Right now a lot of us are trying to divest and diversify from having our entire lives on Google both because of the way Google spends its money and the long-standing privacy concerns seeming a bit more scary now.
What services have you switched to and what has your experience been? What do you like, what don’t you like, would you recommend them?
I use both POV and up=north depending on my use case. For some routes where I don’t care about the details of the route I find it useful to have the POV view with what I need now zoomed in and correctly oriented and what I’ll need soon still visible and smaller but still distinguishable.
The problem with up=north is that when you’ve zoomed right in to see the detail, all the wider view stuff is missing, especially when out of built-up zones. It’d be better if the detail level would be replaced/augmented with a detail density setting, so that when you’re out in the sticks with only you, a small single track road with grass down the middle and one sheep visible all the way up to the horizon in any direction that you don’t have to zoom right in to the individual blades of grass before you see the road you’re on.
Other times I do care about the route, and in those cases I’ll use up=north and manual zoom as needed. I still get caught out though when travelling south and the arrow pointing left means I need to turn right.
When I first saw POV I thought it was a stupid gimmick. But then I tried it out and really liked it, but not always.
I always like seeing the details, and I can’t imaging looking at a map and up not being north. It would be like reading a book turned sideways – hypothetically I could do it, but it would require far more brainpower to interpret than it’s worth. I do like my location kept as the centerpoint though. That’s really nice, but apparently hard to implement. The “re-center” feature on Google Maps is my friend.