Comment by kmarc

Other map apps offer different routes between two points, showing the trade-off in time. Organic Maps calculates one route, and it doesn't matter if it's through a deadly car-congested highway.

My example is going from Zürich West to Downtown. Here is my experience:

* Organic maps: calculates fast, although through a street with a lot of traffic, no alternatives offered.

* OsmAnd: takes 5 seconds on a flagship phone to RENDER the current view. I try to avoid zoom and pan. What the hell. Calculating the navigation is either a couple seconds or a minute. The whole UX is totally broken, however, at least you can select to prefer byways / bicycle routes.

* Mapy: fast rendering, fast pathfinding, alternatives offered, configurable to use bike paths.

* Google Maps: totally random what happens, it's a combination of the above (I guess it tries to use live traffic data, too?)

Now the funny thing is that there is an actual signaled bicycle path (which I prefer, since it avoids traffic), and OSM does have this data. None of the app would prefer that path, unfortunately (it's maybe 20 minutes instead of 18 minutes, but much safer).

It feels like most of the apps are hyperfocused on one type of navigation / exploration / feature set (being offline is huge, though), and nothing comes close to Google Maps' "not the best, but delivers alright UX across all these features" approach.