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.
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!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoMaps
History section, conflict arose related to control and potential profiteering by the shareholders (with a whopping 7 citations to confirm it holy cow)
Thank you!!
No problem :)
Oh I’m aware of the “Osm” meaning.
I still think it’s a bad name 😅 how does someone unfamiliar with OSM pronounce it? Why is there a tilde?!
OSM is just pronounced open street map or as an acronym- O.S.M.
The tilde isn’t from OSM, it’s from OsmAnd (the navigation app), and I thing it’s used to communicate whether you’re running the version from f-droid, or the play store version? I agree that’s confusing and makes for an awkward name though