I tried this, but it keeps forgeting the choice to use the classic maps and I always have to go to the options and pick it again. It's not such a big deal, but yeah, it's annoying.

When you get back to the classic interface there's a yellow message at the top asking if you want to make the change permanent.

Web apps and me are constantly at odds because I run all sorts of privacy extensions, I disabled Local Storage (via folder permissions) and I don't let cookies persist. So, I just stopped using web apps wherever possible in favor of native ones. It pisses me off too because the web (and the Internet) could be so much better than this.

Anyway, for the longest time - even with a bare browser (no extensions) - YouTube wouldn't save certain settings (annotations disabled, video quality), even while I was logged in.

Aren't you more uniquely identifiable on a native app, though?

Most of the native apps that I use don't serve ads and they don't pull in third-party resources from the web.

For now.

Hopefully, it will work like Google Groups. Meaning that for the next two or three years, we will be told that "The old Google Maps will be going away soon," but it won't actually happen.

It's so nice of Google to give their users so much advance warning of incoming suckage. I guess that's part of the whole don't-be-evil mission statement. Kudos to them.