Just used it yesterday. It's a great little app to browse OSM data as it is. Much better than Google Maps at finding walkable trails. If only it had the features of overpass turbo, e.g. searching for points tagged with specific attributes.
On the other hand, GMaps is better for up-to-date commercial data like stores and their opening hours. Its navigation system is better too. As much as I'd like to drop all Google services from my life, Maps is too useful to let go.
Google has an infinitely-larger community; a local community is not sufficient in dense areas where businesses are opening and closing every day. France has the third largest OSM community and yet some neighborhoods of its largest cities are full of outdated businesses.
That being said, I switched to Organic maps years ago. For 90% of places I go, it turns out I go to them repeatedly day-to-day, so I added them to the map the first time and update them when I go there and the hours have changed. Then they're on the map the rest of the time when I need to look up hours or what not so I rarely have anywhere around here that I go to that's not on the map anymore. When I do, I add it and next time it's on there and it works well enough 99% of the time.
For example, bicycle routing in my area was unreliable, because it would try to route me over rough trails. Just adding a few tags improved the experience dramatically. And then it was fixed not only for me, but everybody else too.
Meanwhile, other people fixed other annoyances, and the map works better across many areas. Google instead decides to hide things that interest me, and shows sponsored places I don't care for. I have zero recourse.
This works for routing, but doesn’t apply to businesses: for the bare minimum you have to add one or two tags (type + name), to make that more useful you have to add the opening hours and ideally the website. Now multiply this by 60,000 (the number of businesses in Paris, France). By the time you’ve finished your neighborhood some businesses you checked last month are already closed and some new ones already opened. Go on holidays? Too bad, you have to start over again when you come back. Trust me, I’m contributing almost every day and I can’t keep the pace.
And I think even partially complete OSM is helpful. If I add just one ATM, that can already help somebody looking for one. That might even be me, when I know it's there somewhere, but not exactly where.
community size absolutely does not matter, it's the activity. a local active community of 2 active persons for every 260 residents is sufficient
That would be huge. For a city with 2M inhabitants, that would mean 8k active contributors. Remember that there are ~40-50k active OSM contributors in the whole world.
Google - a real person - calls every week to update.
Business owners usually provide it on their door. I added opening hours to many places, and importantly I didn't have to add opening hours to many other because they already had them.
> For real time bus/rail status you need integrations to countless public transit systems.
For public transportation, I personally usually need to buy a ticket, which Google Maps doesn't provide. So I use the public transportation app of the country in question. For countries where public transportation are public, which usually implies an app, of course. Countries that have broken public transportation won't work the same, but anyway the public transportation is broken there :-).
I actively avoid contributing to that corp. Not even marking spam. Let them drown in the fruits of their own incentives.
Even if you managed to help a shop get hundreds or thousands of new customers by updating their online information, they wouldn't even give you a cup of coffee if you asked. More likely they'd spit in your face.
For most physical businesses that are open to the public, correct information on map services are by far their most important advertising. Yet, they neglect this and spend thousands on billboards, social media, radio spots, etc. If they are failing as business owners, that's their own problem.
Not in my country. They don't even keep track of national holidays, and very often keep listing establishments that closed down years ago.
Also, you might be standing in front of a restaurant and when asking google maps for nearby restaurants, if that one isn't blessed, you'll get directions to a 3km restaurant instead.
google used to be good, because if the hours were there, someone had put effort in. they were 95% accurate for CONUS. but over the last 6~ years the quality has degraded. Only about 65% accurate now. And to me, that's worse than unuseful, because i can't plan, i need to verify, so i might as well have gone to the store website anyways.
also who the heck needs open and close times? if you need that level of precision you need a personal assistant.
Uh I do?
Not all restaurants are open for both lunch and dinners, and in every country there's different ideas on what's the appropriate time for having a meal.
I much prefer Every Door, especially for updating opening hours and any kind of place details. Have you tried it?
So many places have better OSM-based coverage nowadays.
If you want to make OSM data better (like that business hours you mentioned) I find Street Complete [0] app fun and absolutely friction less way to do that.
Guys, if the device has location services disabled, your app should get the hint after I dismiss the prompt for the n!th time.
I switched from OSMAnd to Organic Maps a few years ago. Organic Maps is way faster, and I actually understand what all the buttons do.
It has some minor limitations, though: it cannot keep the GPS on when you switch to a different app, and it doesn't do track recording.