For off-road and hiking: (properly customized) OsmAnd is the best app in existence, hands down. My setup shows me all the information there is: surface type, road quality, required road clearance for tracks; surface, incline, difficulty, obstacles for trails; surface, vegetation, elevation, steepness for completely off-road/off-path sections; all the amenities that are there (water sources, picnic tables, random gas stations in the middle of nowhere); easily switchable and overlayed layers to look at aerial imagery if something is unclear on the vector map; and there is a 3D map to help visualize the terrain, which works both with vector maps from OSM, aerial imagery, and the combination of both (which has saved my ass on a couple occasions). All of this can be fully offline (including pre-downloading aerial imagery) which is indispensable when you’re in the middle of nowhere.

I avoid driving in cities at all costs (out of principle, shout out https://lemmy.ml/c/fuck_cars, but also practicality). When I really have to, I use OsmAnd. It’s perhaps not ideal (way too much information density even if you disable most things) but I’m using it when I get there anyway so why switch.

For walking in cities: OsmAnd is ok. I have a profile which disables most details and makes the map readable.

For cycling: OsmAnd is ok, but for some reason routing always takes ages, and I’ve never figured out why. If I need to take a longer trip I just use CoMaps - it gives slightly worse directions but finds the way nearly instantly.

For city transit: I mostly know the routes in my city already, but when I’m in an unfamiliar part of town I use the city’s transit app. It’s OSM-based, doesn’t require google play services or anything like that, provides great routing and instructions and live position updates. Sadly OsmAnd is not a good fit for this purpose: it takes forever to load the routes, and the coverage on OSM is not good enough to be 100% reliable.

For inter-city transit: sadly it’s not too good here, and it’s very badly mapped; I tend to give up and resort to rome2rio. I can usually find a phone number of the bus driver to call and figure out the current schedule.

For finding businesses I would not expect much… there seems to be no good answer that isn’t Yelp or Google Maps, and of course that kinda goes by the nature of crowd sourced reviews and information.

This is where you can actually contribute yourself. Adding businesses to OSM is trivial with something like StreetComplete or EveryDoor. The OSM community is strong where I live so I can find almost any business I would want to visit.

My experience has been OSMAnd feels “heavy”. It is a large app but i guess there’s so much it just feels sluggish. But it has the most features which I use as my go to reference.

Organic maps (and CoMaps) feels sleeker and quicker but when im on the road I want traffic updates.

For the last few years my go to is Magic Earth for the traffic data.

My issues with OSM is a lot of missing information and incorrect roads. I have contributed updates but when I’m driving and I come across something wrong there’s no way for me to flag it so i can revisit it later.

All in all I’m still torn between them all and still waiting for the day one ticks all the boxes.

More often than not I find I end up using Google Maps to get me out of a wrong or missing turn or to the final destination because finding places on OSM isn’t there yet. If OSM gets something wrong when I’m driving I don’t have time to faff around trying to fix it so GMaps takes over the rest of the way and I dislike having to do so

Just to clarify, OSM is the acronym for Open Street Map, which is just the map/database

OsmAND, comaps, and organicmaps are all apps/clients that use OSM as their source of map data, and add gps navigation functionality

Comaps was forked recently cause there were some issues with organic maps being run in kind of a crummy way that wasn’t in line with the community, if I understand right. But I’m sure someone more knowledgeable could elaborate better

I dunno if this clarification was needed or helpful but I figured I’d add it in case it’s of help :)

I like the organic maps UI, and I have liked the OsmAND functionality, but I’m still working on transitioning away from google maps so I have limited perspective. I do know there’s an app that wraps the google maps website so you can use it without google servicesor whatever and potentially less risk of tracking, and that may be of use depending on your needs!

OpenStreetMap - always. Or OSM~ if you like…

Yesterday I had a nice moment watching my SO use CoMaps for the first time via my phone. I was driving, so couldn’t mess with adding an intermediate stop to the navigation, and she did it instead.

Anyhow, she’s literally never used the app before, and quickly found the business listing and added it to nav. I mean, she’s a smart person so her competence is not a surprise, but it speaks well of CoMaps and OSM that someone who is used to using Google Maps exclusively for years could just pick up this FOSS app and do what she needed painlessly.

It’s encouraging to me to see how increasingly nice an experience it is to be able to not use Google or Apple maps at all these days.

i mainly bike and am in america (its shitty). i search on GM for a company, grab the address, plug it in to OSMand, and use the bike routing - its extremely good.

there are options in OSMand where you can “prefer biways” - use it… its great. every time there is a bad, unsafe, or non-existant crossing, you can tap-hold -> avoid road and it will only avoid that tiny block you selected. sooooooooo good.

im biking ~7mi one-way this evening (do it once weekly; its a bit longer than my usual rides of <3mi), but all of the roads i hate are already avoided, and i only have to take a little bit of unpaved rocky shit “sidewalk” path to get there (a super busy freeway overpass; im not riding in the street)

Public transit!!! Yes there is one and I love it. It’s called Bimba and it’s in its earliest stages. Listen, I used Transit sit as well. It’s flawless. But it runs through play services and gmaps. Using organic maps/open street map based location services takes your location data away from the tech oligarchy and puts it back into your individual ownership. With that said, if you use the transit app your erasing that data gain and handing it right back to the tech ogarchy.

Bimba really needs users in order to be successful in its early stages. Use the first option when you go to select your map and transit services, that is if you’re unfortunately also an American right now. Expect some bugs and issues when learning it. That smoothens out. Always make sure to pinpoint your location on the map first. Always favorite your frequent transit stops for instant loading. There’s a lot of other transit map database options but I confirmed my city worked with only the first option. Again I swear it’s dependable once your usual stops are all favorited, it gets situated enough to quickly pinpoint you and you get the right databases setup. I hope Bimba works for your city!

I’ve been contributing business hours and websites to OSM via CoMaps for a few weeks now. OSM needs that as a minimum to make it viable over Google Maps for me. Business discovery with Google Maps will be a huge challenge to match; Google is able to trawl its huge database of reviews for keywords so I can search “vegan cinnamon roll” and get results.

I use Transit App for bus schedules and routing.

CoMaps car/bike/walk/hike navigation has worked pretty well for me, but the turn by turn directions and voice are not as good as Google Maps. I’ve also been finding Google Maps routes are becoming laughably bad and it really irritates me I have to review a route before taking it now. Google keeps trying to route me through alleys and other dumb zig zag paths lately.

I have comaps installed but overall I don’t think it matters a great deal which open street maps app you use, they’re all really similar. I try to contribute business info when I remember to do so but there doesn’t seem to be any yelp/google business equivalent. Need something that hosts user reviews and pictures and some way to moderate that in a decentralized enough community way. Can’t beat Google maps without the business pages and crowd sourced data

For road nav I have found Organic Maps to be better than Osmand but both sort of suck. Neither are as good as a Garmin non-connected GPS from the 1990s. I haven’t tried Comaps. Organic’s map data is just fine, but it is pretty terrible at navigating and not so good at route finding. Also you get huge bloaty map updates 1x a month or so. The roads don’t move around that fast! I hate Google but I usually end up using Google Maps unless I don’t mind long delays while Organic gets its act together.

For hiking Organic is supposed to be great, though I haven’t used it much that way myself.

For transit, as far as I can tell, everything sucks including Google.

I use CoMaps these days (previously I used OrganicMaps). CoMaps has just added Panoramax images, which is very nice.