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.
Public transit!!! Yes there is one and I love it. It’s called Bimba and it’s in its earliest stages. Listen, I used Transit sit as well. It’s flawless. But it runs through play services and gmaps. Using organic maps/open street map based location services takes your location data away from the tech oligarchy and puts it back into your individual ownership. With that said, if you use the transit app your erasing that data gain and handing it right back to the tech ogarchy.
Bimba really needs users in order to be successful in its early stages. Use the first option when you go to select your map and transit services, that is if you’re unfortunately also an American right now. Expect some bugs and issues when learning it. That smoothens out. Always make sure to pinpoint your location on the map first. Always favorite your frequent transit stops for instant loading. There’s a lot of other transit map database options but I confirmed my city worked with only the first option. Again I swear it’s dependable once your usual stops are all favorited, it gets situated enough to quickly pinpoint you and you get the right databases setup. I hope Bimba works for your city!
Hey thanks for sharing this! I’ll try Bimba. I’m planning on switching to GrapheneOS soon so the less stuff reliant on G services the better, as much as I like the Transit app.
Edit seems like it’s a bit limited on its coverage, with little to speak of in the US :(
Was hoping to get Chicagoland metro area transit.
Dang that’s unfortunate! Well transit is still very valid. Yeah I guess I was in like one of two cities or so it supports. I got really lucky. But transit only had theee minor trackers on it. It just uses googlemaps. I found it to be the best app for transit though. Bimba can’t compare due to it being so early on. But yeah it looked like Bimba was mostly for Europe and for some reason they like my city.