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

I’ve had a decent go with guru maps, which uses osm as the backend, I believe. All routing is done locally on your phone, so it can be hit or miss depending on your connection. Searching for anything besides an actual street address sucks. Oftentimes I’ll plug in an address, and then it will pop up the name of the business there, but searching for the business first never works. Just like on osm, it always seems to end up finding some city in europe that has a name sort of similar.

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.

Just to clarify, OSM is the acronym for Open Street Map, which is just the map/database

OsmAND, comaps, and organicmaps are all apps/clients that use OSM as their source of map data, and add gps navigation functionality

Comaps was forked recently cause there were some issues with organic maps being run in kind of a crummy way that wasn’t in line with the community, if I understand right. But I’m sure someone more knowledgeable could elaborate better

I dunno if this clarification was needed or helpful but I figured I’d add it in case it’s of help :)

I like the organic maps UI, and I have liked the OsmAND functionality, but I’m still working on transitioning away from google maps so I have limited perspective. I do know there’s an app that wraps the google maps website so you can use it without google servicesor whatever and potentially less risk of tracking, and that may be of use depending on your needs!

I use CoMaps these days (previously I used OrganicMaps). CoMaps has just added Panoramax images, which is very nice.

Using any of them on a de-googled phone is pretty bad since the FOSS text-to-speech offerings are really primitive. Stephen Hawking could make fun of them for sounding robotic. Theyre pretty bad.

I too have found myself in the same boat, especially because Google Maps is probably (for my life) their best product. I was in the early contributor beta and have been pretty consistent in leaving reviews over the last 10+ years (although the offers for comp’d dinners have disappeared) - I’ve made an effort to be better, I have CoMaps on my phone, and I’ve started contributing to OSM. I think what would really seal the deal for me to shift completely would be integrated reviews. As you said, google and yelp have the market cornered for that, but there is no transparency.

edit: that transit app website is the worst marketer crap I have ever stepped in, scrolled so many fucking pages of artistic empty-words and vision speak and still have NO FUCKING CLUE what the app does. JFC.

For road nav I have found Organic Maps to be better than Osmand but both sort of suck. Neither are as good as a Garmin non-connected GPS from the 1990s. I haven’t tried Comaps. Organic’s map data is just fine, but it is pretty terrible at navigating and not so good at route finding. Also you get huge bloaty map updates 1x a month or so. The roads don’t move around that fast! I hate Google but I usually end up using Google Maps unless I don’t mind long delays while Organic gets its act together.

For hiking Organic is supposed to be great, though I haven’t used it much that way myself.

For transit, as far as I can tell, everything sucks including Google.

Is there any OSM client that includes traffic. Living in a large metropolitan area in the US I need traffic info.

I also switched to the Transit app for public transit after google maps stopped showing the option to start navigation and only allows for searching for routes now. Not sure why it stopped working. Maybe because I use GrapheneOS, but it worked on Graphene before with no issue, so could be a combination of policy changes and using a non Google OS or something. It works fine with driving and walking still.

For driving, I still can’t find a comparable app that has both real-time traffic which is essential in my city to avoid constantly fluctuating bottlenecks due to construction, traffic pattern changes, and rush hour traffic. I found one at one point, but it didn’t read the names of streets, just said “turn right” instead of “turn right on first avenue”. This is confusing when streets are close together or it’s treating alleyways as streets, etc. CoMaps is the best I’ve found if it had traffic routing.

i mainly bike and am in america (its shitty). i search on GM for a company, grab the address, plug it in to OSMand, and use the bike routing - its extremely good.

there are options in OSMand where you can “prefer biways” - use it… its great. every time there is a bad, unsafe, or non-existant crossing, you can tap-hold -> avoid road and it will only avoid that tiny block you selected. sooooooooo good.

im biking ~7mi one-way this evening (do it once weekly; its a bit longer than my usual rides of <3mi), but all of the roads i hate are already avoided, and i only have to take a little bit of unpaved rocky shit “sidewalk” path to get there (a super busy freeway overpass; im not riding in the street)

I have comaps installed but overall I don’t think it matters a great deal which open street maps app you use, they’re all really similar. I try to contribute business info when I remember to do so but there doesn’t seem to be any yelp/google business equivalent. Need something that hosts user reviews and pictures and some way to moderate that in a decentralized enough community way. Can’t beat Google maps without the business pages and crowd sourced data

I’m using OsmAnd and I’m happy with it. I can find food stores, petrol stations and restaurants. No need for reviews, life’s an adventure.

I’ve used Here we go for a few months now and find it pretty good for driving and also walking/biking. Has some info about businesses but unfortunately nothing close to Google. Unfortunately it also isn’t open source (I think) :(

Public transit!!! Yes there is one and I love it. It’s called Bimba and it’s in its earliest stages. Listen, I used Transit sit as well. It’s flawless. But it runs through play services and gmaps. Using organic maps/open street map based location services takes your location data away from the tech oligarchy and puts it back into your individual ownership. With that said, if you use the transit app your erasing that data gain and handing it right back to the tech ogarchy.

Bimba really needs users in order to be successful in its early stages. Use the first option when you go to select your map and transit services, that is if you’re unfortunately also an American right now. Expect some bugs and issues when learning it. That smoothens out. Always make sure to pinpoint your location on the map first. Always favorite your frequent transit stops for instant loading. There’s a lot of other transit map database options but I confirmed my city worked with only the first option. Again I swear it’s dependable once your usual stops are all favorited, it gets situated enough to quickly pinpoint you and you get the right databases setup. I hope Bimba works for your city!