I realise that Google places ads in the native Gmail environment. However, when using a third party front end to embed the Google services, how does the company make money off that? When I use Thunderbird to access Gmail or the Google Calendar or when I map my Google Drive to the file explorer, how can Google profit from this kind of use?
I had similar results to you. In my case the deal breaker was navigation, because I need to be able to make changes to the route on the fly which these apps don’t allow. In fact, you need to tap like ten times through menus to finish a trip and search for something else.