Comment by charlie-83
11 hours ago
I really want to stop using Google maps but the issue I have with every other option is that I can never just search for the place I want to go to. 99% of the time, the place I am going to is a business, searching "<shop name> <city name>" on anything other than Google maps either gives me nothing (OsmAnd in this category) or might give me some the shops of that chain but in a random order and intermixed with towns a hundred miles away which have the same name. More generic queries like "petrol station" are even worse. The best solution I have come up with is to use Google maps to find the actual address and then copy that into the other app but at that point I might as well just use Google maps.
Anyone have any solutions to this?
The situation with retail chains is improving thanks to projects such as https://alltheplaces.xyz/ (disclaimer: I'm a contributor) and efforts of some OSM contributors to focus their contributions towards comparing OSM and ATP features to add missing shops, remove closed shops, update opening hours, etc. For one such example, see https://matkoniecz.codeberg.page/improving_openstreetmap_usi... for a tool (created by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=matkoniecz) which is used to match and compare OSM and ATP features.
This work has been slow to take off though as the OSM community has traditionally been stuck on time wasting debates about whether opening hours displayed on the wall of a shop are copyrighted (just the raw data, not a photo of their presentation), and debating the merits and pitfalls of armchair mapping vs. on-the-ground mapping. At least these historical roadblocks seem to now be mostly resolved.
For OsmAnd, you might be able to use the OBF import feature (see https://www.osmand.net/docs/user/personal/import-export/) to add the raw ATP dataset, or potentially other open data such as Overture Maps if that is more to your liking. Data is mostly sourced direct from brand websites, APIs, etc (as if you were using a storefinder map on their website).
Interesting project osmand user here mainly in Germany.
In some cities osm data is far more accurate when t comes to opening hours or if a shop actually still exists compared to Google maps. However searching for them is a pain that one needs a bug improvement.
Since I can't rely on the search I usually try to find the poi category and click though the results,super markets,restaurants, pharmacy,atm etc works but so many cliks and caveats. Search needs massive improvement.
Is there a feed of closed shops somewhere? If so, ArchiveTeam could use that to save their websites to archive.org.
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/
Nothing ready-to-go that I'm aware of. ATP will just observe in the next weekly crawl that a shop is no longer returned by the storefinder API call or sitemap crawl, and that shop will simply not be present in the next weekly dataset generated.
To set up archives of shop-specific pages (e.g. record of opening hours, address, etc at a point in time), one could monitor the latest builds of https://alltheplaces.xyz/builds.html and when a new build completes, take the new build and 2nd oldest build to compare differences. Then for any feature whose attributes have changed (address, phone number, opening hours, etc) archive the `website` and/or `source_uri` attribute pages again to ensure the latest snapshot is captured. Any new feature would get the same treatment so the page for the newly observed shop/feature is archived for the first time.
I'm also aware ArchiveTeam projects tend to commence once the impending collapse of a retail chain is known and someone realises there is a website not archived which would be useful to preserve. Monitoring of ATP feature counts for brands across time may give some hint of how a brand is performing and whether it is growing or shrinking without having to find press releases and financial statements of the brand. Even if a brand suddenly announces bankruptcy (it happens all the time), generally the website will remain online for at least a few months whilst a new buyer is sought or whilst each retail location has a fire sale to get rid of remaining merchandise. It's also worthwhile to be aware of acquisitions of retail chains as this often results in the new parent company changing websites soon after acquisition closes, possibly removing useful content that once existed. Websites also change "just because" and this could be observed after-the-fact by seeing when ATP spiders break and get replaced/fixed.
> The best solution I have come up with is to use Google maps to find the actual address and then copy that into the other app
This is what I do.
> but at that point I might as well just use Google maps.
I disagree. OSMAnd is so much more user-friendly as a map. Google Maps is a great business locator, but that's all it really does well.
Here's a comparison, albeit this uses openstreetmap.org rather than OSMAnd: https://i.xkqr.org/gmapsvsosm.png
I'm stubborn enough to use Google Maps in my web browser (signed out) and then copy/paste the actual destination address into the app for turn-by-turn directions (e.g. CoMaps, OsmAnd). It's inconvenient, but it's also one less Google app on my phone.
The Google Maps moat has always been its breadth of accurate, current business information. It is unfortunately the Yellow Pages of the Internet era.
Same issue, OsmAnd is great, but unless geocoding services like Nominatim get as good as Google Maps's search, I cannot use it unless I know the precise location of where I'm going.
I don't have solutions but I have similar experiences about this. It's probably a difficult problem since there are so many different queries and differences in the geospatial data.
Sadly, often shop data is simply missing in OpenStreetMap.
(I have an ongoing project attempting to make slightly easier to detect and add missing ones but it will be just tiny step forward, not solution)