Maps.me is pretty killer, though. The only issue I see with OSM is lack of traffic data. Generally when I drive with Google Maps, I already know the route but want Google to step in when there's traffic.
You should try Waze. I too mostly use Google to route me around traffic, but Waze is an order of magnitude better at it. It has more frequently updated traffic data and is willing to take you on side streets.
For example the other day I was driving down a major road, and Google said to just stay on it, but Waze took me down a side street for two blocks and then back to the main road, saving me four minutes, which was 25% of the total trip time.
Also, when making a long drive, Google chooses a route that is optimal right now for the entire route. Waze accounts for the fact that it will be an hour later when you get to the second half of your trip, and uses that to make better choices.
What I wish Waze would do is have a mode that allowed me to learn a route. Maps, and Waze both 'optimize' so much that its sometimes hard to learn a route from point a -> b because every time you go it sends you on different paths.
Many of the path optimizations seem to save you _seconds_ and when I'm driving I don't care about seconds, I care about minutes in greater quantities than 10.
No, Google, I am not going to make a left turn here, because I have someplace I need to be by Wednesday.
This made me laugh a whole lot more than it should have. Thank you.
And their pathing is just bad: it insists on cutting through a gated community to get to my place, something that's physically impossible. And even worse, the entrances to that gated community and my townhouse complex are on different arterials. It also doesn't recognize the entrance to my townhouse complex as a valid entrance too (if you try to enter via the entrance, Waze will shriek at you to turn around, get back on the arterial, and find the gated community). I've also seen it straight-up get lost before when trying to go to one bar that's near my office.
Because of this, I long ago decided that whenever I request a Lyft, and I'm going either to or from home, I will call the driver and say "My name is Amy, I requested a ride. I'm calling to confirm that you are not using Waze.", and I will hang up and cancel if they say they're using Waze, if they don't speak enough English to understand the question (I live in a pretty diverse city, so this is common), or if they demand why I'm asking and then start angrily grilling me about every detail related to my destination.
And, yes, the third scenario is sadly common. I have never seen people get angry in real life like Waze partisans do except where actual religion is involved... imagine the worst kinds of vim/emacs warriors, Linux/Mac/Windows fanboys, PlayStation/Xbox/Nintendo/PC zealots, iPhone/Android partisans, etc., except in real life instead of on the Internet. It's actually why I started calling ahead: I used to just wait for the driver to get here, get in the car, and then as soon as they start the navigation and Waze comes up, I would calmly say "please don't use Waze, it can't get to where I'm going". The reaction was, more often than not, angry and aggressive. They treat "Waze can't get to where I'm going" as an attack on their lifestyle. After dealing with abusive drivers who will call me a liar to my face, screaming "that's the only thing I have!" at the top of their lungs, getting violent (I had one lady who punched her steering wheel while screaming the aforementioned), and sometimes getting straight-up kicking me out of the car (my response is always "Gladly!"), I've learned to call ahead and filter them out, as I have no desire to come within 10 feet of nasty, aggressive religious warriors. Oh, sure there have been plenty of Waze users who will let me navigate them manually (I can navigate from my office to my home in my sleep) or who will let me open Google Maps on my own phone and listen to the voice nav from there, but the number of angry fanboys and fangirls with no emotional maturity means that I'm not willing to risk it.
And it's because of the aggressive religious warriors who I'm afraid to share a vehicle with, and to a smaller degree because Waze's pathing sucks in general, I've started to call ahead to make sure they're not using Waze even when I'm not going to or from my house.
Google might route me through a turn that's theoretically allowed according to street signs but takes forever to make in heavy traffic; Waze might route me through a turn or "street" that's theoretically not usable but all the locals are using it anyway.
I'm using Here for longer trips. Google has the habbit of making questionable routing decisions. We ended up on roads that looked like after bombardment using it.
GMaps may notice the bridge is crowded when you get there, but at the point it can't reroute you, because you're already on the wrong side of the bay, so it will just update your ETA.
What I've found is that the Waze ETA is almost always accurate when I start the trip, whereas the GMaps one keeps updating as I go.
I'd be surprised if gmaps doesn't do the prediction you describe (I used to be in a sister team of the team doing traffic prediction).
Waze on the other hand will often give me an estimate that's 20 minutes faster than Google Maps, and with the traffic that eventually pop up on that route, take me 20 minutes longer than what Google Maps estimated.
Technical issues can have solutions :)
I guess someone motivated could run some experiments and try to figure out what is actually shared.
There are thing like OpenLR, which were invented exactly to solve these kinds of problems.
Yes, Waze is willing to take you on side streets, by design, just like Google Maps isn't, deliberately. Waze is Gentoo, Google Maps is Ubuntu. One is tuned for the quickest drive, the other for directions that are simpler and thus easier to follow or remember (e.g., it doesn't reroute you if it knows it will save you just 2-3 minutes).
In my experience, though, traffic has to be very bad for it to do this. Maybe it does it less often?
As a direct result Waze was unusable in large Italian cities for the longest time, long enough that the gap in free turn to turn navigation that was once there got filled by google maps on ios and everyone forgotten about that experiment. They eventually conceded and started mapping all the details as needed by turn to turn navigation, but too little, too late.
(source, in italian https://www.waze.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=1408&start=1... )
Not that it wouldn't be nice to have in OSM, but it's just not something that fits into what OSM is. It's a whole separate service, even if such a service could be integrated with the third party apps that use OSM data.