What is the Best offline Navigation most similar to Google maps, and why?

dlb

Please share your experience

Grkrz

Magic earth

pdagenius

Sygic

User2288

If you are looking for privacy respecting frankly you don't have too many options anyway. If you really want to know whats best for you I recommend installing all of them and have a play around with each.

One's I know worth looking at are:

OsmAnd+
Organic Maps
Magic Earth

Magic Earth is not Foss but its privacy respecting and probably provides the best experience. OsmAnd has the most options but I didn't like the "feel" of it. OrganicMaps is a friendlier version of OsmAnd, but perhaps lacking in comparison.

I'm not familiar with Sygic that pdagenius mentioned so can't comment.

malatoi

As mentioned above, there are only three reliable tools and all of them stand on OpenStreetMaps.

I use OsmAnd+ for hiking and biking, because it has so many possibilities and tools.
Organic Maps for navigation driving by car.
Magic earth I just tried, when I experimented with /e/ OS, whre it is the default map app. I liked it, but I prefer FLOSS. Magic earth has crowd sourced traffic alerts. That's a advantage compared to OsmAnd+ and Organic Maps.

I don't have any experience with Google Maps, so I am really happy with OsmAnd+ and Organic Maps. :)

ve3jlg

What is the Best offline Navigation most similar to Google maps,

Do you want "Best" or do you want "similar to Google maps"?

Any app which does not track your location and movements like Google maps does is superior if you care about your privacy. I believe I can reasonably say that includes anyone reading this.

I personally use OsmAnd+ because of reasons that others have already identified.

Graphite

I find that Magic Earth search is pretty bad. If you search before GPS lock, it'll return results from thousands of miles away. Doesn't seem to remember anything about previous position. Also, if your search isn't exact, it doesn't prioritize closer fuzzy matches, and again your results list will be filled with better matches from thousands of miles away.
Organic Maps seems to find POI much easier. Also easy to search by street name alone.

For navigation, Magic Earth was superior to Organic Maps though.
I keep both up to date with maps. And also keep Google Maps on my Google user profile just in case OSM isn't doing what I need.

dlb

ve3jlg Do you want "Best" or do you want "similar to Google maps"?

Realistically there is no better navigation on mobile device than Google maps. So I am searching a similar one. I care about privacy, that's why I'm here.
What is best in your opinion and what is similar to gmaps.

pdagenius

Sygic

dirksche

dlb I use Magic Earth for car routing and Organic Maps for hiking, cycling and exploring a city.

dlb

pdagenius how is sygic privacy wise? Is it open source?

pdagenius

dlb Actually, I have no idea. I use it as you can buy a subscription outside Playstore direct from Sygic, the maps are offline and are way better than Magic Earth. Additionally, there is something going on with Magic Earth that makes my phone overheat. This does not happen with Sygic.

Kottonballs

Another alternative is to install Google Maps, download a map, and then revoke network access.

User2288

Google maps only allows an offline map for 1 or 2 weeks. After that you have to connect again. And when you do connect it uploads all the data it has gathered from you since it was last connected. It gathers your location and records wifi data as long as its running and uploads all of it when it reconnects to the internet. Just FYI.

This may still not be a problem for the user depending on their scenario.

Also google maps is still superior for other things like business info and other location information such as bus stops. Has more detail.

I personally have separate profile just for Gmaps in case I ever need to look up this kind of information. I don't use it for navigation though because I don't wanna give it my location.

alex_herrero

Nobody said anything about Waze. Yes, it's Google, but I'll happily learn something today from your thoughts about it.

ve3jlg

User2288 Also google maps is still superior for other things like business info and other location information such as bus stops.

Hmm.

I used the excellent and default public transit layer on OsmAnd to look up bus stop locations AND the routes they serve, and the bus stop numbers just a few hours ago. Then I entered a bus stop number into the front page of my city's public transit website and got realtime arrival information for the routes arriving at that stop.

I did this while significantly protecting my privacy and not having to look at ads that are always major clutter to me (Google maps). I did not even have to install a public transit app which is piled with a horrific number of trackers and ads, or being tracked by Google because I had to enable Play Store (GMS) to use the app.

My personal location and movements are private information I always want to protect. I am glad to be able to easily do so.

The pedestrian and cycling layers on OpenStreetMap in my city are top notch too.

roddyd

I didn't like OsmAnd when I first started using it, but now that I'm used to it I prefer it over everything else.

spiral

roddyd
In OSMAnd, I was never able to successfully enter an address and navigate to it. The app would never be able to find any address I entered. Was I doing something wrong?

DeletedUser517

spiral With OSMAnd I downloaded my local map but since I do not use google services I could not get anything to work until I changed location source to android api. My default setting was for google play services