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Comment by komuher | Hacker News Reader

Good for you one mega-city in Europe* got proper apple treatment after 10 years lets wait 20 more years for other monster cities, and then they can maybe add some cities under a 10 million population :D

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What’s the other option? Google is the only internet map ever? Or no other internet map can ever release anything until they have perfect global coverage?

How about OSM?

Love osm and osmand, but if I'm travelling in town then I go to Google map for real time traffic and public transit.

What is a good iOS app for turn-by-turn directions (driving, biking, walking, public transit) that uses OpenStreetMap data?

Organic Maps is IMHO the most usable OSM app for Android. It's available also for iOS, no idea if it's 1-to-1 but worth giving it a try.

It’s in the store. It touts working offline, do you have save map data for an area first or can you use it the same way as other map apps?

I’ve used Google Maps’ offline saving feature when traveling internationally and where cell service is poor or absent.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/organic-maps/id1567437057

It works only offline. You download the area before you can zoom in; there's no online tile-on-demand.

OM is ok, but the contours are coarse and in meters. I use Gaia, which has far more capability and also works offline. But, note that Gaia has been bought recently by Outside. I’m concerned about maintaining privacy, based on the email they sent.

I should mention that Apple Maps, being vector based, can be pre-downloaded using the hotel wifi when you are in a roaming area and will work for many blocks around the hotel without using the radios. Google won’t.

The Google Maps app will let you explicitly download quite large areas for use offline.

> It touts working offline, do you have save map data for an area first or can you use it the same way as other map apps?

You download a region before being there, then you can use the app completely offline. The 'completely offline' modus only works for the downloaded data, obviously.

I'm using it quite a bit abroad, since roaming data outside of Switzerland is really expensive :)

Organic Maps is amazing. For hiking and climbing it has routes that Google and Apple do not put on their maps. For offline mode you can download entire US states or countries and the search is instant once you've downloaded the data to your phone. I still use Google/Apple Maps for navigation, but mostly because I've never give Organic Maps navigation a try.

For car navigation I've used https://www.magicearth.com/, which I've found to be really good.

https://cycle.travel/ is (in my opinion) unbeatable for bike-navigation, but I use it more for planning a ride (and exporting the GPX file to my Garmin Edge) than for 'on-the-go' routing.

I don’t think Apple needs perfect coverage, just more than “parts of the USA and 10 major cities worldwide”.

Sell iPhones cheaper in countries that have reduced features.

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