I ask because I have tried both and neither consistently find destinations I need, and when they do, they don’t route me there in the fastest or most efficient way possible. My first experience with Organic Maps, for instance, tried to turn what was usually a 4 hour drive into a nearly 6 hour drive. I used Google Maps to get there instead.
Google Maps is still the best navigation I’ve used, followed closely by Magic Earth, which gets the job done but still isn’t all that great. I find myself resorting to Google Maps 9 times out of 10 because even Magic Earth will add 15-30 minutes to any trip. Even when I do use Magic Earth, I have to double-check it against Google’s navigation just to make sure I’m not wasting any extra time or gas money on the road.
Also, a little gripe with OSMAnd that probably isn’t too big of a deal, but OSMAnd can’t find anything unless I download my state map. It tells me “nothing found within 5 miles” and gives me the option to expand the radius. But at 10, 15, 20, all the way up to 50 miles, it won’t find I’m looking for. Like I said, not too big a deal since downloading the map of my state solves this issue, but it’s still inconvenient and kind of a waste of internal storage space given that other apps can navigate successfully using online maps.
I’m wondering how any of you get by using OSMAnd / Organic Maps as I’ve seen people post on Lemmy that they do. Am I just missing something? Or are these apps really as bad as I think they are?
Edit: I should specify that I use navigation mainly for driving and Olive in the US. Seems like people biking / hiking in the EU have a bit of an easier time with some of these apps
in France, we’ve been using it for years now and it works fine
its efficiency may depend on the number of volunteers that map a country and France seems to be in top 3. That may explain why it works here
I’ve heard OpenStreetMap isn’t that good in the US because there’s just not enough volunteers there. In germany, however, it’s more up to date than Google Maps from my experience, aside from stores and the like. Routes on Organic Maps are the same as on Google Maps here.
But the navigation experience is dogshit!
wdym exactly?
I’ve had the exact same experience. The maps are great but the navigation (at least by car) is just not there yet. I’ve tried it a bunch of times and after getting sent off the highway and along dirt roads in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason I gave up on it.
Well this hasn’t happened to me yet. The lack of real time traffic warnings is a bit annoying tho.
There are some options in the settings screen which allow you to avoid unpaved/4wd/toll roads when calculating nav routes. You can also specify your car’s dimension and weight to tune it even further.
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Lol wut? I’ve used it for over a decade in North America, South America, Asia, and Europe. It’s fantastic.
Great for traveling without data. Also POI features make it wayy more useful than Google Maps. Good luck searching for a drinking water fountain or picnic table on Google Maps.
I have not used either for cars but I have tried both for driving bicycles. The thing with open street map is that they have a lot more of the small streets that bikes can go on but cars can’t. In my experience google maps usually wants me to drive my bike right on some huge multi-lane car road for 3 hours and totally ignores the bike path right next to it. When I went on a 1 month bicycling trip I tried both but found that OSMAnd had vastly better suited roads. Some of the tiniest tiny roads it sent me on were some of the most memorable of the whole journey. Sometimes the path in OSMAnd will just be a dirt path half a meter wide and I love that. I thought many times who on earth even added all these roads! I’m so thankful for every local nerd who added every single dirt road in his neighborhood on there. Simply amazing sometimes. But yeah it doesn’t work at all if you don’t download the map that’s true. Also I really can’t answer for navigating by car.
For me it’s at its best when using it offline and without decent phone signal. I mostly use it off the beaten track, cycling, hiking and when needing to understand the terrain. I wouldn’t use it as a substitute for Google maps or Waze though.
Same, would love to switch completely to an OSM based app. But my main use case currently is for hiking, the trails are usually better, and for situations where I have poor cell reception.
I’ve used it exclusively for 5 years for the privacy benefits. Destination and address search is BAD. Navigation is adequate.
Osmand works great for me, at least for bike navigation. Not driving yet so can’t comment on how good that aspect is. Google maps has a few paths & routes in my area (village) either unmapped or incorrectly mapped, and i’m not too fond of Google anyway.
Personally I was after offline maps for my device to begin with, so for my use case Osmand is absolutely amazing
I use it daily for travel by bike or foot (kombined with BRouter). And its awsome!
Experiance by car is a bit mixed tho. (EU-Germany)
Well, it’s important to adjust your expectation when using offline navigation. Vehicle routing is a type of constrain programming, which is a very hard problem where the more computational resource your throw, the more accurate the result would be. The problem is mobile mobile device typically have limited CPU and RAM compared to cloud service. While there are many flagship devices with fast CPU and big RAM these days, osmand were probably designed with the lowest common denominator devices in mind which affect routing performance.
Instead of using the default offline navigation engine, you can actually configure osmand to use online navigation engine. By default, there are only two predefined option there, but you can add more. Try adding a bunch of them and compare which one produce the best routing for your use case.
True, if you are doing it for privacy, then you should try to selfhost it. Else, it’s best to use the provided online services. I usually only need the cross streets or highway exit. I can travel without constant GPS navigation. All I need is traffic(car crash) or the general location/plaza. For Houses, I just bring up the map route once I get to the neighborhood.(which is not as cpu/resource intensive to route.)
It works fine for where I am but using a privacy friendly alternative is going to come with downsides, as it depends heavily on crowd sourced data.
Searching sucks big time for me too, as locations are not written in english here, you have to assume what the english transliteration might be. I just start with short close matches, and that usually works out after a little bit of digging. Google maps usually gives out most searched locations right away and often that’s you’re looking after.
We can only hope It will get better as more people start using it
osmand is objectively the best navigation tool for me lol, anything proprietary wouldn’t have as much detail nor the advanced features i want
EU here. I mostly user Organic Maps and navigation works fine, especially so when going hiking. Some kind souls have mapped even the minutest mountain path throughout the country. Seriously, I think I’ve only had one example where the path wasn’t on the map. And that was a wild trail. AND because I noticed in time, I tracked the trail from start to finish and added it to OSM later that day, so that’s no longer a problem. Gotta love it.
Looking up addresses though… That still needs improving.
i used osmad successfully in austria, germany, chech republic, slovakia, denmark as pedestrian, biker and driver. i tend to download the maps because i dont like depending on internet. it works fine, routes are nearly identical to google maps (my wife doesn’t trust osmand). of course you don’t have actual traffic warnings - on the flipside: google does tend to invent streets …
