Google UX design in general, across all their products, is user hostile garbage. Obsessed with minimalism, taking away options and features, shoehorning everything into cross-product bland design themes, cross promoting products, preferring algorithms over humans, basically designed with Google's interests above the user's everytime.
I like their current Maps app on Android a lot. Especially compared to Waze. It has a habit of popping up contextual info at the right time, and always seems to have way more data on any given location that I am 100% comfortable with, but am thankful its there anyway.
Given, that is the exception. They just - for some bizarre reason - broke their own material design guidelines in the youtube app by moving the tabs bar to the bottom and coloring it white like its an iOS app. It is now a disgusting blemish on the UI, makes no sense, isn't ergonomic at all, and violated their own design rules. And they didn't even add anything with it. They just moved the bar for no good reason and infinite bad ones.
The later seems to be way more the status quo than the former, sadly. The designers at Google seem to be locked into one project, and then they overengineer and reinvent the app every single year to justify their jobs, while breaking UX and alienating users.
I hope I am not jinxing Google Maps here - it got overhauled like two years ago into its current state. If its "due" to be redesigned from scratch again, and they break or take away a majority of the features that make it useful now, I'm going to be sad, because there is no real competitor to the density of information Google has.
That's interesting, I wonder if Google Maps is different on iOS, where I use it – I find it utterly infuriating. Like most of us I'm plenty tech savvy and have used Google Maps since its inception. Using the latest app is the only time I ever barbarically scream at my phone. It does maddening things like make the "place info" pane (store info, hours, etc.) impossible to get back to if I do something like pan around the map a little (to see what else is near my destination) – so I have to cancel the entire search and start over just to get it back...somehow the obvious action of tapping the goddamn waypoint marker doesn't do it. There's also something that happens when navigation is active that makes the stop/X button completely disappear with no obvious way to get it back; I have to re-discover it every time after yelling at my phone for a minute to shut up/stop navigating. Just thinking about this app pisses me off. There are a dozen other little things. It's so bad.
As someone who switched from Android to iOS in the last year or so but who tries to remain in the google sphere of apps, they mostly all feel like they are 2-3 years behind the equivalent Google versions. A lot of that comes down to iOS not treating google apps/services as first-class citizens and the lack of interoperability between the different apps that are baked into android, but the apps themselves also suffer.
That being said, there are very few (are there any?) other companies out there that would be capable of creating as much parity across platforms as Google has, so even though there are still problems, I still salute them for their efforts.
Not that it makes the practice any better but the bottom navigation bar is in fact part of Material Design: https://material.io/guidelines/components/bottom-navigation..... It is also used in Google+ and Google Photos. The bottom-nav-vs-no-bottom-nav design trend seems to reverse frequently though. The bottom bar will probably be removed again in a year or two.
Maps is already garbage. It should never pop up extra information during navigation, it's dangerous. I manually pick routes a lot. Sometimes they're not there fastest. While I'm driving, it will constantly tells me it found a faster route, and the only way to stop it from switching is to hit a button.
I actually like algorithms over users. Governments and businesses have time and time again asked Google to censor this, make exception that, etc - and they have given in here and there, but in a lot of cases they've been able to shift the blame from people to The Algorithm. As in, if the algorithm thinks your competitor's site is more relevant than your own, stop whining and make a better website (for example).
