Comment by tobinfekkes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tobinfekkes | Hacker News Reader

Can confirm!

I would be what is considered a Google Maps Power User for the last 10+ years, everything from user to developer.

Just last month, I finally had enough and downloaded Open Street Maps. Not because it's "better" overall (i.e. obviously Gmaps is more polished, smoother, cleaner interface, satellite tiles, etc), but because it's better in the way that a normal person would want to use a "map". Emphasis on "map", not an advertising board.

For example, I was trying to find the name of a very prominent river in Alaska, and no amount of zooming in, panning, clicking, or tilting in Gmaps revealed the name. I followed the river from start to finish, thinking it would display the name eventually, with no luck. Same for a prominent mountain. Similar results happen for things like street names, labels, anything that is not the nearest McDonalds or the 17 Starbucks that are in the viewport (that I'm clearly not looking for or interested in, based on either my searches or my clicks).

It's getting to the point where Google Maps should be renamed Google Billboard, because it is having less and less in common with a map.

This issue with not being able to identify street names became a massive problem for me while traveling in Iraly this year.

When walking from place to place in cities, I like to memorize the entire path so I can actually look around on my walk as opposed to having my face buried in the phone. But Google Maps made it almost impossible to identify the names of at least half the streets I would try to know (so I know what streets to turn into, etc). Looking at the text directions doesn’t help because my memorization requires me to have a mental image of the path, and correlating the text directions with the maps image is way too time consuming.

Now, this actual use case might be rare. But the idea that a map cannot be used to identify street names in large European cities is just terrible. And for comparison, I’ve done this for over a decade and I don’t remember this ever being a problem before say 2017-2018 even though I was visiting far smaller cities over that period.

OpenStreetMap has similar problem. Often, finding a street name requires futile, fumbly scrolling and resizing. Quite frustrating.

On the main website you can use the "query features"-function. It even returns roads first and shows their name if its set.

In the Organic Maps-app, in osmAnd and in MagicEarth long tapping on a place returns the nearest street name or address.

I haven't used Google Maps in like 5+ years, and was absolutely stunned when I saw recent screenshots of it. Who wants that many ads on their maps when better options are out there?

I'm looking for alternatives. What's out there for my two common use cases?

- Car navigation through Carplay that includes traffic data.

- Finding businesses i.e. restaurants, shops, services quickly.

I'm not loving GMaps lately buy tbh it does work as expected in those scenarios.

I'm on an iPhone now to escape El Goog, so I have Apple Maps, which has a reasonably excellent privacy policy. But a third party I'd highly recommend is HERE Maps. Quality can be a bit more regionally variable but it was very good for me. A bunch of car manufacturers use them.

I'd highly recommend is HERE Maps

I've tried using HERE Maps and I loved the offline maps and navigation. However the business and point-of-interest search was pretty terrible. I had to basically use Google every time to find the address of the place I was going to and then enter that address into HERE.

I appreciated the "El Goog" reference. I chuckled. Thank you.

I use Apple Maps and prefer the CarPlay interface. Google maps still seems better for searching businesses, but most of the time I’m going to an address in city or suburbs.

Organic Maps is WIP on Android Auto support ^1.

However, regarding restaurants. There is no solution for the lack of ratings/reviews.

[^1] https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/pull/3806

https://openplacereviews.org/

Same problem for me. It absolutely refuses to recognize some major roads and will keep diverting me through longer routes. Which is baffling because it worked well for yars before that.

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