this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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I use OsmAnd~. Mainly to analyze my skating routes (average speed, distance, etc) and planning sightseeing routes when on vacation.
For finding commute an app from local public transport is still the best and google maps are better than osmand, but for navigation on foot it's very good. And you can download the region earlier, so when you use it, you don't need that much data.
I had the same experience. OsmAnd seems to be better for planning routes on foot than Google maps. Where Google Maps is clearly better is for info about businesses and stores.
I found OsmAnd~ to not only be good on foot, but also on bike. It sometimes plans more aggressive routes than google which saves time (side streets for less distance, opposite directions on one ways...). Take this with a grain of salt though, because I ride primarily in NYC.
What Google does (I see it as remains from early days of how it became good) is it takes into consideration the route other people took. So if a lot of people do an illegal u-turn, there's high probability you'll be proposed such route too.
It works the other way round too. If a lot of people don't take an optimal route for whatever reason, there's less probability it'll propose it to you.
OsmAnd just tries to connect the dots postman-np-problem style
OSMAnd is how I use OpenStreetMap too. It's quite good for road routes even in rural areas, but especially in those rural areas finding specific locations can be spotty or outdated. Even in my town of over 100,000, I still have trouble finding some local places like restaurants and businesses. I always try searching for what I'm looking for before I leave home, so I have access to my computer to pull up a map and address to pin onto OSMAnd if I need to. (I'm someone who de-Googles as much as humanly possible so I don't use Google Maps.) With more up-to-date data it can be a great alternative to Google or Apple Maps, but that's the nature of crowd built data: it's only as up-to-date as the data contributors provide, and that's both a strength and a weakness of OSM.
In ideal world it would be businesses putting info about them in OSM, same as they do with Google maps now.
Until then it has to be us putting them on the map, I guess
I actually find OSMAnd is great for busses because you can quickly see all the bus routes as lines and figure out which you need to take.
Ifinsd most cities just make a PDF that doesn't have as much detail and you can't pinch-zoom and pan around quickly. And their guides specify neighbourhoods or destinations whose names you're not familiar with