Very astute! Legally the code is owned by each contributor and licensed via the DCO. Financially the project is underneath the umbrella of the Platform 6 co-op (see OpenCollective)
This is temporary though and a permanent nonprofit home is a top priority.
Most of the activity is public, so look at the usernames of the fork leaders vs their activity on the upstream project... It's most of the recent top contributors who've been around for a long time and made their perspectives pretty clear.
The good news is that the fork team is a majority of the top contributors outside of the owners, and the owners have been burnt out and embroiled in conflict for months, so I expect the experience to be roughly the same or better going forward. Drawing users is a gradual process no matter what, but isn't really the #1 metric of a FOSS project... active contribution by diverse contributors is, next to usability and popularity.
FYI the OSM foundation will probably always be reluctant to sponsor or appear to prefer a certain end-user app. I don't know exactly why, but they really do see themselves as a vendor agnostic database, and don't want to make a popular website or mobile app that actually gets traction any time soon.
Sad to see Organic Maps "owners" trying to do the exact thing the community was worried they'd do: repeat a Maps.Me rug pull and possibly force everyone to migrate to yet another app! I hope they can either come to the negotiating table or that this new project can be the truly open and sustainable project we need.
Those might be called peaks or peak indicators: common in audio interfaces to indicate the maximal decibels in each frequency bucket over the last second or so, so that you don't miss seeing a split-second super loud sound.
Also consider that with Google you have to redownload your area of the map almost constantly since they're online maps, whereas it's only even possible to download a ~100mb map file from OrganicMaps monthly-ish when they release app updates and most people don't update. 100mb per user is nothing.
Apple and Google are not guaranteed to be updated when government road data changes. They do their best and they have tons of money and user-reported data (like live GPS traces from users' devices) to do decent work, but there are many times that OSM map nerds do a better job. The real issue with OSM is in remote areas where not a lot of people are around on the ground to realize that it's broken or care: the first user in an area often has some volunteer work to do. But fortunately it's easy and you can do it. Any random person can make a better map of their area than Google, instead of having to beg them for it.
It highly depends on what you're doing (a road trip vs a grocery run vs hiking mountainous back country) but the first step is to do a sanity check of the route. It's very easy for many GPS apps to route people to the center of an airport for example (i.e. the middle of the runway) instead of the main terminal, and only recently have a few apps managed to do better about that. Other times you can just easily spot that it's not a great route by reviewing it for ten seconds.
One way I did this randomly the other day was choosing Bicycle or Walking mode which prioritize slow streets and pedestrian pathways. Maybe a different definition of thrilling than most people in cars, but I appreciate being taken into other areas of town I might not normally go since they're not major roads.
OsmAnd also has many different navigation profile options, you might try customizing that to get what you want. Organic Maps focuses on what the bulk of people need to navigate decently, so that the end result is simple and usable for everyone even if it's not the most feature-packed.
Those people are the original founders who took it open source, which was a great move since otherwise it'd have become just another piece of shovelware getting enshittified into oblivion.
I'm a volunteer working on an improvement to the spoken directions and I can say with firsthand experience that Organic Maps' development is not suspiciously fast. It is simply a fork of Maps.ME which has gone to crap, so when you look at features per year over the whole lifespan it's really not a lot. I think OSM is growing in popularity especially as more people realize that FAANG are awful and so we're seeing more activity lately, but let's just say that it's taken me a year to get around to working on this task again (is it just easier to accomplish things during Back to School week and Christmas-New Years' week?) and in that time I have not had many merge conflicts to deal with. It's getting better, and things are happening more quickly, but certainly not suspiciously-quickly. OM has been a thing since 2021 and I've been trying to ditch Google since 2015 so I've been around for awhile seeing the progress: much slower than I'd like, but still remarkable. Certainly not comparable in any way to a VC-funded startup that can churn out a product in months, this is funded by donations and volunteer work.
I tell people OsmAnd is a swiss army knife that does everything for power users (the cyclists or hikers or drivers who find it really important to do a few specific things that most apps can't do) whereas Organic Maps is the app I actually recommend to family and friends as soon as I know that there's decent address coverage in their area (it's OSM only, so if an address POI doesn't exist in OSM it isn't searchable in OM. But volunteers and everyday users are adding new addresses all the time.)
A lot of the effusive praise is from people in Europe, who navigate slightly differently (often directions are based on intersection, etc) and have a lot longer OSM tradition. My guess is that you're American (or at least not European) and so unfortunately the fact is that volunteers like ourselves have to do the work of adding addresses to the map. One easy way anyone can do that is with the RapID / MapWithAI address layer from the National Address Database, I myself have taken to doing large formally-approved imports as well.
OM's only data source is OSM itself and their volunteer dev team is already overloaded so that's the only option there for now (basically the same as with OsmAnd) but if you really want an OpenStreetMaps based GPS app with full address support ASAP you can try Magic Earth in the meantime. It's not FOSS, but at least it's not Google.
As for ice cream, it's a matter of checking to see if those closer businesses are mapped correctly or not. If they're properly tagged as "ice cream" in OrganicMaps but not displaying in the correct order then that's an OM bug to report, but my guess is that they're not entered properly into OpenStreetMap to begin with. Both are free open source projects though so we can make things better ourselves without begging a big corporation to do it for us.
Yeah the level of detail for things people care about is truly unmatched. I like mapping doggie bag dispensers, trash cans, and park benches -- stuff Google will just never care about.
The bike profile in OSM routers will prioritize bike paths, bike lanes, and small streets over big highways, but there's always a balance since you're unlikely to want to bike 10 miles out of your way to avoid a busy street. That balance is always in flux and can only ever be as good as the OSM data underlying it (road classification and bike tagging etc)
If you bookmark streets that it's sending you down or avoiding inaccurately and check them out later on a computer, I bet you'll find that there's some OSM tagging issue. https://osm.org has a routing tool you can compare with as well. The OM Telegram channel is always willing to take reports on where OM routes are worse than OSM.org routes, and OSM channels are happy to help figure out what tagging issues there may be.
Recall that Google as a company doesn't care about making people's lives easier and better, they care about inserting themselves as a middleman in aspects of your daily life and then trying to sell ads about it. They might invent a "talk to your grandma anytime" app and tell you it's because they love your sweet grandma, but the only things that will get attention and dev work are the bits that figure out how to sell you more stuff.
Problem is those companies are like Nest, who made good products with love and then sold themselves to Google who then turned most Nest products into bargain-basement offerings with half the features. So the only real fix is FOSS, since everything else can be bought and killed. (FOSS can be too, but it's harder.)