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Comment by yosito | Hacker News Reader

Open Street Maps is great as a data source, but the front end client apps for using it are somewhat lacking. On my iPhone, I use Maps.me when I travel to Cuba and Google Maps almost everywhere else. If I was building an app, I'd definitely use OSM and probably Mapbox.

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I think the weakest part of OSM apps is search. When I type in an address into Google it will most of the time find what I am looking for whereas in OSM apps I have to go through country, state, city, zip code and whatever. The maps themselves are excellent.

Absolutely. Search is pretty abysmal in many of the OSM apps. I did a bunch of editing for OSM a while ago and I went to search one of the things I had added and it didn't come up because I had searched "office works" instead of how it was entered in OSM "officeworks".

On Android, Osmand works very well.

I've found it rather slow and temperamental, plus their business model of charging for access to map updates basically means that you have to pay them to use corrections you contribute to OSM.

> plus their business model of charging for access to map updates

Not sure what you are talking about, but I am not prompted to pay for updates. In fact, I'm installing some updates and new maps right now. Even the 'live' feature works. I am using the f-droid version of the app though, so maybe that's the difference?

The version in f-droid provides anything free, which the version in google play does not.

This app is excellent. I'll probably donate. I would be totallly comfortable with doing this if they made their UI free, making osmand a completely free software.

I which I could use it on a regular computer, or if a web service provided something similar to what we get with osmand, the experience of its offline search included.

Next step would be mapillary providing a free app to contribute to their database or osmand providing a way to do it.

They charge $9, which is basically just covering server resources.

I haven't done it in quite some time, but if that is overly burdensome, it is also possible to avoid needing access to their servers by building a map file yourself.

I feel like I'm crazy when people recommend Osmand and have a good experience. I've tried and tried to like it but I can't even type in an address and have it find it. Other apps based on OSM seem to manage just fine -- I'm not exactly in an obscure location.

For “off road” use, Gaia GPS is great. Especially since it syncs to their website.

I love OSM but editing is horrible. Draw a small path that wasn’t there before, pick from 500 different labels and tags (landuse:path or landuse:track?), make one small mistake, get a passive aggressive reply from an experienced editor that is basically “get off my lawn” and have your edit reversed...

On iphone, the nicest looking app I found is called MapOut.

Very slick, works well, offline. I guess aimed more at outdoor use than cities, or driving.

Can you describe where you find maps.me on iOS to be lacking?

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