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Comment by Aeolun | Hacker News Reader

Google maps is fantastic. It beats literally everything else I can think of.

But that’s scary. I want a competitor that offers at least roughly similar quality, but Google is so far ahead that it’s no contest.

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Google Maps has been a really garbage experience for me lately, so much so that I've been actively looking for alternatives. Sadly, there aren't many.

Some of problems I've had with Google Maps recently:

- Routing gives me weird bypasses that aren't necessary and often actually add time to the trip. I've started to not trust the routing.

- The UX when searching for places is extremely difficult to navigate, especially when trying to use map view instead of list view

- planning a route _without_ asking for directions is near impossible because many street and landmark names are not displayed

- Landmarks are drowned out by the overwhelming clutter of business names (paid ads)

- Maps are sometimes wrong in my area and I have no idea how to get them fixed.

I've started using OsmAnd for most of my mapping needs lately, and it's better in almost every way _as a map_. The only major thing it's lacking for me is traffic-aware navigation.

Google Maps has a few quirks. Here in Germany it always prefers to send you through 30km/h residential zones. Which might be somewhat faster than taking congested main roads but those 30km/h zones are terrible to drive through. There's always cars parked at one side of the street so you have to wait for oncoming traffic. The streets usually are very narrow. So the stress level to the driver is way higher.

I also noticed a quirk where it would send me 2km down a road just to turn back and drive the 2km back to where I came from. First few times I thought I must have added a waypoint but nope - sometimes it just makes you waste time.

Apple Maps might be better but I can't use it as it has a quirk with "Environmental Zones" in Germany. There are 3 kinds of zones: Red, Yellow and Green. Your car has a badge with a color (depends on how environmentaly friendly it is). So a green badge can enter every zone, a yellow badge only yellow and red zones, and a red badge only red zones.

Now whenever Apple Maps encounters such a zone in the route the navigation switches to a waaaay zoomed out view (tends to display the whole route on a map). So you can't really see the next turn, etc.

To get rid of that view Apple Maps expects you to click on OK. Which really sucks while driving.

What's infuriating is that you can't turn off the env zone checking or even just tell Maps that "my car has a green badge so PLEAS FOR F SAKES STOP PESTERING ME EVERY TIME YOU ENCOUNTER A ZONE". (Those zones are very common - every bigger town is a green zone. So Apple Maps becomes _really_ unusable on longer trips).

I'm just annoyed that Google Maps still has no support for displaying speed limits in Germany or most of Europe. TomTom does show them.

That sounds horrible for yellow and red cars. I hope all new cars are green.

Electric cars are all green, gas cars are green if they meet EURO 1, and diesel cars are green if they meet EURO 4 (or EURO 3 + retrofitted particulate filter)[1]. This is pretty loose for passenger cars: any made in the last fifteen years should all qualify [2].

[1] https://www.germanemissionssticker.com

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards

I hope cars are mostly forbidden in cities soon.

They are in most European cities anyway. I'm in a - for the US small, for Europe mid sized city with a pop of roughly 400k. City center is banned to cars. You're supposed to park on the outskirts or take public transport into the center. (Or bicycle).

The result is that almost no one goes there anymore. All the inner city shops are closing down - while the mall style shopping centers on the outskirts are flourishing.

Walkable cities sound great in theory. Until you realize that shopping groceries _really_ sucks when you have to carry full bags for 3 kilometers or have to use over-filled public transport.

yeah, yellow is like very old diesels and red is for cars without a catalytic converter. so most cars (even my RAM 1500) have a green badge

> - planning a route _without_ asking for directions is near impossible because many street and landmark names are not displayed

This drives me absolutely batty. No matter how much I zoom in, I cannot see exit number labels. Sometimes they show up, at random places along the exit ramp, but I haven't figured out the rhyme or reason how.

Real maps clearly label exit numbers of every exit. I don't understand why this is so hard for Google Maps.

Or I'll see a street name I'm looking for, zoom in directly on that name, and it disappears.

Navigating through Romania using Google Maps, I can't see the names of towns.

I have switched to OsmAnd, and the only thing I miss now and then is a good geocoder.

OsmAnd+ is my go-to maps app as well lately. It's fantastic. The only problem I have with it is the rendering for the actual map is super unoptimized, and leads to it having a very low refresh rate. Which, for someone who got a phone with 120 Hz as soon as I possibly could because the smoothness matters so much to me, it's a tad frustrating. Especially when I'm trying to scroll around the map manually. When I leave it in navigation mode while driving, the refresh rate doesn't really matter.

According to the GitHub Issues/Dicussions, this isn't an issue with the iOS implementation. Just the Android one. Hopefully something they can fix.

It drives me INSANE that I carefully align the map UI with the area I want to search, enter my search term, and then bam Google Maps automatically expands to the entire region.

This is NOT what I want ever.

Another thing that bothers me, when using the my phone as the map display I can search for places along my route and go back to normal navigation mode. Then as I drive whatever I am searching for will pop up along the route when we get close to it (say restaurants or gas stations). You can't do this in Android Auto, you have to always select the location or clear the results entirely.

>The only major thing it's lacking for me is traffic-aware navigation."

This. I use mostly OsmAnd, I especially like it when on bike or pedestrian mode. But yes sometime traffic info is a must so I use GM few times per year for this.

I always thought this, but recently I used Mapbox for the first time. I specifically was looking to build a geo-data analysis application, and was running into performance issues with gmaps. Mapbox absolutely knocks it out of the park when it comes to that kind of thing, I was very impressed.

> Google maps is fantastic. It beats literally everything else I can think of.

At least for walking and cycling, OSM has data leagues better than Gmaps. Also for driving actually, but navigation is indeed not as good. Lack of traffic info...

Yeah I use other apps for everything but driving, but until I move to a country where I can get rid of my car I just can't quit Google Maps.

In my experience, Apple Maps is on par with Google Maps (at least in the U.S.), esp with latest improvements in non-car routes (i.e., cycling, though I use Komoot for that anyway). However Google tends to have more POI (they're further ahead in the ad biz).

With so many iPhones and Apple Maps being an smoother experience (Siri/OS integration), it definitely competes heavily with Google (at least in US).

I’ve been using it in the new electric car I got with CarPlay this year, and it’s fantastic. It’s integration with the battery charging is pretty much everything I want: it automatically chooses a charging point for a trip that will need a charge, based on my battery’s current charge level. It even tells me the number of minutes the charging will likely take, since it knows the speed of the chargers it recommends.

Last night I tried thr single button “Share ETA” from CarPlay, too.

Agree Apple Maps is great now. Except the multi-stop support only works for driving... but other than that it works very well. It'd been awhile since I'd actually driven until a couple of weeks ago and I was pleasantly surprised how good the turn-by-turn directions were, announcing things like "go past the next light then turn left".

Second this. I would guess the number of iPhones with Google Maps installed is less than 20% just thinking through people I know. Of course some of those older relatives also don't use online maps so this number might be misleading.

Apple Maps has been noticeably better than Google Maps for directions in the last year or so when I've been testing them both.

I agree that GMaps still reigns supreme, but Apple Maps is now definitely better in some regards, including the actual maps and transit directions for my city.

Probably due to all the OSM data they include, in fairness.

Apples Maps just is not very available globally. It is heavily U.S. oriented, while Google seems to offer similar features everywhere. Maybe some day Apple catches a bit.

Also, not everyone has and Apple device, so it's not really a competitor to Google which is available on almost any device apart from sanctioned Chinese ones and any web browser.

Apple Maps is also working well for me in Delhi NCR, India. Apple seems to have partnered with local mapping company called MapMyIndia. The traffic information and navigations are also quite useable and the ETAs also seem accurate.

I always check both Apple and Google Maps, but use Apple maps on my iphone because its way more battery efficient.

Is Apple Maps cross platform or only exclusive to Apple devices?

It has a well hidden web version. The easiest way to access the web version is via duckduckgo - just do a search for anything and click the map tab. the actual map tiles and data all come from apples servers.

Only Apple devices

Per the other comment here, Duckduckgo uses Apple data.

https://venturebeat.com/business/duckduckgo-ducks-google-to-...

Oh, that's neat. It doesn't seem to have turn-by-turn navigation though. The most it can do is list the steps on the website.

> I want a competitor that offers at least roughly similar quality

How will that happen realistically? The truth is it's impossible to compete with ad-funded tech giants in the current state of affairs.

For that to change two things are needed:

1 . government intervention to break up Google ads from their maps and other businesses, leveling the playing field for their competitors who aren't making money via ads (not really gonna happen in the US, but maybe ... wink wink EU)

2. consumers now being OK with having to pay market prices for subscriptions to essential services like maps, email, etc. that they got used to getting for free through their personal data monetization (also not really gonna happen because people don't like paying for stuff they used to get for free and also many people can't afford to pay)

What warrants this adversarial tone? This is one person’s justification of the “everything was better when everything wasn’t google” sentiment. Are you trying to talk somebody out of how they feel because you feel that an alternative is not realistic, for the very reason that they find it scary in the first place? We all know why Google is unstoppable until the ad money runs dry.

Is it? I've used openstreetmap exclusively for the past 5 years and it's almost never let me down, for both day to day and trips abroad.

Why doesn’t the open source community organize around projects that are just as far? Chrome and Safari were based on open source projects like Konqueror, Webkit, Chromium and Blink. They do 90% of the heavy lifting.

Want an open source facebook / twitter? Here you go: https://qbix.com/platform

The quality of Google Map is better than others because it has more users, and thus better input data. And that's the real problem - competitors cannot improve improve their product without better data, and so users find it inferior and avoid their product / service and turn back to Google Maps (which allows Google to improve their product further and take a lead). Note though that Google has another edge over its competitors - (1) Android OS has been collecting geo-location data even if you don't use Google Maps and (2) Google also gets their competitors data if a user uses a competing map app on Android OS.

Google search is also in a similar position - the vast amount of users means its competitors just cannot improve their product because users become disappointed with the quality and stop using it, thus denying them a chance to improve their product.

The old solution to prevent anti-competitive behaviour and foster healthy capitalism was to break them up. But for more modern problems like this, I think a different approach is also needed - we need to force such monopolies to also share their data with the competitors, till the competitors become large enough to compete with them on their own.

(For those seeking a decent alternatives to Google Maps, I recommend Here - https://wego.here.com/ - it was owned by Nokia before they sold it to a consortium of European automobile manufacturers and is quite good).

+1 Here maps are pretty outstanding. Offline maps in the apps are great!

check mapy.cz for even more precise and better looking maps

Google's business model makes it really hard for competition.

For a maps company the map is the service they offer, for Google is just a data gathering service

I use Apple Maps because Google Maps is littered with ads. And I assume Google apps use more battery than Apple apps.

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