I only recently noticed how far OSM has progressed compared to Google Maps. Yet, it's missing one dominant client which works nicely and user friendly across the board. Nothing comes close to Google Maps despite the way worse map data. And Google is compensating most of the missing map data by far superior routing with real world traffic data. The lack of map data starts to show up in niche routing like walking, hiking and biking though…
It's already my favorite on iOS but then again, I can't use it in the browser. Even worse, every time I open it, it nags me if I want to continue the "location search". Just show me where I left off instead of forcing me to press pause or continue. I also want to sync my favorite places across devices, can't do that. Also it's missing a "download the map automatically, I have unlimited data" option. It's how OSM often is, riddled with too many decisions, and not really using the rich amount of available data.
Google Maps is much better as a navigator than as a map. It can tell you how to get to the specific location you are interested in, but it doesn't give you a good overview of the area.
It doesn't show you as much detail as it could. The color scheme has a poor contrast. The colored zones are ambiguous and often misleading. You see a random-looking sample of points of interest rather than a consistent listing of every single location of a certain category and significance. Major roads and streets are easy to see, while railroads fade into the background. And sometimes you can see major bridges only by zooming in, as Google Maps thinks they must be insignificant because you can't drive over them.
> Google Maps is much better as a navigator than as a map.
This is true specifically for cars and maybe mass transit. But for navigating on foot or bicycle, OSM is much better. OSM tells me where water fountains and park benches are, and has far more trails marked. Google Maps excels at leading people to places they might spend money, and is mediocre at most anything else.
Might give OSM another try because I'm getting really frustrated with Google Maps, particularly on mobile, when I just want to see a $@#%!% map. It's gotten astonishingly reluctant to show you the names of cross streets, which makes it darn near useless if you're walking around, and want to head in a general direction, but not on a particular prescribed route (which I find myself doing quite a bit doing urban exploring). It's like they think everybody's traveling point to point, and wants directions, with the map just being some kind of odd tease for those.
I am 100% in on OSMand and the whole ecosystem, but I still curse out loud every time I have to enter a street address into its address "parser". I know it's a hard problem, but it's horrible. None of the app's other shortcomings are meaningful to me.
Didn't OSMand do something strange to guess addresses instead of using reverse geocoding? I seem to remember that there were plenty of addresses that are actually in OSM and Nominatim has no trouble finding that OSMand cannot find or places in wildly different places.
Addresses in OSM are in expanded format eg 100 south 35th street. What you’re entering is likely 100 s 35th st. Osmand looks for exact string matches so it won’t find the address.
Addresses in OSM are divided into their constituent parts, so you have separate house number, street (or place), city, suburb, country, etc.
Of course, you still need country-specific code to account for all the various abbreviations, e.g. Str. in German, or the cardinal directions and road type abbreviations common in the US (blvd, hwy, dr, etc. ... I've recently fixed a bunch of those in OSM and it's quite a list). Well, and checking alt_name, local names and names in other languages in OSM as well.
That would seem to be a missed opportunity for a really great open source project. Google collect traffic though the clients so there's no real barrier to a better client.
I actually find Google's routing pretty frustrating. Maybe in cities you want the shortest/fastest route given the traffic, but outside of cities other factors are at play, such as road quality (ie width, straightness, max speed) and directions simplicity. The usual "one size fits all" approach of Google is sorely lacking. Map routing is crying out for customizability.
We were on vacation in a part of the country we are not very familiar with and relied on Google Maps to tell us the way. On the last leg of the trip back home there were two routes, one were significantly faster, so we chose that and ended up driving several miles over a mountain on gravel roads. Luckily it was mostly in good condition. :-)
It was worse when Google Maps tried routing us around traffic by sending us off the highway and down on narrow roads through neighbourhoods and side roads. Poor people living there suddenly had a main road along their homes. This kind of thing should be regulated.
I was on vacation in Utah last week with some friends, we missed our turn onto the gravel road our rented cabin was on. My friend was using Google Maps to navigate and said "oh, Google says you can just take the next turn rather than turning around" - the "next turn" seemed fine at first and then after it was too late to back out (no way to turn around), it became a rocky, rutted forest road. Even though we had a 4x4, it was the most terrified I've been in a vehicle in 25 years or so. When I checked Apple Maps later, it didn't even show that as a navigable route.
Anecdotally, a friend of mine in Oklahoma says he never uses Google Maps to navigate because it has a bad habit of trying to route him down unimproved ranch roads of dubious quality.
Personally, I usually prefer Apple Maps since it plays nicer with CarPlay, and while Ohio has fewer roads of dubious quality like that, my experience left me much less trusting of GMaps.
Mapbox offers traffic data that they collect themselves.
I don't know how accurate it is compared to the tons of Android smartphones sharing their location to Google, but in areas with many Tesla it is good enough.
Mapbox traffic and routing is pretty far from ideal. Used it for driving directions for awhile because of the relative cost and ended up constantly wishing we could just use Google. I don't recall specific issues though.
At least here in denmark the authoritative source for traffic information makes it available under a CC Universal license in the DatexII (european standard) format.
