Privacy
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
I agree that the idea is great but I have yet to find one single address that I need to get to using the osmand app, which kind of makes it useless. It seems incredibly difficult to use.
It's because OsmAnd has some serious issues searching for certain addresses. It's not an OpenStreetMaps problem, but an issue with the app. Organic Maps is better. Magic Earth is even better. Note: only talking about address searching. OsmAnd still has a ton of other useful features.
If I need to use OsmAnd, sometimes I'll copy the plus code from Google Maps, as that translates to GPS coordinates.
Sure it could be the app not going to deny that. It does feel like the app has so much to offer but it's difficult to use. I have heard Magic Earth is good but since this is the privacy community I didn't mention it or compare it to osm since it's not FOSS.
Copying codes from one source into osmand still breaks your privacy though because your using Google so might as well continue using Google. I'm not super paranoid or anything but for privacy sake I'd say unless I can contain my use case to the app (and osm) it doesn't work out.
I hope the entire movement grows 😁
are there any OSM maps that have the addresses?
I can see the addresses in Osmand but can't search them in the app 
Ah yes, you are right, I guess I just look on the map once I have found the street, knowing approx were it is
IMO OrganicMaps is a better OSM app.
Organic maps lacks a lot of features.
I agree, but I'd say it meets the needs of most users. Anyone that needs additional features should try osmand.
Is there a way to make it pull some data on road closures from google maps? There's a lot of construction on my way to work right now so I rely on google maps to pick the fastest routes, which it does well. OSM just doesn't have the data to do that.
OSM is just map data. No navigation. You can add any routing engine, the problem is, google does not share that data.
Gmaps WV
Osmand can't use google data because its proprietary.
What I do is I just give myself extra time to get to my destination.
With osm I take the shortcuts that are not on google.
I was hoping it could be scraped somehow, but yeah, that's very non-trivial for something like maps.
Testflight link can be found here: https://osmand.net/docs/versions/nightly_versions/
I think I'll stick with stable
Testflight = free in app purchases
No, OsmAnd is pretty bad. Data presentation makes it feel like something out of 1960-s.
Sounds like you just dont know how to use a map. Google maps is horrible to anyone who wants to actually use it like a map.
Lol ok
As somebody who also uses paper maps for hiking still: I find google maps got a lot worse over the years, and is pretty much unusable for just looking at maps, while osmand provides easily readable maps.
It is clunky and takes tinkering to get it just right for each use case, which can be a pain especially for new users. But once it's set up it works very well and most importantly works everywhere. While traveling abroad without cell data OsmAnd saved our asses more than once when Google Maps failed!
It's like Call of Duty vs Arma. Call of Duty is slick and is very good at a very specific experience. Arma isn't nearly as smooth or pretty, and it has a learning curve but once you get past that it can do a wide variety of amazing things the other simply cannot match. But admittedly it's not for everyone
At least it has a great and well recognizable name!
To each their own I guess