Comment by kibwen

I'm slowly de-googling due to the WEI debacle, and my resident OpenStreetMap evangelist recommended this as a Google Maps replacement. It obviously doesn't have all the features of Google Maps, but surprisingly there are several things that I feel it does better. For example, the transit overlay is much more visible and shows transfers between lines (although that's the only overlay it offers, no bike lane overlay sadly (although, honestly, GM's bike overlay isn't all that useful)). Searching is obviously instantaneous and shows all your hits, so I can search for "cafe" in my city and immediately get a map with pins for every single cafe, which can be overwhelming at large zoom levels but it's fine once you zoom into an area (and it's much less "mystery meat" than GM's approach of selectively only displaying a subset of your search results based on your zoom level, so I think it's a worthwhile tradeoff). And no ads, obviously. The biggest downside is that the search is basic, and searches the whole planet while only sporadically prioritizing results in your current area, or your current zoom, or your downloaded maps. If you have an address it doesn't matter, but if you don't have an address then you'll find yourself longing for the more intelligent search of Google Maps. But it's nice, and I'm using it more and more often by default over time. However, until search is improved, I don't think I'll be able to uninstall Google Maps entirely (although eventually maybe I'll just use it through mobile Firefox).