I use Organic Maps regularly and I'd love to get rid of Google Maps eventually, but they don't really fulfill the same purpose to me. It's awesome for hiking (which Google Maps is useless for) but meh for Navigation and almost useless for finding information about shops, restaurants etc in an area.
The quality of organic maps data varies a lot by location.
*OSM
Magic Earth is pretty good for navigation. But yeah OSM is pretty lacking in info about places, whenever I can I try to add details.
This is simply because
- Google has an OS
- The OS has the map app preinstalled
- Everyone has an account
- You are nagged to add info about POIs afaik, even by shop owners
Meanwhile OSM has nothing. OpenPlaceReviews is confusing as heck. There is no centrally available image host (and you cant just upload insane amounts of data like videos of everything, like on Google).
Things that could lift OSMAnd (which is more poweful but also more confusing and slower than OM) to those standards:
- "Just upload a photo" to some host.
- A review system that works
- API integration for public transport services like DB. Those already do navigation really well, but no routing directions etc.
I have tried organic maps for a bit, i like it, but the lack of geocoding made it not very useful to me.
Generally I want to plug in an address and navigate to it. Is that just a lack of data in my area?
Organic maps is on the play store though. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.organicmaps
This happened in August. It seems it's been put back already.
Very useful for me, thanks a lot. I am offline a lot and have always struggled with gaps (which allows offline maps but gets in trouble with offline rerouting).
It is easy to submit map update requests to Google (I had a high contributor level), is there a simple manual for this for OSM?
