First of all, thanks all for your tips on how to unravel my life from GMail. I’ve slowly started to migrate over to Proton mail (slightly controversial but I feel the full suite will be easier to sell my wife on, who loves her big tech corpos)
Now to the topic at hand, what are some good alternatives to Google maps for driving directions?
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I use it in combination with SherpaTTS in Android Auto for car navigation
Just tried it out. I’m astounded at just how deep the settings go. It’s bordering on too configurable.
I’ve been using it for years, but I agree that it’s almost too configurable. Start small, and don’t ezplore the menus too deep :).
This is the best alternative I found so far. I love how much you can configure it to your own needs. There is a bit of a learning curve, but once you get over that, it’s so much better than g maps.
And another vote for osmand+
Its also great at finding and optimizing paths for bicycle!
Osmand+ is definitely the right answer for customizability and power; however CoMaps has made the GUI decisions for you in a nice way and is ready to go out of the box.
Osmand+ added secure location sharing to their roadmap for 2026 which is something my family really misses - so I will he using and supporting when that drops.
Laslty, open street maps have one fatal choke point - search is pretty terrible. Even inputting a correctly formatted address often yields no results or too many confusing results. Searching by place name is hit or miss, mostly miss. The only workaround is to verify address and get lat long coordinates for that address- I typically do this from a third party website.
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I had great success with Zood on stock android but no luck on Graphene using non - google location services. I’ve reached out to the Dev for integration with OSM and/or beacondb support with no response.
If anyone has Zood running on Graphene without switching to google location services let me know I’d love to use it
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Can you share how you did this? Did you have to seat beacondb as your location services in iode or in the app itself?
My experience is that Zood cnnot find me unless I’m using default (google) location services, and I haven’t been able to find a workaround for my set up
I use OsmAnd+, works fine for me.
Disclaimer: I don’t often go to places I’m unfamiliar with so I don’t need directions very often, but when I do it seems to get the job done. YMMV.
Ive been using Here Wego, with SherpaTTS for voice instructions
I know OpenStreetMap exists as an alternative, but I don’t know if it has decent driving directions. You could check it out and see if it has what you want/need.
I use it most of the time and it always gets me to my destination just fine! The text telling you to take X exit could be bigger though.
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Where exactly? I cannot find it in the options…
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I somehow thought the original comment was talking about Organic Maps but I now see it was about OpenStreetMap aha. My bad!
I personally found Osmand to be horrible UI wise, it was impossible to find anything with the search bar. CoMaps on the other hand, is wonderful, uses a lot less battery charge and the search works great too. Only downside is that I had to install a text-to-speech software seperatly as my phone does not have Google TTS.
I’ve been using Mapy.com for the last six months and it just works. Sometimes it’s even better than Maps.
Like others here, I use open street maps data, but I’ve found comaps to be the best frontend to it. I can approach the navigation functionality of google maps with it.
CoMaps.
Congrats on the big steps!
I still have to change email on a few banks, Steam, and some others. Proton just sends your shit to Google. I was so pissed. I’m already about to switch to something else and abandon it.
Wait, Proton sends user data to Google? Doesn’t that run contrary to their privacy ethos? Do you have an article on that I can read?
So basically, I had Gmail as my backup email, so when I got some emails on my Proton account, it sent messages to my Google email saying that my Proton email had received messages and who they were from. They were regarding purchases I made, so it basically defeated the purpose of leaving Gmail if Proton sent them my purchase history anyways.
I removed the backup email and it fixed the issue. It still pisses me off. Also Proton tried as hard as they could to force me to collect all my gmail spam in that account. I got around that by making a bogus gmail and then signing up to proton with that, IIRC.
Open Street Maps. On android you can use osmand from fdroid
With that said, I’ve noticed that OSM does not have a lot of addresses, especially for residential areas, so I would recommend pairing that with gps-coordinates.net two convert street addresses into GPS coordinates.
OSMand has been recommended many times here. Its a paid app on the corpo app stores, with subscription fees or a $70 purchase to access premium features. However, the version on F-droid is free and as far as I’m aware has those “premium” features enabled.
Openstreetmap’s address lookup is the one usability issue I have encountered. OSM can only look up building numbers if that specific building has been added, and many are not. When navigating to an address I often have to find it in another app and copy the coordinates.
I use organic maps because I like it but it does have some issues so I would look into it and probably go with a service that pulls from the same source(osm/open street maps)
I personally use OSMand+ but its not as nice as Google maps. I’ve had some luck using Magic Earth in the past. Something about it pissed me off and I uninstalled it, but I can’t remember what. It might be worth trying
I love Magic Earth, but I recently read on Lemmy that they require a subscription now.
Mapy.cz, OSMand, Organic maps and so on.
