What's your go-to OSS navigation app? I've been trying the three in the title. CoMaps is a fork of Organic but Osm seems to be its own thing. Honestly haven't seen a reason yet to prefer one over another besides Osm's pretty bad name.

For public transit (trains buses etc) I use Transit, it's not OSS but the company aligns strongly with me and I like that their employees get four-day workweeks: https://transitapp.com/vision However if there's a OSS alternative I'm not aware of I'm always willing to try it.

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. I have GMaps WV but it's kind clunky and I just ended up falling back to Maps unfortunately.

EDIT: Forgot to mention biking. I live in a not-so-bike friendly suburb and have actually found that Google gives me WORSE bike routes than OsmAnd, for what it's worth. The OSM route tends to be more roundabout but safer. My guess is you get more urbanist minded people contributing to these, so that's nice to see.

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[–] lowspeedchase@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (5 children)

I too have found myself in the same boat, especially because Google Maps is probably (for my life) their best product. I was in the early contributor beta and have been pretty consistent in leaving reviews over the last 10+ years (although the offers for comp'd dinners have disappeared) - I've made an effort to be better, I have CoMaps on my phone, and I've started contributing to OSM. I think what would really seal the deal for me to shift completely would be integrated reviews. As you said, google and yelp have the market cornered for that, but there is no transparency.

edit: that transit app website is the worst marketer crap I have ever stepped in, scrolled so many fucking pages of artistic empty-words and vision speak and still have NO FUCKING CLUE what the app does. JFC.

[–] magguzu@midwest.social 4 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

The transit app is for public transit. Trains buses etc. I probably should have specified sorry!

But yeah there really isn't a way around reviews I think I'm going to have to come to peace with that.

[–] lowspeedchase@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

No let me apologize I was overly harsh on that criticism.

yeah there really isn’t a way around reviews

I think it's just too valuable to stay open and free, someone will always want to monetize (from the business, the reviewers, the 'pop up' order on the map, etc)

[–] paper_moon@lemmy.world 2 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

I know there's a lot of legal areas open source apps have to stay out of, like the reason none of these open source maps have good points of interest databases is because they can't just import in what google has, for legal reasons. But I feel like for reviews you should be able to click a checkbox that says 'show google reviews' or something for the end user, and just webscrapes it on demand for the business you're looking at.

Even better, there should be an anonymous torrent or something of both POI databases and reviews that you can import into the apps as an end user. That way the app creators are legally protected 'our app doesn't directly give the end user google owned data' but the end user just searches google finds the db file and imports it. Boom! Win/win

[–] lowspeedchase@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 11 hours ago

Yeah not bad, I'm sure you could use federated login to allow the users' personal google acct to hit the maps api and pull reviews. But yelp/google/amzn/etc all manipulate ratings and reviews behind the scenes without any transparency which is a deeper problem and why I am always critical of reviews in general. But like I said, if you and I created an OSS review plugin/service for use in OSS maps, it wouldn't be long before it was corrupted in some regard... somehow. Cynical I know but the review data is just so damn JUICY to everyone.

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