Anyone else in usa find it doesnt let you sea navigate to a specific address such as “123 main st, columbus, oh”? Ive tried reordering the address the way addresses appear in search results for pointsof interest but that doesnt seem to work either.
Yeah, basically. The most useful thing Google Maps does is work out which buses and transfers you have to take to get between one location and another, and until I can find a replacement for that I’m stuck with it.
Saying “we need a better system” without understanding why we have the current system we do is not helpful.
I work with hosting services and resource constraints every day at work.
Someone like Google can give you instantaneous updates because they have billions of dollars and can host data farms across the globe for billions of users to access whenever they feel like it.
OpenStreetMaps likely doesn’t have this kind of funding and gets by on what they have. They are running fine now on the small amount of users they have, but if the usage suddenly 10x’d or 100x’d overnight from a popular app like Organic Maps switching to realtime downloads straight from the tap, the servers would ignite (not literally, I hope).
What I would like you to do is draft up a proposal for how to overcome the financial and technical hurdles needed to allow a much larger userbase to constantly hit the OSM service. This would be a much better use of your time. Once you’re done, submit it to the Organic Maps and OpenStreetMaps staff to try to get it moving forward, or at least talked about.
Take StreetComplete with you when you’re out and do pokemon-style quests while at the same time improve the map of the area you’re in.
It’s very fun and quite addictive, and the data you’re providing is open source so it’s not free labour for some huge company.
If the maps in your area are incomplete, you have the power to change that by editing OpenStreetMap. Organic Maps updates its maps about once a month by pulling data from OpenStreetMap.
It is way way lighter weight and is overall a better experience. I use osmand for routing because the voice is much better tuned (OM just says barely-useful things like “turn left” instead of “turn left at Broadway”. I think both have their uses. If the voice was better I would use OM exclusively.
Organic Map’s voice turning instructions were just recently updated to include the street name (at least in the iOS TestFlight, not sure if it’s in the official release yet). This was something that was preventing me from fully switching over but since this change it is much more usable imo
What are some reasons as to why I would want to use this over, say, OSMAnd?
Osmand isn’t fully free software. Some parts are under CC Non-Commercial license that forbids derivatives to make life harder for potential forks: github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/blob/master/LICENSE#L… That’s both against the Open Source Definition and Free Software.
Not that big of a deal to me personally, the app is still brilliant and open to the community. But given the community this is posted in I understand the concern and alternatives like Organic Maps are great for that.
I use both all the time. Organic Maps rendering and navigation feels snappier, even with 2.5D support, and less cluttered, but since I do contribute to OpenStreetMap, OsmAnd is unmatched for editing and access to power tools like up-to-date data, GPS tracking, PDI editions, etc.
Unfortunately, in my country the map is not as complete as the proprietary options, so, using OsmAnd is more practical for me. As a regular user, though, I’d prefer Organic Maps.
Both are great but I find Organic better for searches and has a simpler UI (so a good replacement for google maps) but OsmAnd has more technical features and better for using offline, importing GPS tracks etc. I use Organic maps in the car and OsmAnd for hiking, cycling and sharing GPS coordinates.
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