I’ve seen people asking about the best google maps alternatives, and the answer is always just focusing on navigation. For that we have plenty of great apps like CoMaps.
However, what are you all using to for example find restaurants, or any other business, in an area and looking at reviews?
when business owners believe that potential customers are using Openstreetmap based apps, they’ll add their businesses. until then, we’re stuck adding them ourselves. maybe an outreach program would help
https://osmforbusiness.com/about
There are some tools to help with this
I mean, community-sourced is what I would want anyways, so …
IMO we need these business owners to be part of the community bc otherwise the task is too big to map and update all these millions of places with a small, ideological group. i don’t think they should have any control over reviews or anything though
I’ve come full circle with this and concluded that the best source is local people. I’ve spent so much time messing around, hungry, on the internet. Now I try to just ask a random person or two for a recommendation.
I believe there are a few proposals of integrations of different open source review systems into OSM, but they haven’t been finalized yet.
Totally agree this is the number one thing missing from open source maps rn, and it should be top priority years ago.
I’m interested in the answer to this as well. I navigate exclusively with comaps but I still have to keep google maps to discover restaurants, hotels and attractions.
I do not think that you can beat Google Maps in that case, as pretty much every business adds themselves to Google Maps voluntarily and also regularly update the entry. No business cares about OSM afaik.
Until Google Maps dies, this will continue happening. The network effect.
yeah, that’s my main use for gmaps on an average day, so I also wasn’t able to replace it unfortunately
even if they are listed in other apps, I’m often looking for things like open hours and pictures, which are outdated or missing in open source apps
