What’s your go-to OSS navigation app? I’ve been trying the three in the title. CoMaps is a fork of Organic but Osm seems to be its own thing. Honestly haven’t seen a reason yet to prefer one over another besides Osm’s pretty bad name.
For public transit (trains buses etc) I use Transit, it’s not OSS but the company aligns strongly with me and I like that their employees get four-day workweeks: https://transitapp.com/vision However if there’s a OSS alternative I’m not aware of I’m always willing to try it.
For finding businesses I would not expect much… there seems to be no good answer that isn’t Yelp or Google Maps, and of course that kinda goes by the nature of crowd sourced reviews and information. I have GMaps WV but it’s kind clunky and I just ended up falling back to Maps unfortunately.
EDIT: Forgot to mention biking. I live in a not-so-bike friendly suburb and have actually found that Google gives me WORSE bike routes than OsmAnd, for what it’s worth. The OSM route tends to be more roundabout but safer. My guess is you get more urbanist minded people contributing to these, so that’s nice to see.
My experience has been OSMAnd feels “heavy”. It is a large app but i guess there’s so much it just feels sluggish. But it has the most features which I use as my go to reference.
Organic maps (and CoMaps) feels sleeker and quicker but when im on the road I want traffic updates.
For the last few years my go to is Magic Earth for the traffic data.
My issues with OSM is a lot of missing information and incorrect roads. I have contributed updates but when I’m driving and I come across something wrong there’s no way for me to flag it so i can revisit it later.
All in all I’m still torn between them all and still waiting for the day one ticks all the boxes.
More often than not I find I end up using Google Maps to get me out of a wrong or missing turn or to the final destination because finding places on OSM isn’t there yet. If OSM gets something wrong when I’m driving I don’t have time to faff around trying to fix it so GMaps takes over the rest of the way and I dislike having to do so
Someone else had mentioned Magic Earth but I was under the impression that it was another big tech thing (I guess I was thinking of Google Earth) but you saying it again made me check it out.
Seems like not OSS but their claim of privacy focus actually makes me interested so I’ll try it out! I’m even okay with the small fee, I know servers cost money to run. Glad to see they’re working on a non-Google or Apple payment.
I looked up Magic Earth because of your comment and was disappointed that you require either a Google Play account or an Apple account as the app has a €0.99 annual subscription. On the bright side, they have an FAQ that states they are working on an alternative. So, hopefully soon we will see that implemented.
They do? I dont recalling having needed to pay for it and dont need to log in. I even have a degoogled phone… maybe it used to be free