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.

  • balsoft@lemmy.ml
    5·
    11 hours ago

    For off-road and hiking: (properly customized) OsmAnd is the best app in existence, hands down. My setup shows me all the information there is: surface type, road quality, required road clearance for tracks; surface, incline, difficulty, obstacles for trails; surface, vegetation, elevation, steepness for completely off-road/off-path sections; all the amenities that are there (water sources, picnic tables, random gas stations in the middle of nowhere); easily switchable and overlayed layers to look at aerial imagery if something is unclear on the vector map; and there is a 3D map to help visualize the terrain, which works both with vector maps from OSM, aerial imagery, and the combination of both (which has saved my ass on a couple occasions). All of this can be fully offline (including pre-downloading aerial imagery) which is indispensable when you’re in the middle of nowhere.

    I avoid driving in cities at all costs (out of principle, shout out https://lemmy.ml/c/fuck_cars, but also practicality). When I really have to, I use OsmAnd. It’s perhaps not ideal (way too much information density even if you disable most things) but I’m using it when I get there anyway so why switch.

    For walking in cities: OsmAnd is ok. I have a profile which disables most details and makes the map readable.

    For cycling: OsmAnd is ok, but for some reason routing always takes ages, and I’ve never figured out why. If I need to take a longer trip I just use CoMaps - it gives slightly worse directions but finds the way nearly instantly.

    For city transit: I mostly know the routes in my city already, but when I’m in an unfamiliar part of town I use the city’s transit app. It’s OSM-based, doesn’t require google play services or anything like that, provides great routing and instructions and live position updates. Sadly OsmAnd is not a good fit for this purpose: it takes forever to load the routes, and the coverage on OSM is not good enough to be 100% reliable.

    For inter-city transit: sadly it’s not too good here, and it’s very badly mapped; I tend to give up and resort to rome2rio. I can usually find a phone number of the bus driver to call and figure out the current schedule.

    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.

    This is where you can actually contribute yourself. Adding businesses to OSM is trivial with something like StreetComplete or EveryDoor. The OSM community is strong where I live so I can find almost any business I would want to visit.