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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Does comaps actually support mass transit directions too?
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.
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’ve got Comaps installed but on the rare case I’m driving somewhere new I crack open the street directory.
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!
I use it in combination with SherpaTTS in Android Auto for car navigation
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.
@sunth1ef
For Location Sharing you can try ZoodI 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
@sunth1ef
I once ran Zood under iodeOS with the BEACONDB location service. It worked wonderfully.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
@sunth1ef
BeaconDB can be set there as a location service via microG.
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 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.
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.
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 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…
I somehow thought the original comment was talking about Organic Maps but I now see it was about OpenStreetMap aha. My bad! There’s no option for it on Organic Maps is what I tried to say
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…
With OSMand you can get a satellite view if you wish
I’ve been using Mapy.com for the last six months and it just works. Sometimes it’s even better than Maps.
