Organic Maps looks like a great tool. No traffic data as you point out as that would require scale. (Scale as in mass adoption, massive computer processing and massive financial investment.) Still I’ll give OM a run for the next few weeks.
I’ve been aware of Open Street Maps for sometime and in the past thought it would be good to contribute to it. In fact the @techman and I played with this back in the late noughties.
Using one’s smartphone’s GPX logs to upload to the OSM database seemed the way to go but GPS capabilities were more limited back then and the uploading of the data was still a manual process.
Things have changed I see. Have you dabbled in any of this? I feel it’s the kind of thing you might be into.
Magic Earth and OsmAnd were the other two alternatives I tried before settling on Organic Maps. I found that the Organic Maps interface suited me better than OsmAnd. I also preferred to stick with an open source alternative (Magic Earth is not open source). I’m interested to hear what your experience with OM is, and whether you uncover any other alternatives to try.
Haha, you’re not wrong! I haven’t tried the map updating yet (other than to submit one or two very minor corrections to Open Street Maps over the years). I’m not venturing much outside already well mapped major urban areas at the moment, but will check out some of the GPS based data submissions to Open Street Maps when I get back to going a bit further off the beaten track.
I am very impressed with Organic Maps. I took her for a couple of drives last week.
She created a route for me that was mostly likely based on the shortest distance on main roads. She gave turn by turn instructions, announcing the next turn while a few hundred metres and then 100 metres away.
The map was clear and showed the street names and also the house numbers along the road. It displayed on the central console through Android Auto and had fairly accurate information about speed limits and driving times. I presume the latter was based on the former.
Obviously, unlike Google Maps, she does not have bluetooth beacons enabled so she failed on going through tunnels. I don’t think there is any intention for that to be added to Organic Maps in the foreseeable future.
Organic maps is privacy focused and all compute is done on the device, so there is no user feedback to a centralised server. As previously discussed this means no information about traffic congestion, more accurate journey times or the location of police and other hazards.
My wife thought it was OK but did not like that the fact that it did not state the name of the road which one was about to enter but merely gave a terse “turn right in a hundred metres”. I said I thought was OK as I was used to a woman telling me what to do.
Unfortunately my wife suffers from an auditory disorder and will stick with Google Maps.
Glad you liked it. A few comments about the rest of your experience:
Street names can be announced → it can be a little extra mucking around, but it is available. It’s not something I use, but I think it should be reasonably accurate and reliable given that it’s almost always just using the default TTS engine of the phone. It looks like there’s a few extra steps for custom Android ROM users as well - another reason why I didn’t put the effort in to trying to get it working.
Bluetooth/WiFi/Mobile location can be enabled in settings. On my Android device, it’s in the first menu of settings, towards the bottom, under privacy. Toggling Google Play Location Services will allow Organic Maps to use those functions of the OS and improve accuracy. No idea if there’s an equivalent on iOS devices. I’ve never needed it beyond the scenario where I’m in a tunnel, in which case my location is “in a tunnel” so I already know where I am despite the lack of GPS data.
Both are toggled off by default, but enabling may improve quality of life enough to migrate from Google Maps. I’ve kept both off as my goal was privacy rather than Google Maps feature parity, but I wanted to highlight that the functionality was available. Unfortunately, I can’t help with the real-time traffic data issue!
