Hacker News Reader

Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

> A lot of the changes to highlight places with more commercial activity to give a high level overview of places to visit, the reviews and ratings system, the highlighting of landmarks, transit directions with live train/bus updates, local guides and so on

Interestingly, that list is mostly what I had in mind when I said that maps was getting worse.

I suppose that it entirely depends on what you want out of a map application. For me, all that stuff just gets in my way. That you think those things are great tells me that maps is no longer aiming to solve the problems that I want solved, and is addressing other problems instead.

That's not saying Google Maps is bad or wrong, just that it's a different product now, and one that isn't going to provide what I want.

So I should just pipe down. I'm not the target demographic anymore. I just need to move on to a different application and be done with it.

View on HN

I still have no idea what problems you want solved

The problems most people have are finding places and ways to get to those places. All the changes I outlined, including continuing improvements to their directions, served that purpose for quite a while. Reviews, the commercial areas highlighting and local guides helps find shopping and food spots and I used this extensively during multiple trips with great success. Same with the transit directions and landmarks highlighting and I fail to see any reason how these made maps worse. I cannot possibly think of why adding bus and rail timings made maps worse. They are incredible features. Things I didn't originally include are also traffic conditions and suggesting routes based on that by factoring in timing which is somewhat hit or miss but still leaning towards hit in my experience

I can point specifically to things like their new Business Messaging, the ramped up difficulty to contributions and reducing them primarily to photos and reviews, and the new experimental color schemes as decidedly worse changes

> I still have no idea what problems you want solved

My problem is very basic: I want to see an uncluttered map, to be able to search for a particular address or street and be shown it on that map, and to get driving directions.

The driving directions are OK, but the uncluttered map isn't a thing anymore. Now, the map is obscured with with quick-search buttons, that pull-up thing showing "places of interest" at the bottom, and is populated with irrelevant (to me) pins showing random businesses.

It all just makes actually using the thing as a map more difficult.

> The problems most people have are finding places

Fair enough. That's why I say that Google Maps is not aiming at people like me. I want basic navigation, in a way that is as friction-free as possible. I also have zero interest in things like reviews, local guides, and that kind of thing.

Again, I'm not saying that what you want isn't important, or even that what you want isn't what most people want. It's just not what I want, and the presence of those things makes using the app for my use case more difficult.

So I just need a different product that is aimed more at my needs.

I've been using OsmAnd for years now, and it's fantastic. Much more complicated to set up the way you like, but you can set it up exactly the way you like. No ads, search results are what I'd call "sterile", and you can have as many or as few features as you'd like. If you pay a $2 monthly subscription, you can download large tiles of highly detailed information from their servers, so you can use it completely offline.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com