Title is editorialized because the original is, frankly, clickbait garbage
Ilandar ( @Ilandar@aussie.zone ) 99•2 months agoI am pretty over these videos of people whining about the amount of data big tech collects while refusing to move to alternatives because “muh convenience”.
UraniumBlazer ( @UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee ) English53•2 months agoFor those unaware, Organic Maps (uses OSM) is really good! It’s good for 90% of all ur navigation needs. For the rest 10%, there’s no good alternative to google maps unfortunately.
jherazob ( @jherazob@beehaw.org ) English13•2 months agoMy issue with these is that my use case is public transport, for that it seems like GMaps is still unbeatable, i hope to find an alternative as good or better based on OSM soon because it’s the one tool i still have no alternative to
Obi ( @Obi@sopuli.xyz ) 5•2 months agoWhere are you from? Where I live (in the Netherlands) there’s an official tool from the public transport services which works just as well as gmaps to plan your train/tram/metro/bus journey.
UraniumBlazer ( @UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee ) English4•2 months agoSame same. This is a problem in shithole cities. Good cities have their own transit apps (which are like Uber for public transit).
Unreliable ( @Unreliable@lemmy.ml ) 2•2 months agoOut of curiosity, any examples? I know for NYC people use Citymapper, but that’s available for most big cities.
UraniumBlazer ( @UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee ) English2•2 months agoCalgary, Hong Kong, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, etc.
Facebones ( @Facebones@reddthat.com ) 3•2 months agoIf you’re American, some of them support transit now. I have Magic Earth and it supports it in most major metro areas (and even my dinky little city I believe lol)
ReversalHatchery ( @ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org ) English6•2 months agoI think 5 out of that 10% is supplemented by OsmAnd. But it does not have public transport schedules and traffic data.
michael_palmer ( @michael_palmer@lemmy.sdf.org ) 3•2 months agoTraffic data?
If a grandmother had a penis, she would be a grandfatherTo implement this function, Osmand should gather location data from every user. ReversalHatchery ( @ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org ) English1•2 months agoNot necessarily. The data is out there. I don’t think they could make it a part of the core app for legal reasons, but OsmAnd has a plugin system. Basically anyone could make it other than OsmAnd devs. Distribution could happen over an F-droid repo.
Kilgore Trout ( @kilgore_trout@feddit.it ) 1•2 months agothe data is out there
Where? GMaps sources this data from each of its users.
lemmyvore ( @lemmyvore@feddit.nl ) English1•2 months agoAnd Google also trusts that data because it’s collected at OS level.
If an open project tried to collect location data they could not trust it. There’s no way to prevent malicious users from sending bogus data.
ReversalHatchery ( @ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org ) English1•2 months agoThat’s where. But also I wouldn’t be surprised if there are also other sources.
lemmyvore ( @lemmyvore@feddit.nl ) English2•2 months agoThere are often individual apps for various cities and transport organizations.
Traffic has always been a mixed bag. Yeah it’s nice to be able to see that street A is more busy than street B. But so can everybody else, and they’re all going to use street B now.
BearOfaTime ( @BearOfaTime@lemm.ee ) 2•2 months agoMeh, I find most people don’t even bother.
I use secondary routes 90% of the time by default, because they’re just as fast with less mental effort and less risk.
Why go with all the lemmings?
ReversalHatchery ( @ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org ) English1•2 months agoBut so can everybody else, and they’re all going to use street B now.
In my experience that’s not how it works out. It’s about balancing the load, while making the driver take the least amount of detour needed.
Street B only has to handle the remaining traffic, and street A has a chance to unclog or at least be a faster route as some of its traffic does not exist anymore. lemmyvore ( @lemmyvore@feddit.nl ) English1•2 months agoThe app doesn’t control what people do, it just makes recommendations based on busy segments, based on data which is already obsolete by the time it’s being used. Ultimately the lemmings will do whatever their lemming brain tells them to.
(That is, assuming the app doesn’t actually try to spread people around the various routes. But I doubt that any app maker wants to assume responsibility for that.)
Ultimately traffic apps are mostly useless. You can’t “solve” traffic congestion with apps any more than you can make water flow faster through a pipe. Congestion is constrained by available road space and choke points. Google Maps is mostly an excuse for Google to collect location data, with a thin layer of features on top to make it seem worthwhile.
ReversalHatchery ( @ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org ) English1•2 months agoWater does not think, it flows where it can.
People while driving cannot know which route isn’t clogged, because cars are not flowing like water. If that would be the case all the small streets around main roads would be full too. If a street is clogged, and the driver sees it, they can decide to go on a different route, but in waze if they are using it to plan a route, it’ll try actively to avoid roads that are too busy. lemmyvore ( @lemmyvore@feddit.nl ) English1•2 months agoIf that would be the case all the small streets around main roads would be full too.
They are. If they aren’t then your city is not really that busy. It’s actually a major problem in some cities for the residents of small residential streets that suddenly start getting lots of traffic because their street gets recommended on Waze or Maps.
Niiru ( @Niiru@feddit.de ) 3•2 months agoWhat are the rest 10%?
PrivateNoob ( @PrivateNoob@sopuli.xyz ) 2•2 months agoReviews most definitely. Hard to beat that
ditty ( @dditty@lemm.ee ) English1•2 months agoWill give this a try later, tysm! Apparently it also works with Android Auto?
Inevitable Waffles [Ohio] ( @InevitableWaffles@midwest.social ) English2•2 months agoYes, it does. I have used it successfully for months. My main issue is I need traffic data due to a new job and figuring which route to take. AFAIK, no other nav app has traffic data. That’s the only real bummer.
Kilgore Trout ( @kilgore_trout@feddit.it ) English1•2 months agoHERE WeGo has traffic data but of course, as in Google Maps, it sources from other users of the same app.
If not many people use HERE, then the data is also not reliable.
delirious_owl ( @delirious_owl@discuss.online ) 1•2 months agoCan you search for street addresses?
PrivateNoob ( @PrivateNoob@sopuli.xyz ) 7•2 months agoWell change can only be done through voicing disapproval first, although Google will most definitely won’t stop the data gathering in Maps.
Well It’s understandable if a lot of people wouldn’t switch over to OSM-based apps. I’ve tried OSMAnd, and I observe 3 drawbacks. Lengthy public transport calculation (fair since it’s computing on the phone), no reviews in POI areas (really hard to catch up on), weird results in transportations
Ilandar ( @Ilandar@aussie.zone ) 10•2 months agoWell change can only be done through voicing disapproval first
Yes, but if you as the consumer never actually stop giving the company your money and/or data then there is little incentive for them to change. Just complaining by itself does absolutely nothing to a company the size of Google. You need to actually follow it up by using your limited power as a consumer to support an alternative. Only then, and if enough people do the same, will the first company consider making changes. If they don’t, at least you are supporting an alternative project and helping it to improve so that it may one day feel like less of compromise.
PrivateNoob ( @PrivateNoob@sopuli.xyz ) 1•2 months agoAbsolutely agreed.
AggressivelyPassive ( @agressivelyPassive@feddit.de ) 7•2 months agoMost people (public and private) never go beyond disapproval, though.
You’ll hear people complain about this and that, but never even looking for an alternative.
umbrella ( @umbrella@lemmy.ml ) 6•2 months agoalso a lot of open maps alternatives rely on YOUR contribution to be good instead of a hired team at some corpo.
use it and help out with it and you will have your open mapping app!
T (they/she) ( @Templa@beehaw.org ) 3•2 months agoI always try to keep in mind there are a lot of people that are simply unable to transition to alternative apps because they lack knowledge and time to do research on such things. What we see through videos isn’t the majority of the people, it is people that make content for the majority.
People have hard times getting into more technical stuff already. Expecting people that are struggling to survive in capitalism to spend their free time learning about underground alternatives or to turn into sys admins and host their own stuff is out of touch if reality in my opinion.
Edit: just wanted to add, I wouldn’t say the problem is on the people, but on big tech that predates on them
Ilandar ( @Ilandar@aussie.zone ) 1•2 months agoThose people aren’t complaining. The guy in the video specifically mentioned Open Street Maps as an alternative, but only in the context of “well maybe one day Google will go in this direction”. He has zero interest in actually switching and ends up making a bunch or excuses justifying his Google Maps usage. He is not trying to be part of a solution here, he is just whining.
kbal ( @kbal@fedia.io ) 29•2 months agoNormal people: Gladly give google maps access to location data at all times and never think about it
Me: Instinctively worry that on the rare occasions I do use google maps it’s somehow identifying me and keeping track of all the locations I look at, so I sometimes look at random places I’m not really interested in just to throw off the algorithms.
But most of the time I prefer osmand.
delirious_owl ( @delirious_owl@discuss.online ) 10•2 months agoMe: can’t install Google Maps because my phone doesn’t have gapps. Awesome.
kbal ( @kbal@fedia.io ) 3•2 months agoOh yeah, I tend to forget that there’s an app and it’s not just a website.
kylian0087 ( @kylian0087@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) 3•2 months agoYou have been free for a while then i suppose.
delirious_owl ( @delirious_owl@discuss.online ) 1•2 months agoOh, yeah, I do use the website sometimes to convert an address to GPS coordinates and load that into OSMAnd
refalo ( @refalo@programming.dev ) 3•2 months agoYou: thinking they weren’t already tracking you by a zillion other means including wifi/bt and cellular triangulation
Me: google-free wifi-only phone with all radios/mic/camera physically disconnected unless I need something specific
utopiah ( @utopiah@lemmy.ml ) 3•2 months agoNormal people: Gladly give google maps access to location data at all times and never think about it
Yet also same normal people get utterly genuinely shock when they see a map of their past locations for the last 3 months.
Possibly linux ( @possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip ) English1•2 months agoUse fossdroid
delirious_owl ( @delirious_owl@discuss.online ) 18•2 months agoBecause we use OsmAnd
Fleppensteyn ( @Fleppensteijn@feddit.nl ) 1•2 months agoGiving it a try since I haven’t heard of this.
It seems to have cool options, but for navigation it’s just completely unusable.
Blizzard ( @Blizzard@lemmy.zip ) English16•2 months agoTL;DW?
EDIT: thank you guys for the summaries.
Ebby ( @Ebby@lemmy.ssba.com ) 15•2 months agoGoogle saw neat idea, built cool software, users happy. Replace cars to generate map data with phones for utmost accuracy. Trends of maximizing profit from cool technology makes users sad and services suck like other popular sites. Host begs Google not to make maps suck next.
Kairos ( @LodeMike@lemmy.today ) 2•2 months agoGoogle has a massive leg up in its technology and use cases so everyone uses it. The guy described it as a “1%” problem (as in the last percent of use cases that are hard to add to the app) and Google doesn’t have as many of those.
muntedcrocodile ( @muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee ) English14•2 months agoI’ve been trying to use osmand but it doesnt have public transport capabilities or live updates which is just too much its missing out on to switch for 100% of tasks
onlinepersona ( @onlinepersona@programming.dev ) English12•2 months agoIt’s fine to use it for 80% of tasks too and try to contribute to it becoming available for 100% of tasks.
muntedcrocodile ( @muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee ) English1•2 months agoI can’t use it for 80% I don’t even have house numbers on streets Ive added a whole bunch tho so I guess I’m making it better for the future. Idk where to even start with adding live traffic/public transport to it what language does it even use?
joewilliams007 ( @joewilliams007@kbin.melroy.org ) 1•2 months ago“HERE we go” has that. Although i dont think its open source, its probably miles better than google.
muntedcrocodile ( @muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee ) English1•2 months agoI don’t see any advantage over google unless its open source.
FriendBesto ( @FriendBesto@lemmy.ml ) 5•2 months agoMost people into Privacy, either stumbled upon the niche or work(ed) in some IT or related field. Have tried talking to the family, they are in denial or do not care. Or think that using WhatsApp is a wise choice and/or they are immune to ads. Somehow. It’s like talking to a goat who has more desire for habit over sense.
I remember playing with Google Now, thinking it ‘neat’ and then within seconds realizing that in order for it to work optimally meant giving Google everything. It got me to root my phone and removed Goople Play Services and/or different ROMs. Today, I do not use Google for anything or use front-ends with a VPN or if ever really needed, Tor.
Organic maps or OSMAnd. Plus, I find these two better for cycling and hiking, over Gmaps. If you must use Gmaps briefly, then GMaps WV from F-Droid.
cyberwolfie ( @cyberwolfie@lemmy.ml ) 1•2 months agoWhat is the benefit of using GMaps WV over the web client in a browser?
utopiah ( @utopiah@lemmy.ml ) 1•2 months agoI for one don’t talk about it… because I don’t use Google Maps. I briefly mention OSM or CityMapper when people send me GoogleMaps links but otherwise better to show than tell IMHO.
Well video is about regular people, not us