It is true most web services are impossible to audit the privacy of, as always, storing things yourself on hardware you control is the safest, but I'd argue that Google and Apple have very clearly different stances, if you follow the money.
None of this is convincing, these open ended musings have other answers like, perhaps this infrastructure change was needed to protect against the compromised backbone routers (revealed later by Shadow Brokers release) which it turns out anybody could tap, device encryption, which handy, has had lots of oopsies and gotchas over time which one could almost suspect were planted.
Last year Apple relented and allowed a dead man's family to retrieve photos even though nobody knew the login information. Hm, but I was told by people here on Hacker News and in tech journalism that Apple DOESN'T EVEN HAVE THE CAPABILITY to do this.
I feel like a navigation app should be like a weather app in what it knows about me: Roughly, what zip code I'm in. Google Maps without location history doesn't even act that smart, it's too dependent on invasive tracking.