I have been using OSM a lot over the past few years as an end user and a developer. In some ways it has been much better than google maps and in others much worse.
As a web developer I have been using Mapbox quite a lot, they provide essentially the equivalent of the paid google maps services. The quality of Mapbox’s software and libraries is very high and I would absolutely recommend it. They also give you access to data not available in OSM like satellite images.
As an end user I have had mixed experiences. How well OSM works for an end user really depends on what app you use. The 2 apps I have used are OSMand and maps.me.
OSMand has every single feature I want but it’s super clunky. The map rendering is very slow on my device, search takes a very long time and often doesn’t find what I want and voice directions are often confusing and miss turns or important info. However gps recording works really well and I use it all the time to record bike rides. Over all OSMand would be prefect if they just made all the features currently in the app work really well.
maps.me is a very stripped back maps app (I say stripped back but it does 90% of what most people would want) and it all works quite well and fast. For just general navigation and search, maps.me works a lot better than OSMand in my experience and search was able to find the stuff OSMand didn’t. The one in the play store contains ads but there is a fully FOSS fork on fdroid simply called “Maps”
To summarize, the data in OSM is actually really good but your experience will depend on how active the editors in your area are and the software you use to view the data. The places OSM really shines are the non commercial things that require a lot of local experience such as walking paths, hiking and cycling tracks. OSM provides the tools to list unlimited detail on objects so I can even see stuff like the trail difficulty rating, path surface type and allowed access. It’s little wonder Strava (Fitness tracking social media) uses OSM for all it’s on site maps. Google maps won’t even let me tell it I have a road bike and can’t take a shortcut through a rough dirt access road.
I would like to switch to open street map, but the ecosystem around it doesn’t seem to be quite there yet. I’ve installed Osmand on my (android) phone as a google maps replacement, but I’ve noticed that it tends to be very laggy, and it’s often very slow to pick up my GPS signal. These basic things make it so that using Google maps in the browser is the more effective way for me to route myself places. I was informed about the existence of maps.me the other day, but haven’t tried it out significantly yet myself, so maybe that app will work well and prove to be an adequate google maps replacement.
I have been using OSM a lot over the past few years as an end user and a developer. In some ways it has been much better than google maps and in others much worse.
As a web developer I have been using Mapbox quite a lot, they provide essentially the equivalent of the paid google maps services. The quality of Mapbox’s software and libraries is very high and I would absolutely recommend it. They also give you access to data not available in OSM like satellite images.
As an end user I have had mixed experiences. How well OSM works for an end user really depends on what app you use. The 2 apps I have used are OSMand and maps.me.
OSMand has every single feature I want but it’s super clunky. The map rendering is very slow on my device, search takes a very long time and often doesn’t find what I want and voice directions are often confusing and miss turns or important info. However gps recording works really well and I use it all the time to record bike rides. Over all OSMand would be prefect if they just made all the features currently in the app work really well.
maps.me is a very stripped back maps app (I say stripped back but it does 90% of what most people would want) and it all works quite well and fast. For just general navigation and search, maps.me works a lot better than OSMand in my experience and search was able to find the stuff OSMand didn’t. The one in the play store contains ads but there is a fully FOSS fork on fdroid simply called “Maps”
To summarize, the data in OSM is actually really good but your experience will depend on how active the editors in your area are and the software you use to view the data. The places OSM really shines are the non commercial things that require a lot of local experience such as walking paths, hiking and cycling tracks. OSM provides the tools to list unlimited detail on objects so I can even see stuff like the trail difficulty rating, path surface type and allowed access. It’s little wonder Strava (Fitness tracking social media) uses OSM for all it’s on site maps. Google maps won’t even let me tell it I have a road bike and can’t take a shortcut through a rough dirt access road.
I would like to switch to open street map, but the ecosystem around it doesn’t seem to be quite there yet. I’ve installed Osmand on my (android) phone as a google maps replacement, but I’ve noticed that it tends to be very laggy, and it’s often very slow to pick up my GPS signal. These basic things make it so that using Google maps in the browser is the more effective way for me to route myself places. I was informed about the existence of maps.me the other day, but haven’t tried it out significantly yet myself, so maybe that app will work well and prove to be an adequate google maps replacement.
I have used both. Maps.me is waaaay faster at rendering maps. The search feature still seems a bit crap but it’s usable.