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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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.
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 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.
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.
Organic Maps works well enough for me. Even for car travelling through Apple Car Play it’s reliable enough. I don’t know if there are better alternatives, but I can vouch for this one.
I only miss satellite pictures to facilitate my navigation as the map can be a bit too abstract…
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.
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.
I’ve been using Mapy.com for the last six months and it just works. Sometimes it’s even better than Maps.
I use it in combination with SherpaTTS in Android Auto for car navigation
Ive been using Here Wego, with SherpaTTS for voice instructions
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.
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 :).
Its also great at finding and optimizing paths for bicycle!
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+
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.
@IDew
You can change the size.Where exactly? I cannot find it in the options…
