Maps after Google

When I decided to de-Google – nearly three years ago now – I predicted that Google Maps would be the thing I missed most. This has proven to be the case: that I can’t find a replacement for Google maps – even a paid one – continues to irritate me.

In this article I compare three privacy-respecting navigation apps which work on a fully de-Googled Android handset: OMSAnd+, Magic Earth, and Organic Maps. By “fully de-Googled” I mean running an alternative Android firmware with no Google Play Services, or even any attempt to spoof these services. All three apps are available as simple APK files: you don’t require access to any app store. You could get them all on the Google Play store as well but, of course, that’s no help to the rigorous de-Googler.

I need to make a few points, right from the start.

• I’m only considering road navigation in this article, not trails. I might write a separate article on off-road and topographic navigation at some point
• I’m in the UK, where all the apps I’m considering have pretty good coverage
• I frequently drive in places where there’s no cell coverage: full offline operation is a deal-breaker for me

Summary of the similarities

These three navigation apps have a good deal in common.

All are free to use, but some have additional, paid features which you may find beneficial or even essential.

All three use the same raw map data, although they store and present it in different ways. They all provide the same points-of-interest database.

All are perfectly useable for road navigation (at least in the UK).

All work primarily offline. They don’t require a mobile data service, but they do require you to download map data ahead of time. All improve over Google Maps in this respect: Google doesn’t want us offline, and offline use of Google Maps is flaky.

All the apps allow you to choose where to store downloaded maps, if your handset has multiple storage devices.

All can integrate mapping data from Wikipedia, if you allow this, and if you’re online.

All the apps are ad-free, and do not require you to provide any personal data

All the apps can show the map in overhead or perspective view.

All support the familiar drag, pinch, and twist gestures to move, zoom, and rotate the map.

All allow you to select a destination by a street name or postal code.

All allow navigation to a point selected directly from the map display, as well as to a particular address.

All provide turn-by-turn navigation, with lane guidance in some areas.

All three support different navigation profiles, for different vehicles – car, truck, bicycle, on foot, sometimes others.

All allow you to avoid particular classes of road when routing.

All the apps offer some control over power usage, which is important because GPS and an always-on display are both hard on your handset’s battery.

Nevertheless, all the apps drain the battery to a measurable extent, as you’d expect. All cause my handset to get a little warm, but not worryingly so.

None of the apps support routing by OS grid reference. That’s a shame: my 20-year-old Garmin Nuvi could do this.

None of these apps can receive traffic information from local radio stations although, again, the 20-year-old Garmin can. This form of traffic monitoring doesn’t require an Internet connection, and doesn’t create any kind of privacy risk. It’s a shame that smartphone apps don’t support it, even when the handset has a radio tuner.

On a de-Googled handset, none of these apps support voice control or voice prompts as supplied, although you can enable some of these features with additional apps – more on this later.

None of these maps is a complete replacement for Google Maps, unfortunately, despite having advantages in certain areas.

Summary of the differences

Magic Earth is the only one of these apps that isn’t open-source, and the one that has most need of a paid subscription to get the best from it. Organic maps has no subscription tier at all.

Magic Earth provides real-time traffic monitoring, and can route around traffic jams and road closures – more on this later.

OSMAnd+ is hugely more configurable than the other apps.

OSMAnd+ has a range of plug-ins that extend its functionality.

Magic Earth and OSMAnd both allow routing to a latitude and longitude, if you can find that information, and if you have the finger dexterity to enter it.

Despite the similarities, the apps all look and feel quite different, despite doing the same job with essentially the same data.

Map data

The source of map data is a major consideration with any navigation app. All the apps in this article use data from the Open Street Map (OSM) project. OSM is a collaborative mapping effort which has been running since 2004. It started in the UK, particularly in London, but it’s since expanded to the rest of Europe and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the world. There’s still limited coverage in some areas, even in the UK, but the coverage gets better day by day.

Anybody can edit the map although it takes a bit of skill and, if done conscientiously, a fair amount of time.
I mapped my neighbourhood for OSM towards the start of the project, and many other people have since refined and improved on my work. I presume that other regions have undergone the same refinement.

Consequently, the map data is mostly of good quality; I haven’t often found a road that just stops in the middle of a field, or had any of these apps send me the wrong way along a one-way street.

The map data includes not only roads, but tracks and footpaths, too, along with some general points of interest. There’s also some public transport data, although I don’t think any of these apps can actually route on public transport, as Google Maps attempts to. Although OSM recognizes different legal classes of thoroughfare – in the UK it distinguishes footpaths and bridleways, for example – the apps themselves may not display these differences. I’ll have more to say about how map data gets rendered later.

Since all three apps use the same map data, they have the same points-of-interest database, and they all show the same speed (safety) cameras, updated with the same frequency. None of these apps offers the same coverage of points of interest as Google Maps does, whether you use them online or offline. However, some neighbourhoods have pretty good coverage. They can all integrate data from Wikipedia, if you allow them too.

Real-time traffic information

Of the apps I’m considering, only Magic Earth can route around traffic jams and road closures. At least, it’s the only one that provides this feature without fiddly add-ons that might not respect your privacy.

Magic Earth’s traffic feature requires an Internet connection, and the app sends your location to the vendor’s server. Since you’re not identified as a particular user, I don’t think this creates a privacy hazard. If you’re worried, Magic Earth’s website discusses this point in detail, so at least you can make an informed choice. The app has to send your location because, without this information, the server would have to send a colossal amount of traffic data.

Magic Earth’s maintainers are pretty cagey about where the app gets its traffic information from. On the website, it says:

We get it from a third-party provider; it is not created by us.

So that’s clear, right? Elsewhere, Magic Earth talks about the traffic data being “crowd-sourced”, whatever that means. However they get the data, the traffic-based routing works reasonably well. I guess some of the subscription cost of Magic Earth, perhaps most of it, funds the traffic service.

Magic Earth also supports user-submitted traffic incidents. You can tell the app that you’ve encountered a road closure or a traffic jam, which will alert other users. The app doesn’t use these reports for routing, but the locations appear on the map.

In short, if you need real-time traffic information, Magic Earth is the only game in town at present.

Personalization and configuration.

Of the three apps, OSMAnd+ is the most configurable: you can change just about everything about it. And that’s a good thing, because the default appearance and user interface layout are pretty discouraging. The display is grey on grey, with map features not particularly easy to distinguish; but ten minutes’ fiddling with the settings makes all the difference. Unfortunately, the sheer number of configuration settings makes OSMAnd+ rather overwhelming, with pages and pages of menus all nested one under another. To be fair, you can use OSMAnd+ with default settings, but it looks and works better with some tuning.

The other two apps also allow a measure of configuration, but of different features. For example, Organic Maps allows you to set the size of the text labels on the map independently of the zoom setting, while Magic Earth doesn’t. On the other hand, Magic Earth offers finer-grained control over power management than Organic Maps. There’s no point trying to list all these relatively minor differences in what can be configured and what can’t – you really need to try all the apps, and see which best suits your needs.

I will note, though, that OSMAnd+ has a heap of optional plug-ins – a feature unique to this app. There are plug-ins for sea lanes and ski runs, for example. OSMAnd+ is by far the most versatile of the apps I’m considering here – certainly more versatile than Google Maps. I’m not sure how many users will need all these add-ons and customization features, but it’s good that they’re available if you do.

Map rendering

Perhaps the most significant distinction between these apps, in day-to-day use, lies in the way they render the map display.

Although they’re all working with the same raw map data, all the apps display this data using different image rendering technologies. This technological distinction might not be immediately visible, but the differences in colours, fonts, and symbols definitely is.

The maintainers of Organic Maps claim that their app is faster than the others, because of the way they optimize the map data for rendering. In practice, I find all these apps fast enough, but they’re right: Organic is definitely fastest on my device. OSMAnd is definitely slowest, however much I tweak its many rendering settings.

Although the OSM data includes both highway and trail information, Magic Earth doesn’t show a clear distinction between roads and trails in the top-down map: the same black lines, with slightly different widths. Still, it hasn’t so far tried to route my car onto a footpath, even though footpaths look like roads on the map.

Organic Maps, on the other hand, displays roads and tracks quite differently. By default, it displays routes you shouldn’t drive a car on it with dotted lines. OSMAnd+ allows you to personalize all these map display elements.

It’s in the perspective view that I see the greatest difference between the apps. Its appearance depends on the simulated camera height, the field of view, and how the camera angle tracks your motion. Organic Maps’ perspective view sometimes changes dizzyingly rapidly as I drive. While it’s useable, I find it a little disconcerting when the map swings wildly as I corner. All three apps have their own distinctive behaviour in this area and, no doubt, you’ll have your own preference.

Map downloads

All the apps allow you to downloaded maps for fully-offline use. In fact, OSMAnd+ only supports offline use out of the box – you have to download some map data to use it.

Organic Maps supports both online and offline operation, as does the paid version of Magic Earth (the free version only allows online use).

The apps differ in how slick they make the download process, and how much fine control they offer over when and how to download. OSMAnd+ offers, unsurprisingly, the greatest degree of control. On the other hand, Organic Maps downloads map data automatically as you move around or scroll the map – provided you’re online, of course.

I wasn’t expecting to find this dynamic download feature all that useful but, in practice, I did – in the short term, at least. In the long term, you’ll end up with all the map data you’re likely to need downloaded, at which point the difference in the download process won’t make much difference.

Costs and subscriptions

Magic Earth really requires a subscription to be useful, but it’s only a few pounds a year. For a while, the only way to subscribe was via the Google Play store so I’m pleased to report that you can now pay directly using ordinary payment methods like a credit card. Payment gets you a licence key you can copy and paste into the app’s set-up screen.

OSMAnd+ also has a subscription version. In fact, it has more than one, and they have different names, depending on where you obtained the app. I confess that I really haven’t been able to figure out what any of the subscriptions offer, if anything, that the free version doesn’t. I’m pretty sure that none of the subscription versions have anything I need. I’m happy to compensate the developers for their work, and wouldn’t mind paying a small subscription but, when I last checked, you could only subscribe using the Google Play store.

Voice features

All three of these navigation apps support voice prompts, but none has a built-in text-to-speech engine, relying instead on the platform’s voice support. On a de-Googled handset, there’s unlikely to be anything installed by default; you’ll need to find and install an open-source text-to-speech app.

In practice, only two such apps exist: eSpeak and RHVoice. You can get both from F-Droid. Of the two, eSpeak is the more robust, but it sounds ghastly – entirely robotic, lacking any inflection. RHVoice is just about comprehensible, although it’s nowhere near as good as the commercial offerings.

Once you’ve installed the text-to-speech engine, you’ll need to configure it at the platform level, select it for use in the Android ‘Accessibility’ settings, download and configure voice sample files, then select and configure voice output in the navigation app. I found all these steps to be a little fiddly, because they had to be done in a specific order. I also found that I had to set up eSpeak before I could set up RHVoice, for reasons that remain unclear. To be fair, Organic Maps has a page on its website that suggests you might have to do this, although without any explanation.

In the end, voice prompts do work in all the navigation apps but, on a de-Googled handset, you can expect a bit of fiddling.

Google Maps supports a measure of voice control, as well as voice guidance – but none of these apps do, even with add-ons.

Summary

I’ve used all these mapping apps extensively over the last six months or so. I’m forced to conclude, sadly, there’s no real substitute for Google Maps. All the apps offer features that Google Maps does not, but Google Maps still outperforms them overall. While they’re useable, none has the feature set, nor the slick interface, of Google Maps. All use map data that has some deficiencies in coverage, albeit fewer than there used to be.

All the apps I’ve talked about have strengths and weaknesses, but Magic Earth has the huge advantage of real-time traffic monitoring. This alone justifies its small subscription. In my opinion – and it is only that – Organic Maps is a better app in all other respects. It’s faster, with a better map display out of the box.

In practice, although I’ve spent many hours evaluating them, I don’t use any of these apps routinely, because I already have a sat-nav in my car. It’s got a big, bright screen, and doesn’t need charging. Its points-of-interest database is comprehensive although, of course, not as comprehensive as Google’s. Its user interface has been refined over decades to be intuitive, with single-click access to the most-used features. It has good coverage even in places where the apps’ coverage is sketchy – including Google Maps’.

All in all, in fact, none of the smartphone apps I’ve tried is as good as a proprietary automotive GPS unit.