in France, we've been using it for years now and it works fine

its efficiency may depend on the number of volunteers that map a country and France seems to be in top 3. That may explain why it works here

I've heard OpenStreetMap isn't that good in the US because there's just not enough volunteers there. In germany, however, it's more up to date than Google Maps from my experience, aside from stores and the like. Routes on Organic Maps are the same as on Google Maps here.

I've had the exact same experience. The maps are great but the navigation (at least by car) is just not there yet. I've tried it a bunch of times and after getting sent off the highway and along dirt roads in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason I gave up on it.

I have not used either for cars but I have tried both for driving bicycles. The thing with open street map is that they have a lot more of the small streets that bikes can go on but cars can't. In my experience google maps usually wants me to drive my bike right on some huge multi-lane car road for 3 hours and totally ignores the bike path right next to it. When I went on a 1 month bicycling trip I tried both but found that OSMAnd had vastly better suited roads. Some of the tiniest tiny roads it sent me on were some of the most memorable of the whole journey. Sometimes the path in OSMAnd will just be a dirt path half a meter wide and I love that. I thought many times who on earth even added all these roads! I'm so thankful for every local nerd who added every single dirt road in his neighborhood on there. Simply amazing sometimes. But yeah it doesn't work at all if you don't download the map that's true. Also I really can't answer for navigating by car.

Lol wut? I've used it for over a decade in North America, South America, Asia, and Europe. It's fantastic.

Great for traveling without data. Also POI features make it wayy more useful than Google Maps. Good luck searching for a drinking water fountain or picnic table on Google Maps.

For me it's at its best when using it offline and without decent phone signal. I mostly use it off the beaten track, cycling, hiking and when needing to understand the terrain. I wouldn't use it as a substitute for Google maps or Waze though.

I've used it exclusively for 5 years for the privacy benefits. Destination and address search is BAD. Navigation is adequate.

Osmand works great for me, at least for bike navigation. Not driving yet so can't comment on how good that aspect is. Google maps has a few paths & routes in my area (village) either unmapped or incorrectly mapped, and i'm not too fond of Google anyway.

Personally I was after offline maps for my device to begin with, so for my use case Osmand is absolutely amazing

I use it daily for travel by bike or foot (kombined with BRouter). And its awsome!

Experiance by car is a bit mixed tho. (EU-Germany)

Well, it's important to adjust your expectation when using offline navigation. Vehicle routing is a type of constrain programming, which is a very hard problem where the more computational resource your throw, the more accurate the result would be. The problem is mobile mobile device typically have limited CPU and RAM compared to cloud service. While there are many flagship devices with fast CPU and big RAM these days, osmand were probably designed with the lowest common denominator devices in mind which affect routing performance.

Instead of using the default offline navigation engine, you can actually configure osmand to use online navigation engine. By default, there are only two predefined option there, but you can add more. Try adding a bunch of them and compare which one produce the best routing for your use case.

It works fine for where I am but using a privacy friendly alternative is going to come with downsides, as it depends heavily on crowd sourced data.

Searching sucks big time for me too, as locations are not written in english here, you have to assume what the english transliteration might be. I just start with short close matches, and that usually works out after a little bit of digging. Google maps usually gives out most searched locations right away and often that's you're looking after.

We can only hope It will get better as more people start using it

EU here. I mostly user Organic Maps and navigation works fine, especially so when going hiking. Some kind souls have mapped even the minutest mountain path throughout the country. Seriously, I think I've only had one example where the path wasn't on the map. And that was a wild trail. AND because I noticed in time, I tracked the trail from start to finish and added it to OSM later that day, so that's no longer a problem. Gotta love it.

Looking up addresses though... That still needs improving.

osmand is objectively the best navigation tool for me lol, anything proprietary wouldn't have as much detail nor the advanced features i want

Don't own a car, for cycling ans walking in northern Europe it's very good (except for the very occasional routing glitch).

It just doesn't have the data to find every place you want to find. Didn't use it for driving directions, but walking directions in South Korea were excellent. Google doesn't have them!

I'm in the same boat: driving and live in the US. Frankly, the biggest gripe I have with it is its terrible POI-related coverage & UX.

i used osmad successfully in austria, germany, chech republic, slovakia, denmark as pedestrian, biker and driver. i tend to download the maps because i dont like depending on internet. it works fine, routes are nearly identical to google maps (my wife doesn't trust osmand). of course you don't have actual traffic warnings - on the flipside: google does tend to invent streets ...

Not great for car navigation, I use Osmand 100% for bike navigation and for hiking

Organic maps has never let me down but I am a pedesterian

The reason you can't find addresses is likely because the data is not added to the maps in your region. I have similar problems here, though my state got much detail from batch updates last year.

I found a resource that merges addresses into osmand maps monthly, for north america and beyond. Even better, it does so in a way that normal address layout for north Americans can be used when searching.

Here in north america, we search by typing "255 maple street, some town 01234", while osmand expects something like " USA some town street 123".

You can download merged maps from opensupermaps.com, and find almost any address you seek, then you can navigate. Osmand is pretty good with directions, but sometimes messes up. Magic Earth is better at navigation, and has similar features to Waze. OSMAnd has much greater map detail, where people have uploaded it.

I've used only OSMAnd+ for years, the biggest trick is to get the latitude and longitude coordinates via https://www.latlong.net for your destination. As far as timing, I've never experienced longer routes. There are settings to indicate which route types you prefer, but you can also see the different routes to get to the same place and choose accordingly.

I tried using it couple of times and it was really bad. Not even the map quality or the routes but the GPS precision was terrible making the app unusable. Probably something with my phone...

But Magic Earth works great. Never had an issue with routes taking longer than on google maps but I don't use to for anything tricky with possible shortcuts like big city navigation. Mostly long distance trips.

I sometimes use mapy.cz. It's Czech and proprietary, but works great, has good English interface, no ads, no account requirement (it tries to convince you to make an account, but I've been using it without acc for years), great navigation and route planning and sources data from OSM. It's proprietary, but I like how they contribute a lot to OSM.

@eddie_of_ny MagicEarth is superior from my tests. Better in all regards in terms of navigation: from the UI to the maps, voices, detection of radar, heads up when you speed up too much. Overall I managed to switch to it after so many years of being unable to find a Google Maps alternative. But truth is if you want to find an exact place to go, and then maybe parking and what not, google maps is still far superior. Has a lot of info about a lot of places. But in terms of navigation MagicEarth is superior in my view.

I'm using organic maps almost every day

Usually if i'm not in a rush, and i'm not looking for a place that is definitely not on organic maps

And yes, hiking, long trips, organic map works really great

Also sometimes it's possible to share a link from gmapsVW to organic, but it's devastating to find out that this time it got the location wrong

I really like OSMand but in my location they don't have any address info (I can't enter someone's house address and find it, only street names) which is what I need 95% of the time when I need navigation. So I found myself using either Apple or Google maps more.

I used it on a roadtrip around Utah. There aren't too many options for roads in the southern part so as long as it takes me home it's doing its job.

I often use maps.me in the UK, which sources the same mapset as OSMand, and it's.. Good? Very useful when you're out of signal. The OSM dataset is about the best I know of for walking, even compared to Ordnance Survey, which many consider the best. I find their online maps, even on dedicated GPS devices, cluttered and not very zoomable. I've spent many hours adding to OSM over the years and it's quite wonderful to see local features that I added popping up in all kinds of places - it's amazing how many commercial mapping options source data from there.

I do agree that Google Maps is the best at routing, especially for traffic and re-routing options. I often have it on even for commutes and more than once it's saved me getting stuck in bad traffic because a road was closed.

I use Magic Earth for my motorcycle, since I'm often out of cell coverage and having fully offline routing is nice. I specifically have it set to avoid motorways, and choose the longer route on back roads if it can. And it works pretty well for that.

Have you customized the routing settings at all in Magic Earth? You can change some stuff for how it calculates routes.

That said anything doing local routing is likely always going to be worse than Google Maps which is doing routing calculations somewhere else based on a lot more data.

Turn-to-turn driving is one of the few things I use a closed app for. Specifically, Here maps which at least it's not by Google.

I've used organic maps for a while but had a problem in a trip I had to arrive on time and there was a change in the road that wasn't in open street maps that almost caused me losing a test I had so when I really need to make it I choose Waze lately. And I live in a big city where traffic info is a must so I'm using less of organic maps because of that..Waze gets me off heavy traffic while organic maps doesn't show arriving time correctly so..great alternative but not that reliable about traffic info depending on your needs

I use Sygic and I don't plan to switch. Its got a lot of great features for free, and not only do they use OSM, they contribute back to it with their content team, making sure information stays up to date for popular stores and sights. Downside is the voice navigation is locked behind their premium subscription. But i think its super valuable at $20/year, plus it allows you to turn your phone into a dashcam which I really like, and even more fun features using the camera. Sorry for sounding like an ad read, but I really like the app, and the company behind it.