this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
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Privacy
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What is a good alternative that actually does navigation and searches on places as well as gmaps? I've been using OsmAnd and it's absolutely dogshit compared to it. Even the navigation, the arguably most important part, is pretty bad.
Edit: actually spent some time looking again, and CoMaps does this quite well. This is replacing OsmAnd+ for me.
And I have the oppositie experience. I find gmaps routing much too agressive. Agree on the search issue.
I'm not sure what you mean by "aggressive routing"?
Gmaps often tries to be clever and recommends you to go off the main road onto some smaller one. This might be ok in USA but where I live its annoying at best. OsmAnd is much better in this regard.
It does it in the US as well, and I find it infuriating. Especially when many of it's "shortcuts" are worse for reasons that its algorithm doesn't detect, like major pot holes, heavy pedestrian traffic, lack of visible street signs, etc.
I'm in Scandinavia and haven't had issues with gmaps routing. The routing of OsmAnd is fine, but the navigation visualization is insanely bad, when you turn your phone horizontal they fill the whole screen with basically useless blank bars both at the top and bottom instead of just showing the map and turn-by-turn instructions in a corner like gmaps. That combined with the less than useless searching (if you don't know the specific address of a place you're pretty much SOoL) makes it really bad IME.
Look the address up and put it into the map app...problem solved.
Yes but that's the nuisance you don't want with an application specifically made to make navigation easier. I want good simple workflows, not shitty clunky workarounds.
Switching to FOSS/private alternatives is full of compromises. Considering this one takes about 10 seconds out of my life and is literally how all navigation worked before smartphones and learned helplessness, I think it's well worth the trade-off.
Yeah i disagree that FOSS should be given extra slack just because...
It's not about giving them extra slack, it's aboit whether you want to live in reality or not. No small FOSS app is going to be a 1:1 match for Google Maps, that's just a complete fantasy. So you, and others complaining in this thread, need to decide whether you are willing to make sacrifices to support big tech alternatives. If not, fine, but I don't see the point in moaning about it online if you are unwilling to be part of the solution. The alternatives won't magically improve if no one uses them, they need people to support the project and offer feedback to help shape future development.
I'm not expecting perfect matches, but what is considered basic proper functionality. Expecting a navigation app that is not just on par (or even worse) with a 25 year old TomTom is really not setting the bar high or expecting too much IMO.
And I do still use inferior apps to avoid big tech, but the constant shortcomings (some minor, some major) is extremely annoying, so yeah I'm venting some of that.
Co maps is mostly garbage for places. Is missing my Wegmans for fucks sake 🤣
Just a heads up for your continued testing.
CoMaps uses OpenStreetMap data, which is populated by the public, so you can fix your problem easily yourself by submitting the data you need that's missing.
You can do this right from inside CoMaps, but also StreetComplete is another great app option for doing so.
I've done this for missing stuff in my area, my edits got verified and accepted very quickly. It's much nicer than waiting for Google to maybe update their shit when it's wrong.
Go ahead and contribute places you are missing to openstreetmaps.
I don't know what Wegmans is, but all the places I've tested so far was found, even small local artisanal shops in the town I live in.