I agree with the article, but i hate the way the author just admits defeat at the end. “I hate everything about it! But i won’t realistically leave. And actually you can keep doing it all, just let me hide hotels pretty please”. Ugh.
I can’t claim I’ve managed anything more, beyond periodically re-testing the alternatives, but i just hate to see it written., Feels like it undermines the whole argument when they make clear that Google will see no consequence.
The biggest hurdle for me, is that many businesses and other points of interest are missing in the alternatives. And if not missing, then useful data like opening hours, reviews, etc aren’t there.
But i hate every moment i spend in Google Maps due to the advertising and bad UX, and I will jump ship as soon as something comes even close (on Android).
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.
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
Google Maps is the last Google thing I rely really heavily on. I would love to be able to replace it with OSM but searching for places is far better on Google (admittedly, probably because they have more context for your search due to all the spying). I also rely a lot on Google reviews when I’m in a new place and just want to grab a coffee or a drink or something. Could probably use TripAdvisor for that though.
At least in m area, the reviews are almost useless. Except one DHL shop, every place has the typical U-shaped distribution typical for manipulation and/or bad sampling. Everything is simultaneously the worst and the best food.
Thankfully we have openstreetmaps.