Hacker News Reader

Comment by docandrew | Hacker News Reader

Good luck to them. After a thorough de-googling of my online life, Maps is their one product I find myself going back to use over and over.

View on HN

I have been using OpenStreetMap (and OsmAnd). But the geocoding is terrible, and there is no traffic data.

I dream of making a rough traffic estimator based on GPX files uploaded to OSM. But I don't know when I'll get around to it.

If you haven't already, maybe try Organic Maps. It's a fork of maps.me by some of the original developers.

have you tried Apple Maps lately. By me its 95-105% google map’s quality. And the Apple Maps app has way less ads and better UX. Really worth a shot.

I agree. It’s been my default for years now, and I don’t even have Google maps installed on my phone any more. GMaps feels like it’s pushing me to businesses that advertise with them, as they get highlighted all over their interface.

I can’t stand nowadays when I get an email with an address that links to google maps. All of our OSes have default handlers for addresses as they do for phone numbers, so just let me use my preference already.

In my city in Romania, Apple Maps is missing a lot of locations.

If you want to fight against Google, add them!

I'd much rather use OSM. I don't care about any company's walled garden wheel reinvention.

+1, switched years ago, never looked back

Apple Maps have gotten a lot better but they really need to ditch Yelp

I'd agree, but business information is really the killer thing in a maps app a lot of the time. It's a lot of the reason OSM is often near useless even with a good app overlay. Much like most people don't know people's phone numbers any more, I don't actually know the street address for most places I go.

Outside of Google and Yelp, who else has anything close to an effective database of business information, including hours, names, addresses...

For driving directions I do use Apple Maps, it’s not bad! But for travel planning or trying to find a place to eat it’s still rough around the edges for me.

youtube is the only thing i find it hard to do without. i thought maps would be a hard one to give up but ive been using openstreetmap for 5 years now and ive only needed to use goggle maps maybe twice in all that time.

i would imagine its a bit hit and miss depending on where you live and whether there have been people contributing to osm in that area

i also don't have much use for traffic data which helps

Reply on news.ycombinator.com