If you have Android Oreo/8.x, most (all?) google apps (including Maps) allow you quite fine grained control over notification categories (so you can choose to have traffic updates and nothing else, if you wish)
Notification categories is not exclusive to google apps, of course (OS level feature as long as your app targets Oreo), but their apps tend to give you very good control over what it shows you.
So, I'd disagree strongly that this is a google "strategy". It's more a problem that their apps tend to have a lot of features crammed in.
Of course, I don't know how this works on iOS (I'd be surprised if it's not in the settings somewhere? It's in their interest that you don't disable all app notifications)
I'm not on Oreo, and they may have changed their tactics. But there was certainly no way to exercise this type of control in maps the last time I looked extensively, which was a few months ago.
Edit: They definitely have, since I have those options now.
Well, to be explicit, they set the minimum timeframe. For example, the Nexus Player is still on the latest version of Android and will/should receive 'O'
(Not letting google off the hook here. What they're doing isn't great and they should do better. Just saying your statement isn't entirely correct)
Here's [1] an open source app that lets you share a link from youtube which then uses a hosted version of youtube-dl to get the direct link to the mp4 url and pass it back to the Android Download app
Windows 10 can _definitely_ do that (I do the exact same thing with bluetooth/wired headsets frequently; I'm "fairly" sure I used to do that on Windows 7 too -- I remember being quite amazed when my Ubuntu machine "finally" caught up and was able to do the same thing.)
In fact, I quite often start music playing on the laptop (chrome/Google Play Music) and then power up my bluetooth headset -- it initially uses eSCO when it routes the audio over (mono) and then switches to A2DP a few seconds later
Maybe the issue is something to do with the SW (chrome/firefox?) you use for GVoice? Or maybe there are some edge cases that I'm not triggering (in particular, a USB headset is effectively a new soundcard and not just an audio sink; I can completely believe windows is flaky with them especially with third party drivers)
The "Fortune" app? As you mention knox, I assume this is an app that Samsung force installs on your phone; so I don't really see what Google can do (without locking Android down even more, and I'd rather they didn't).
Google is mostly going in the opposite direction and allowing you to uninstall any apps you don't use [1] -- admittedly, the Youtube app is not one of them on my 6P. But, I can disable it so it's not visible in the app drawer. In fact I can disable all the google apps and have always been able to do so (the only exceptions are non-Google, "system" apps).
Doesn't help if you buy a Samsung phone though....
As I mentioned in the other [1] thread, you can use this android app [2] (which uses youtube-dl) to download directly onto your phone. If you're on iOS, sorry :(
There is also this app [1] (shameless plug, I wrote it) which uses youtube-dl to download videos off any supported sites. No real UI as it just parses the media URL (when a link is shared to it) and passes it off to the android download manager.
I threw it together (over a few hours) simply because I like watching stuff on youtube at 1.5x speed and the android app does not allow you to do it (whereas if you use VLC to play the downloaded video, you can increaseplayback speed)
It's also available on the play store [2] with youtube downloads disabled by default
Netguard [1] is a loopback firewall (installs as a local VPN) that doubles as an adblocker if you install the version from github [2]. I installed from the play store and used the IAP to contribute to development before swapping to the github version (the version on the play store can't block ads [3] due to it being a ToS violation)
Note that one of the recent updates [4] introduces ads for the free version. But not if you buy any of the pro features. Seems a fair trade, plus it's open source (which makes me slightly happier about routing all network traffic through it)
I know this is supported in this google dual-port PD charger: https://store.google.com/gb/product/usb_c_dual_port_charger
There is an explanation on how the power budget is split in this post: https://plus.google.com/+BensonLeung/posts/8jmUYtJxAwX
Presumably other multi-port chargers also do similair things