Why won’t you show me the street name
This is by far my greatest frustration with it.
I’m confused and didn’t understand this point.
Both of the screenshots used in the article show the street names.
Every street is shown on the zoomed in screenshot, and every major street is shown on the zoomed out screenshot.
in general i’m baffled by most UX changes google pushes to their products. it just makes no sense to me, even if we’re being generous with a profits-first perspective
- you like that super convenient 1-click “remove” button on your youtube “watch later” list? let’s make that a 2-click action by putting it under a dot menu with no other options in there
I think it’s change for the sake of change. The same reason why grocery stores redo their layout every couple of years. They want to make things appear ‘new’ while also keeping you on your toes in the hopes that you’ll buy more product.
They’ve been doing this for years now with Android. The biggest changes are always with icons and menu layouts now that they ran out of innovative ideas.
Grocery stores are actually a bit more sinister than that, they reorganize things periodically so people have to spend more time walking around the store and can impulse buy more. They are getting wiser though, they tend to do it more sectionally rather than the whole store so people don’t get as fed up.
I use Organic Maps as much as possible. For public transport I use another app (not google maps but a local app for my country). Sometimes I check google maps if I can’t find a place or if the opening times are missing on openstreetmap (the source for organic maps).
The main issue with organic maps (and I think any map app based on OSM data) is search. Especially in places where multiple languages are used I’ve found it quite frustrating.
Valencia, for example, has Valencian/Catalan as its main language on OSM, but Spanish is very common. If I search in Spanish I don’t get good results. A small typo will also mess things up. That’s pretty frustrating and means I often have to go to the website of wherever I’m going to get the proper name in Valenciano without typos, or I have to look it up on google maps.
The great thing about OSM is anyone can fix things like this - name tags can have multiple languages!
Yes that’s indeed great and I have contributed to OSM, but even for places with tags in multiple languages the search still didn’t work great.
Perhaps it’s been improved, but I think Organic Maps first searches for the primary name tag first and only later name:es or name:ca. But that means that when searching in Spanish in Valencia (where the name tags are in Valencian/Catalan), it would often give me results outside of Valencia but that would have the name of what I was looking for.
That’s not impossible to improve, but it’s difficult to get those things consistently right. Google knows so much about its users it can make really accurate predictions about which results are most relevant.
But what’s for me way more significant is that OSM is quite unforgiving when it comes to typos or slightly inaccurate spelling. Organic Maps has that problem and openstreetmap.org as well. As an example: there is a part of the city called l’Eixample. If you search for l'Eixample on OSM you will find it no problem: https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=l’Eixapmle
But if you forget the apostrophe, lEixample, or if you switch around the m and p, l'Eixapmle, you get no results: https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=lEixample
For me that is really frustrating when I’m outside somewhere and have to quickly look up some place on my phone. Most of the time I can still find it with organic maps, but it can definitely be more cumbersome than with google maps.
Organic maps is amazing. I tend to use MAPS.ME for general commute and also it has a great offline feature to download maps when I’m in a different country. definitely a better alternative to Google maps
It’s a steaming pile of garbage. When I click “maps” I’m expecting a map to open up. With google maps I’m faced with all kinds of menus and shit I never asked for that I need to start clicking away to uncover the map underneath.
I’m shocked the auto zoom function isn’t mentioned. I am zoomed into the area where I am. I search for something. The app zooms out to show me results from places literal hours away… Sometimes on different continents. I’m annoyed, I zoom back in to where I was, click on a result, and it zooms out AGAIN. WTF?