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.

  • Luke@lemmy.ml
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    22 hours ago

    Yesterday I had a nice moment watching my SO use CoMaps for the first time via my phone. I was driving, so couldn’t mess with adding an intermediate stop to the navigation, and she did it instead.

    Anyhow, she’s literally never used the app before, and quickly found the business listing and added it to nav. I mean, she’s a smart person so her competence is not a surprise, but it speaks well of CoMaps and OSM that someone who is used to using Google Maps exclusively for years could just pick up this FOSS app and do what she needed painlessly.

    It’s encouraging to me to see how increasingly nice an experience it is to be able to not use Google or Apple maps at all these days.