I’m slowly but surely deGoogling my life. Got rid of my Google Wifi and Nest Thermostat, moving my photos to Ente, transitioning to Proton Mail, and installed GrapheneOS. But the few map apps I’ve tried to use are pretty rough still.
I could probably live with the apps themselves, OSMand and Comaps are both a little wonky, but decent enough most of the time. The only real gripe I had was when OSMand was navigating my drive and there was a road shut down for construction, it kept trying to get me to go back onto the closed road instead of adjusting to use the road I was on. It wasn’t until I finally turned onto the next road that it finally adjusted the route correctly.
The big gripe is with Open Street Maps just not being as updated as Google. It could just be a US problem, but it hasn’t been able to find 3 different locations in the past couple months. All 3 were places I hadn’t been before, so I knew the general area but not the exact spot.
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Location 1 - I got sent to the old location a couple miles away. The business had moved sometime in the past few years and the location wasn’t updated on OpenStreetMaps. I looked up the correct address, put that into Comaps and got there.
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Location 2 - Going to a place on a road that changes names in the middle. Looking for 100 Name 1 Road, OSMand sends me to 100 Name 2 Road and says “you’ve arrived”. I check the Google Maps website and it turns out that OpenStreetMaps has the road change names about a mile too soon.
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Location 3 - A relatively new shop that wasn’t even OpenStreetMaps. I grabbed the address from their website and put it into OSMand. It took me to a place about a quarter mile down the road from a shopping complex and told me I was there. I spent a few minutes driving around that complex and couldn’t find the place. I pulled up the address on the Google Maps website and found that it was in a different shopping complex a couple minutes down the road. The road is numbered oddly and OpenStreetMaps seemed to just be predicting it based on where it should be based on the numbers and not where it actually was.
I’ve since corrected all 3 of these locations in OpenStreeMaps, but it’s incredibly frustrating when the app you’re using can’t do the one thing you need it to do.
Switching map apps is tough for all the reasons you mentioned and more.
I’m exclusively using CoMaps for navigation but doing a little extra work before hitting the road by assuming the destination is wrong and double checking it and updating OSM if needed.
For my partner, this would be a deal breaker and she would be back on gmaps so fast. So instead of going head on into this, we settled in MapQuest which isn’t perfect, but doesn’t accidentally take her to the wrong town and provides traffic information and road closures at least.
I think it’s worth it in the long run to not be spoon feeding my location and shopping habits to Google 24/7 while dealing with ads in a maps app.
Good luck to you!
I think I need to change my behavior too and do a bit of prep work before I leave. I may have to leave Google maps on the phone but disabled for now. Not sure I want to rely on OSM in case of an emergency.
Yeah that’s a good idea. The prep before leaving came about because I already have a habit of making sure I have music or podcasts downloaded since I live in a rural area that doesn’t have good enough service for streaming. I still think its a good habit either way.