I too have found myself in the same boat, especially because Google Maps is probably (for my life) their best product. I was in the early contributor beta and have been pretty consistent in leaving reviews over the last 10+ years (although the offers for comp’d dinners have disappeared) - I’ve made an effort to be better, I have CoMaps on my phone, and I’ve started contributing to OSM. I think what would really seal the deal for me to shift completely would be integrated reviews. As you said, google and yelp have the market cornered for that, but there is no transparency.

edit: that transit app website is the worst marketer crap I have ever stepped in, scrolled so many fucking pages of artistic empty-words and vision speak and still have NO FUCKING CLUE what the app does. JFC.

Yesterday I had a nice moment watching my SO use CoMaps for the first time via my phone. I was driving, so couldn’t mess with adding an intermediate stop to the navigation, and she did it instead.

Anyhow, she’s literally never used the app before, and quickly found the business listing and added it to nav. I mean, she’s a smart person so her competence is not a surprise, but it speaks well of CoMaps and OSM that someone who is used to using Google Maps exclusively for years could just pick up this FOSS app and do what she needed painlessly.

It’s encouraging to me to see how increasingly nice an experience it is to be able to not use Google or Apple maps at all these days.

For off-road and hiking: (properly customized) OsmAnd is the best app in existence, hands down. My setup shows me all the information there is: surface type, road quality, required road clearance for tracks; surface, incline, difficulty, obstacles for trails; surface, vegetation, elevation, steepness for completely off-road/off-path sections; all the amenities that are there (water sources, picnic tables, random gas stations in the middle of nowhere); easily switchable and overlayed layers to look at aerial imagery if something is unclear on the vector map; and there is a 3D map to help visualize the terrain, which works both with vector maps from OSM, aerial imagery, and the combination of both (which has saved my ass on a couple occasions). All of this can be fully offline (including pre-downloading aerial imagery) which is indispensable when you’re in the middle of nowhere.

I avoid driving in cities at all costs (out of principle, shout out https://lemmy.ml/c/fuck_cars, but also practicality). When I really have to, I use OsmAnd. It’s perhaps not ideal (way too much information density even if you disable most things) but I’m using it when I get there anyway so why switch.

For walking in cities: OsmAnd is ok. I have a profile which disables most details and makes the map readable.

For cycling: OsmAnd is ok, but for some reason routing always takes ages, and I’ve never figured out why. If I need to take a longer trip I just use CoMaps - it gives slightly worse directions but finds the way nearly instantly.

For city transit: I mostly know the routes in my city already, but when I’m in an unfamiliar part of town I use the city’s transit app. It’s OSM-based, doesn’t require google play services or anything like that, provides great routing and instructions and live position updates. Sadly OsmAnd is not a good fit for this purpose: it takes forever to load the routes, and the coverage on OSM is not good enough to be 100% reliable.

For inter-city transit: sadly it’s not too good here, and it’s very badly mapped; I tend to give up and resort to rome2rio. I can usually find a phone number of the bus driver to call and figure out the current schedule.

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.

This is where you can actually contribute yourself. Adding businesses to OSM is trivial with something like StreetComplete or EveryDoor. The OSM community is strong where I live so I can find almost any business I would want to visit.

How many people use Street Complete to fill in the details with Open Street Map? It is really nice to use on mobile.

When I am in the office, I update Open Street Map during meetings. Gives me something to do, and I can look busy, or keep my hands occupied while I listen.

I use CoMaps these days (previously I used OrganicMaps). CoMaps has just added Panoramax images, which is very nice.

Not sure if most are aware of this, but unless you’ve got a totally de-googled phone, switching to another map makes no difference to Google if you’re on Android, as they get all of your displacements whichever map you may be using through the OS.

I’ve used Here we go for a few months now and find it pretty good for driving and also walking/biking. Has some info about businesses but unfortunately nothing close to Google. Unfortunately it also isn’t open source (I think) :(

I’m using OsmAnd and I’m happy with it. I can find food stores, petrol stations and restaurants. No need for reviews, life’s an adventure.

I’ve had a decent go with guru maps, which uses osm as the backend, I believe. All routing is done locally on your phone, so it can be hit or miss depending on your connection. Searching for anything besides an actual street address sucks. Oftentimes I’ll plug in an address, and then it will pop up the name of the business there, but searching for the business first never works. Just like on osm, it always seems to end up finding some city in europe that has a name sort of similar.

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!

OpenStreetMap - always. Or OSM~ if you like…

I’ve been contributing business hours and websites to OSM via CoMaps for a few weeks now. OSM needs that as a minimum to make it viable over Google Maps for me. Business discovery with Google Maps will be a huge challenge to match; Google is able to trawl its huge database of reviews for keywords so I can search “vegan cinnamon roll” and get results.

I use Transit App for bus schedules and routing.

CoMaps car/bike/walk/hike navigation has worked pretty well for me, but the turn by turn directions and voice are not as good as Google Maps. I’ve also been finding Google Maps routes are becoming laughably bad and it really irritates me I have to review a route before taking it now. Google keeps trying to route me through alleys and other dumb zig zag paths lately.

I try to use OsmAnd when I can. Its probably the best FOSS option. My Google alternative is Magic Earth, which is not FOSS, but is powered by OSM and more privacy friendly than Google.

I was happily impressed by how active the contributor community for OSM is. I got good feedback on my contributions. Its so satisfying to see the map improve based on your efforts.

For public transit in many different countries, I used to rely on Transportr but since it’s not being properly maintained and some countries stopped working, I’ve been relying on Öffi (Directions, Stations, Plans) instead. It presents the connections in a kind of time-based chart instead of a list, but I actually find it quite good after getting used to it.

I use transit for transit (it’s in the name) but it also gives fantastic bike directions and transit+bike if I’m not feeling a particularly long ride. I may have had to mess with the settings but it almost always shows biking as an option.

Otherwise I use OsmAnd, but since I almost exclusively get around by bike and bus I am usually looking places up to manually plan routes, not using navigation.