A general Schwarz Lemma for almost-Hermitian manifolds

We prove a version of Yau's Schwarz Lemma for general almost-complex manifolds equipped with Hermitian metrics. This requires an extension to this setting of the Laplacian comparison theorem. As an application we show that the product of two almost-complex manifolds does not admit any complete Hermitian metric with bisectional curvature bounded between two negative constants that satisfies some additional mild assumptions.