e.g. Mapbox GL JS 1, which is much better than MapKit JS.

Where? I went to https://www.apple.com/maps/ and clicked "Open Maps" but that just brings me straight back to that same page with no map in sight, just a lot of pictures of idevices.

“DDG” in the parent comment refers to DuckDuckGo, for example https://duckduckgo.com/?q=New+York%2C+United+States&t=iphone...

Yes I know what DuckDuckGo is. The comment also said:

> Apple Maps is available on the web

They're probably referring to https://developer.apple.com/documentation/mapkitjs which is what powers the DDG integration.

Anyway it is the case that the only way to browse Apple Maps via the web (AFAICT) is via an integration like DDG: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-use-apple-maps-right-in...

So yeah saying it is available on the web feels a bit disingenuous, but it is, kind of, indirectly.

Ah, that is bizarre. But I've never understood Apple. Thanks for explaining.

> requires a lot more effort than just avoiding using google.com, youtube.com, gmail.com, etc.

Yeah this is fair! I don't want to give the impression that this is all it takes to get Google to stop stalking you. But I do think it at least helps. I found a lot of the chatter in the de-googling community to a bit purist and defeatist at times, but maybe I went too far the other way, here. I want to encourage people to do the same without thinking it's all hopeless or doesn't make any impact because Google's gonna get you one way or another, but I also don't want to paint an unrealistic picture, as if this is all it takes to wash our hands of Google's reach.

I updated the post to reflect this.

> If Apple were a different company, it would've made maps available for use on web browsers and non-Apple devices.

I too actually want to use certain software from Apple, I just refuse to use it on Mac as me and the Mac WM keep talking past each other :-)

I finally got around to installing a PiHole, and it blew my mind that the default behavior was to use an upstream resolver. I had never imagined that the countless folks more privacy-oriented than myself, would tolerate this.

After reading up on it, okay, I get that those upstream forwarding resolvers will be faster due to being geographically distributed and having a huge number of users (== very current cache), but man. Seemed to be defeating half the point.

I'm using the supported Unbound config now, but.. still surprised it's not the default.

It's more complicated than that: using unbound is basically trusting your ISP with your DNS data (it's not encrypted so it can MITM). Using an upstream resolver doesn't necessarily mean you give up on privacy.

It may actually be more private to use a public resolver (with DoT or DoH of course) that will know your IP address but maybe not directly tie it to your identity (like an ISP does). Also, imo they generally have better privacy policies than ISPs (not that I trust those but still).

The next more private options include using DNS over Tor or Oblivious DNS (https://blog.cloudflare.com/oblivious-dns/). Those options are better for privacy, but I don't see them are default (at least for now) as they imply some slowness (Tor) or are more opinionated (ODNS).

Even after all that, your browser will leak the SNI header in clear-text (eSNI isn't popular yet) so your ISP can still get the precise name of the site you want to visit.

Thanks, I guess this is a fair point. I'm with Sonic (who I absolutely trust) but currently my fiber is provided by AT&T, who I do NOT. Still waiting for that native fiber.

I guess I'm so used to thinking about this from the the standpoint of building DNS resolvers for business that I didn't think through the differences when it's just my house's traffic.

I'll look into DoH.

I would probably use Apple Maps more if I could download maps for offline use as I can with Google Maps.

I prefer OSMAnd for that. The maps don't expire after 30 days like they do within Google Maps.

For me "offline" doesn't mean "requires network connectivity and mandatory updates within the the next thirty days."

> If Apple were a different company, it would've made maps available for use on web browsers and non-Apple devices. That could also help in a more rapid improvement of maps as opposed to the mostly-useless state it's been in (except for a few countries and regions in certain countries that Apple likes and works more on).

If apple would have done that (for Maps and other services), how would it be different than Google?

Google offers these services for free to the end-user and generates revenue from ads.

Apple is using these services to sell more hardware devices, and generates revenue from there.

> Google offers these services for free to the end-user and generates revenue from ads.

We pay them with our data. It’s an exchange of services.

I never use the DDG results when looking for something. People on here will sometimes say that the results are as good as Google, but it's just not true in my experience. I would switch completely to Startpage, but I value the !bang feature too much. So for general searches, everything is prefaced with !sp. It's just muscle memory now.

I have found runnaroo gives often nice results especially on technical topics. Combining with DDG removed the need to use Google.