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Comment by dastx | Hacker News Reader

I've tried over and over again to switch to OSM but everytime I've reverted back to Google Maps and Citymapper. I've even contributed to OSM to fix bits I'm around but it's hard.

I don't drive so I rely heavily on public transport, and so for me that's the biggest selling point for any such tool. Unfortunately I've yet to find an OSM app that can do this in a useful manner as Citmapper and Google do. Unfortunately the data is just not there, and when looking through the issues of AndOSM, it feels there is a lot the developers just don't want to bother implementing (and in one scenario, someone had raised a PR but they refused to merge it). Granted, some issues are due to licensing, but many are quite important from a usability point of view.

It's been a while since I last time tried AndOSM, or OSM on it's own for that matter, so unfortunately I can't remember the specific cases.

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Maps.me is what finally has allowed me to mostly switch with offline maps, good routing, and support for all modes of transit I use consistently.

https://maps.me/

Unfortunately it looks like they may share your data with third parties, which includes their parent company, mail.ru. I personally don’t trust them.

Oh wow, I wasn’t aware of this. I will definitely be re-evaluating them…

I switched from maps.me to osmand recently after I found out about the 20 tracker dependencies on the Exodus Privacy app. osmand has zero trackers and so many cool features that I use. Love it :)

There's a version that removes "ads and binaries" on F-Droid: Maps (Offline OpenStreetMap maps) - https://f-droid.org/app/com.github.axet.maps

There's an open source version of Maps.me with no tracking on Fdroid for those on Android. It's called "Maps" https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/

OSMand+~ is a much faster smartphone client, that cares about your privacy and doesn't spam you with ads.

You can find it on osmand.net, the F-Droid repository and the Play/ios store.

There is an ad-free version of Maps.me. It is on F-Droid under the name of simply "Maps". I would recommend it to ordinary users who might be daunted by OSMAnd's somewhat arcane interface.

I find the interface to be really powerful once I got accustomed it, took some time though. I use it for hiking, motorcycling, measuring distance, searching places and public transport, etc. Its easily one of my most used apps on my mobile

It's very powerful, but, as a result, very stuffed and overwhelming. It's a significant barrier to entry. I've seen it several times.

There is definitely a place for a much simpler app, that focuses on the most important features and ease of entry.

I agree, i also saw it happen even with technically minded persons - but I really hope they don't take away that powerful interface from me. I find it invaluable since I got the hang of it.

I actually switched to Maps.me (F-Droid's "Maps", technically) for most uses because OsmAnd's renderer is a lot slower, what did you mean by "much faster"?

I do use OSMand a lot for my bicycle tours. I download the map for the area and keep the phone offline so nobody bothers me and the battery lasts longer. However when planning the itinerary I keep looking at the satellite view of Google Maps because I want to get an idea of the terrain and of what the streets and intersections really look like. Then I place markers on OSMand and use them when I'm cycling. Using OSM and nothing else would give me many surprises on the road.

Since there seems to be some skepticism about them, I want to recommend this app, that my partner uses and likes, and that claims to be based on maps.me while having removed all advertising and binaries.

https://f-droid.org/de/packages/com.github.axet.maps/

If I look for bus stations, select United States of America as country (would have been nice if it geo-located my IP address here) and try to pick the 'locality', for 'San Jose' it offers only "San Jose/Northern Marina Islands", "village Hacienda San Jose (Puerto Rico)" and "village San Jose (Illinois)". Wonder why people think the Internet centers around the SF Bay Area ...

have you tried OsmAnd https://osmand.net/? I'm using it for years, travelling around the world when i need to have offline maps with me and it works good most of the time. I'm not saying it's the best and the fastest map, but it helped me tons of time to find an A-> B route - being a pedestrian, a cyclist or travelling by a public transport

The biggest drawback for me (coming from someone who exclusively uses OsmAnd for nav) is the lack of geocoding. I can't just type in an address and get a reliable destination pin to navigate to, instead I have to paste the address into a website that will convert it to lat/long first and then use that to drop the pin. That's the main issue that prevents me from recommending OsmAnd to people like my wife who are happy using Google or Apple and unwilling to compromise for the sake of principle.

OsmAnd does provide geocoding, but perhaps the address data has been lacking in the areas where you tried it?

Geocoding works perfectly fine for me, especially for simple addresses. Where did you use it?

If you click the search button in the map view you're shown a keyword input field and 3 different tabs below (recent hits (this is the default), category and address), the first two search in a "keyword" mode, only if you switch to the address bar, it'll conduct a distinct address search.

I've tried this previously, and it seemed to be able to narrow it down to a particular street, but not a specific address. In the case of my address (in TN, USA) the first item in the list of results is just my street and the pin drops almost half a mile from my actual house.

However, just looking at it again now I see there's an "Online Search" button if you scroll to the very bottom of all the search results which seems to properly geocode the exact address. I'll have to play with it more to judge how accurate it is, but that's a convenience I wasn't aware of before.

I have, although I seem to have mistyped it as AndOSM.

This seems to be targeted at developers moving their apps away from Google and towards OSM. I do agree though that for a consumer, there isn't a good general transit OSM based app that competes against the private ones.

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