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Let's talk maps for driving, transit, finding businesses? OsmAnd, Organic Maps, CoMaps , etc (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 day ago by cm0002@lemmy.world to c/opensource@programming.dev

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What's your go-to OSS navigation app? I've been trying the three in the title. CoMaps is a fork of Organic but Osm seems to be its own thing. Honestly haven't seen a reason yet to prefer one over another besides Osm's pretty bad name.

For transit I use Transit, it's not OSS but the company aligns strongly with me and I like that their employees get four-day workweeks: https://transitapp.com/vision However if there's a OSS alternative I'm not aware of I'm always willing to try it.

For finding businesses I would not expect much.. there seems to be no good answer that isn't Yelp or Google Maps, and of course that kinda goes by the nature of crowd sourced reviews and information. I have GMaps WV but it's kind clunky and I just ended up falling back to Maps unfortunately.

OC text by @magguzu@midwest.social

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[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Magic Earth implements OpenStreetMap but is freeware, not open source. Unfortunately it's the only option I know of that has real-time traffic information.

For finding businesses I would not expect much.. there seems to be no good answer that isn't Yelp or Google Maps, and of course that kinda goes by the nature of crowd sourced reviews and information.

This is really true. Businesses have a lot of incentive to add their own information to Google Maps and keep it up to date, not so much with OpenStreetMap.

[–] illusionist@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Considering how many users osm has businesses have an incentive to keep it up to date. But they simply don't know about it. Adding opening hours is 5 minutes for a business. They would add it if they would know about it. But they use only gmaps and they don't even think about what others use.

[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 3 points 1 day ago

Considering how many users osm has businesses have an incentive to keep it up to date.

It's really not enough incentive. The difference in scale is massive.

"1. More than a billion people use Google Maps every month. (Google Cloud)
2. 5 million active apps and websites use Google Maps Platform core products weekly. (Google Cloud)"

By comparison, OSM doesn't even register, it's a rounding error.

But they simply don't know about it.

Knowing that should be giving you a clue about how much market penetration there actually is.

They would add it if they would know about it.

Doubtful. The businesses that benefit the most from having things like operating hours easily accessible are small retail storefronts and restaurants (e.g. not places with dedicated IT teams). For a small business owner, they're probably going to ask "how is this worth my time?"