I'm less concerned about Google Maps than the Google partial-ownership. Based on the sentiment above, I would assume that it either does or will eventually "require the Google eco-system for over 50% of the apps to even work". It's like Android in the early days - at first they just wanted to get a foothold, so everything was very open. Only once that solidified did they start locking it down.
Google is trying hard to get a foothold on KaiOS, the OEMs that partnered with Mozilla (and particularly Qualcomm with its Qualcomm 205 chip) need something like KaiOS that can run well on 256mb of RAM and less than 16GB of flash, as Android is a pig (even Android One).
I wish Mozilla made an effort to get Mozilla DeepSpeech and Mozilla TTS onto this platform, as Speech to Text seems to be the first thing Google has gotten added to KaiOS. Problem is, with these budget devices you don't usually have the RAM for even a full memory mapped TF Lite model, and end up with a stripped down language model that is much less accurate :c
Mozilla could run DeepSpeech servers, but it would be a similar commitment to the Tor Relays they operate...
