Open source software is often comparable or even superior to the proprietary sort in feature set, the kind of thing you can list in bullet points. But it tends to fall down when it comes to user experience.
I remember attempting to use OSM on my phone before, and I remember being similarly confused about "which app should I use?" and the ones I tried just being fairly clunky. But I'll give maps.me a try, I can't remember if that was one of them.
This can be a tumultuous time to try maps.me. It recently got a new owner that decided to use it as a distribution channel for their digital wallet. I'm not sure where it stands right now, but at one point they had thrown away the previous app nearly entirely.
For more context check out [0], which had a major discussion when it was posted. In short, the source code of Maps.me is open source and people are working on building from that, yet the Maps.me you find in the play store isn't the same as the one so many people recommend.
This kind of garbage is why open source software can't compete with the likes of Google. I started out reading this comment chain thinking "great, I'm going to try maps.me". 10 seconds later, I've learned I can't just try it, I have to find the right fork, of which I see several, each with people mentioning serious caveats. And who knows when the currently best fork will get taken over by the next wallet software huckster?
Come on, this has nothing to do with it being open source, rather the contrary.
The same thing could happen (and has) with proprietary software, and you are then out of luck.
With open source? Use the last known good version, fix wat you need to, even if you are the only one person on earth interested in that piece of software. Maintain it. Or just find someone else who is doing it (that's a "fork").
I've stopped using a lot of proprietary software and apps due to this, though examples are fading from my memory. On Android, I think I can name at least ES file explorer and Touchpal that went down the Adware hole.
Nowadays I only use FLOSS. Not even GAPPS. OSMAnd (which I donate to) is pretty nice and featurefull, it suits me as a maps power user, but it can be a bit daunting. There used to be a maps.me fork on F-Droid, but it was recently removed: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/7951/d...
Looks like the maps.me community is reorganizing, and hopefully it will re-emerge stronger and more resilient that it was before. Also, lessons learned with this might be useful to other projects.
> And who knows when the currently best fork will get taken over by the next wallet software huckster?
I agree, and I bought plenty of both paid and open source apps in the past. But I find that having the source code offers stronger guarantees than a receipt (some paid-for proprietary software also let me down, if only for becoming abandonware), that's why I only use proprietary software if it's in a comoditized niche with plenty of interoperable alternatives.
For instance, I bought every "simple mobile tool" app (from Tibor Kaputa) on the play store (even though I don't use Google Play, at least they are in my family library), as well as OSMAnd plus its plugins. I also bought some open source games on Steam, such as mindustry. Krita is there as well, but I prefer donating directly to KDE.
I am totally in favor of paying devs, though I generally prefer to make anonymous donations, trough liberapay (unfortunately not tax-deductible) for instance, as a way to cut the middle-man, (I tend to spend more than 600€ a year on free software donations, which is not negligible to me: almost half a monthly salary).
I don't really understand your point, to be honest: ES is "abolutely proprietary" as far as I know, so it won't be available on F-droid. I was trying to come up with examples of proprietary software that changed under me. Source access is a must for me, this is about freedom, not price. I also have trust issues with proprietary software.
Proprietary software doesn't have the same or worse garbage? At least this way when the "vendor" went bad, the users were only annoyed instead of fucked.
I'll take "this kind of garbage" Every Single Day to the end of time.
Maps.me isn't really "open source software". It's a commercial entity and one of the most popular mapping applications in the world. (Definitely #1 for navigating on foot.)
The point is that yeah, competing with Google in some field that isn't integral to Google's advertising business is quite possible and realistic. There are real-world examples.
There are benefits to dictatorships in software, which can help avoid fragmentation and give customers "the one right choice". However, such dictatorships tend to falter and fail as the desire to serve the masses with a simple, yet effective option morphs into disregard of user preferences and rent seeking as those users are locked in.
Google is a powerhouse today, but that power is built on a lot of the open source software (e.g., Android) that you claim cannot compete. I am willing to bet a significant sum of money that within the next 10 years Google (which by now forgot its "do not be evil" origins) will be successfully challenged on both the search and the mapping fronts by an upstart leveraging some open source software. My 2c.
Ah okay, I just downloaded the one on the play store and it did seem pretty bad? I mean initially it felt alright glancing around, but as soon as I searched for "chinese restaurant" it just immediately fell over and did nothing useful.
That might be down to data i.e. OSM being crappy in your area or the app being bad... Hard to tell, it worked for me back when the app was with its original developer. So maybe browse around on osm.org in the same area to see if you have data in your area.
I live in a major European city (Munich), so the data being that bad would strike me as a sort of indictment. Based on how people talk, I thought big European cities would be one of the strongest types of areas.
I tried out your idea -- I went to the official site, openstreetmap.org, zoomed in onto my neighborhood, and then searched for "Chinese restaurant" in the search. It returned a result for a place apparently literally named "Chinese Restaurant" in Portland, OR. That doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.
I love OSM but what you say is correct, search is hard, or rather no one cares about the search part of OSM. That is why you need to browse around on the map to judge data quality, and even then you might nor see all that is there.
The data is usually there if you live in europe, it's just hard to search. There are two related things that make it hard, bad tagging of the data and the extreme diversity of data. E.g. this winter I've used osmand to find fire pits, it was a great way to use the data but there seems to lots of ways to tag firepits so a search might not find all of them.
At least here in the USA, address locations are not public data in most of the country. City maps are generally copyrighted and cannot be used in OpenStreetMap. Google has paid for access to proprietary address data. Osmand isn't a source of data, it is not at fault here. OSM contributors need to add addresses manually by walking down the street and using an OSM mobile app like StreetComplete to fill in the gaps.
So I'm no power user, but I've been using OsmAnd instead of Google Maps as a simple map app for about a year. If I just need Street names, fine. If I need to search for any business address, it sucks. I still need Google Maps on my device.
You say "contributors need to add addresses..." but this is so unintuitive that it's simply not going to happen in over 99% of cases. I say this as someone who really believes in the cause and who therefore makes up the 1% that would be willing to spend the time improving the data. (I still buy digital music and manually add my own mood/instrument tags, if you want a 'for instance')
So why don't I? Case in point: I wanted directions to a restaurant that opened near me about 2 years ago. Couldn't find it. So I walked there, ordered my food and while waiting for it to be served, manually navigated to the map position and found the previous restaurant was still listed. As far as I could see, there was no way for me to edit the map entry within OsmAnd. As an interested party, willing to invest some initial setup and learning time, and ongoing edit time of a minute or two, I completely failed. There's nothing in the UI to even hint at how to edit the address. A 'regular user' isn't even going to bother trying.
At this rate, the world will change much faster than the OSM data.
FWIW, I looked into it and apparently the "online search" functionality gets way more hits when searching for house numbers. That search must use nominatim or pelias as the backend. You can find it by hitting the search button, going to the categories tab, then scrolling to the bottom of that tab.
It really depends on the jurisdiction. Lots of cities and counties have open data, and lots of states too. There's also a national database that looks pretty interesting:
The UI improved but it's still a maze of options and menus. I use it to plan my cycling routes but I gave up on the navigation features. Creating a route from markers is a nightmare of complexity. Then there is the problem that with a bicycle I can ride on pretty much every surface and it's impossible for the poor thing to guess an itinerary I would like. Not it's fault.
What I do is discovering roads and paths with OsmAnd, checking them with the satellite view of Google Maps and sometimes also with Street View, then
placing markers in OsmAnd and following them when I'm on the new areas I still don't know.
If OSM had satellite pictures I could do without Google Maps for that. I would still use it to check the opening hours of shops.
Well, you can add online tiles to OSMAnd as an overlay, it supports multiple providers (even custom ones, so you could use the high quality IGN Ortho for France, for instance). I actually quite like the route's output.
> Creating a route from markers is a nightmare of complexity.
Is it really so complex? Globe icon or menu -> switch to cycling profile -> itinerary icon -> adjust start position and destination, markers are suggested when tapping on either. You can add more intermediate markers by tapping the "+" between source and dest.
You can press any part of the map -> directions -> add as {subsequent, first intermediate, last intermediate} destination. You can also tap existing markers to do so.
In my opinion, it doesn't get much easier than this? I was so confused at google maps' interface when I was handed a phone to plan a route three days ago, it felt like it was burried down more menus, reorganizing destinations was a pain, while it's just edit -> drag and drop in OSMAnd.
For biking, also try brouter: http://brouter.de/ I know it can be used with OSMAnd, but I never spent enough time to figure it out. The web version is quite good already.
Yes, and it's only on F-Droid. Apparently there's OsmAnd and OsmAnd+, and the one with the tilde is basically the + version with no dependencies on google services. At least according to german wikipedia, which had a convenient little table
maybe they renamed it, I was just reciting wikipedia, it might be outdated. In any case, OsmAnd+ is the paid version that OsmAnd~ is supposed to be equivalent to, so I imagine they just decided to rename it to make things less confusing
e: I can see it on the f-droid site, but i can't find it in the f-droid app either:
I remember attempting to use OSM on my phone before, and I remember being similarly confused about "which app should I use?" and the ones I tried just being fairly clunky. But I'll give maps.me a try, I can't remember if that was one of them.