Openstreetmaps has 8.75% of the contributors Google Maps has.
Organic Maps has 1% the user base Google Maps has.
Agreed! I got one for that too:
Lemmy vs Reddit
Monthly Users (0.004%) 44k vs 1.2b
The difficulty is asking people to get started with this. People want to get to work/navigate as quickly as possible to where they need to be, they don’t want to be figuring it out. Social media can be janky and you’ll be patient, but if you’re late for something because you’re struggling to adjust to an app you’re more likely to go back to Google/Apple Maps
Take a definition of ACTIVE contributors, because both projects have a lot of inactive contributors that only registered and didn’t do anything but just one update and left, if any.
Google is known for dropping projects that they can’t monetize enough. Maps’ been around for a while, but it can always just disappear for public use. Or decide that you need a Google account too use it and that’s a privacy nightmare. We need alternatives, but in this case, we need free and open source alternatives. We can’t put all the eggs in the same basket.
internet explorer, yahoo mail, myspace, icq… things change. unfortunately it’s mostly due to a huge company having the resources to promote their product to convince people to migrate but still. people can leave old giants.
i think proton is getting shittified as well but you should make a post listing all these alternatives for different services, rather than peppering them in the comments.
Don’t post pictures of text
Lemmy added an alt text field for image-only posts a few versions ago; it would be nice if more people would use it.
At least this post does link to the mastodon post which it is a screenshot of.
Reminder: As long as you don’t get rid of “Google Play Services” running as “root” 24/7, removing/not using Google Maps doesn’t mean so much to Google.
Additional reminder that Google not only records your location minute by minute, they also record your motion activity through your phone’s gyroscope and know exactly what you’re doing (walking, running, biking, driving, playing sports, etc). You can view all of this in your history. It’s genuinely infuriating that they can get away with this.
You can turn it off in your settings, but as with any proprietary software you can never be sure that they’re not still doing it (why wouldn’t they? that’s just leaving profit on the table)
The phone sensors are so advanced that tools like “Sleep as Android” can record a perfect sleep snapshot just by leaving the phone on the bed while sleeping. I think Google can also record “private encounters” too. Actually, everything with a good sensor (smart watch(!)) can record everything. I am saying don’t be afraid, be horrified :-)
The gyroscope can record your speech: https://crypto.stanford.edu/gyrophone/files/gyromic.pdf
And no OS requires permissions for apps to access your motion sensors.
How many non tech people would use this, especially if not in play store. 95% of people don’t know fdroid exists
What impetus would most people have to mentally even start considering replacing Google Maps?
Much like with making people switch to Firefox as a browser, the first step to a tech user is understanding that to most non-tech users, the concept of thinking about a browser choice makes no sense, as their goal is to open a web page, and the specifics between now and the web page being opened are irrelevant. It’s equivalent to making non-DIY people care about the specifics of the brand of the hammer at home, it’s not like they couldn’t, but the very idea of doing that would usually leave them looking at you bewildered, as it feels arcane to invest brain time into a tool this simplistic and invisible.
Does the app have:
- Location sharing
- Live traffic updates
- Public transportation
Missing one of these is a deal breaker.
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Yes, you can share location, the widgets aren’t as fancy as Google integration with everything.
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Not feasible without the constant data harvesting in the background, which it doesn’t do. It doesn’t log your every move as Google does. Privacy vs surveillance, will always be at odds.
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Depending on the area. In my country public transportation is way better on OSM than on Gmaps. Oftentimes Gmaps won’t even have large structures like train stations or bus terminals. It depends on users and contributors.
