this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2025
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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 public transit (trains buses etc) 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.

EDIT: Forgot to mention biking. I live in a not-so-bike friendly suburb and have actually found that Google gives me WORSE bike routes than OsmAnd, for what it's worth. The OSM route tends to be more roundabout but safer. My guess is you get more urbanist minded people contributing to these, so that's nice to see.

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[–] eodur@piefed.social 1 points 2 days ago

I try to use OsmAnd when I can. Its probably the best FOSS option. My Google alternative is Magic Earth, which is not FOSS, but is powered by OSM and more privacy friendly than Google.

I was happily impressed by how active the contributor community for OSM is. I got good feedback on my contributions. Its so satisfying to see the map improve based on your efforts.

For public transit in many different countries, I used to rely on Transportr but since it's not being properly maintained and some countries stopped working, I've been relying on Öffi (Directions, Stations, Plans) instead. It presents the connections in a kind of time-based chart instead of a list, but I actually find it quite good after getting used to it.

[–] The_Sasswagon@beehaw.org 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I use transit for transit (it's in the name) but it also gives fantastic bike directions and transit+bike if I'm not feeling a particularly long ride. I may have had to mess with the settings but it almost always shows biking as an option.

Otherwise I use OsmAnd, but since I almost exclusively get around by bike and bus I am usually looking places up to manually plan routes, not using navigation.

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