Used to use comaps now I use OsmAnd i will look at comaps again when the UI Refactor is done
this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2025
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I recently moved to CoMaps after having a positive experience with Organic Maps, specifically re: offline navigation capability.
Although the search in CoMaps could be better, it's still far superior than what I experienced with OsmAnd. In my opinion, CoMaps UX is vastly better than OsmAnd.
On Linux mobile Puremaps is nice.
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.
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.
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?"
Osmand for everything except car navigation. Magic earth is a little bit better for that but I hope osmand gets there as well
OsmAnd won't get there without live traffic data, but for that to work the users have to accept live location tracking. Magic Earth's traffic data depends on active users allowing the app to collect location, direction and speed in order to create a real-time traffic flow estimate, exactly the same way that Google Maps does it. I seriously doubt that this feature will be added to OsmAnd anytime soon.