Irony is lost on this guy ... :D
Edited to add: I comment on the guy you commented on, not you. Just in case. I did not want to reply to them to not give offense.
I use https://brouter.de/brouter-web on my laptop. Someone told me that you can use brouter as the nav engine for Osmand and thus greatly improve speed and accuracy for navigation, but I have not yet tried this.
And I recently installed GMaps WV from Fdroid as a wrapper for Google Maps. It gives current traffic information but I don't really know if it is even close to gmaps.
I use Graphene but with Google play store app. Here in Europe my banking apps and 2fa apps (SecureGo) work flawlessly. NFC cards work with PassAndroid and FOSSwallet, both from Fdroid.
I've had issues installing rather new games via the play store, but most often it takes a couple of tries or a waiting period to work in the end.
Long forgotten the times back in the days during the Great Editor Wars when Emacs was shunned as an acronym for "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping". The youth of today ...
Every once in a while I think about using PayPal ... then I do some research and am utterly astonished why people would agree to such T&C. I would never use Google or Apple for payments. So I am desperately looking for a viable alternative. I used giropay until they cancelled service to the end of 2024 and I have to wait for Wero or an alternative.
Yes, I do have serious concerns and I do absolutely not trust any American services. Especially not in these times. And I have less security concerns but rather privacy and data protection concerns in this matter.
But I do have no illusions. European politicians see digital services as means to surveillance and control. Citizen's concerns, rights or best interests are certainly not on their agenda. This was clearly demonstrated recently when the EU commission refused to publish the names of the stakeholders and institutions working towards even more surveillance and permissions for governmental organizations.
It's not really about seeing ads. It's getting tracked every inch of the way, being sorted into unkownable categories and actively being served malware that makes me use an adblocker.
Classic TV made do without "personalized" ads, why should this not be enough to compensate for presenting and maintaining a website?