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Google Maps has become an eyesore. 5 examples of how the app has lost its way
(www.fastcompany.com)
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this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
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I use Organic Maps as much as possible. For public transport I use another app (not google maps but a local app for my country). Sometimes I check google maps if I can't find a place or if the opening times are missing on openstreetmap (the source for organic maps).
The main issue with organic maps (and I think any map app based on OSM data) is search. Especially in places where multiple languages are used I've found it quite frustrating.
Valencia, for example, has Valencian/Catalan as its main language on OSM, but Spanish is very common. If I search in Spanish I don't get good results. A small typo will also mess things up. That's pretty frustrating and means I often have to go to the website of wherever I'm going to get the proper name in Valenciano without typos, or I have to look it up on google maps.
Organic Maps is great!
The great thing about OSM is anyone can fix things like this - name tags can have multiple languages!
Yes that's indeed great and I have contributed to OSM, but even for places with tags in multiple languages the search still didn't work great.
Perhaps it's been improved, but I think Organic Maps first searches for the primary
nametag first and only latername:esorname:ca. But that means that when searching in Spanish in Valencia (where thenametags are in Valencian/Catalan), it would often give me results outside of Valencia but that would have the name of what I was looking for.That's not impossible to improve, but it's difficult to get those things consistently right. Google knows so much about its users it can make really accurate predictions about which results are most relevant.
But what's for me way more significant is that OSM is quite unforgiving when it comes to typos or slightly inaccurate spelling. Organic Maps has that problem and openstreetmap.org as well. As an example: there is a part of the city called l'Eixample. If you search for
l'Eixampleon OSM you will find it no problem: https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=l'EixapmleBut if you forget the apostrophe,
lEixample, or if you switch around themandp,l'Eixapmle, you get no results: https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=lEixampleFor me that is really frustrating when I'm outside somewhere and have to quickly look up some place on my phone. Most of the time I can still find it with organic maps, but it can definitely be more cumbersome than with google maps.
Organic maps is amazing. I tend to use MAPS.ME for general commute and also it has a great offline feature to download maps when I'm in a different country. definitely a better alternative to Google maps
May I ask why you use maps.me? As far as I know that's just a worse version than Organic Maps at this point.