I get terrible (not “suboptimal” but genuinely ridiculous) routes enough of the time to call the program not fully working. There is also a thing where if there are two routes of roughly equal quality, instead of choosing one and sticking to it, OM will keep trying to switch between them, asking for a lot of crazy U-turns. The POI search is also lame: if you

That’s weird, I only see 1 route choice when I use it.

enter “McDonalds” and there are 10 of them in the area, it shows them in some weird random order instead of nearest first.

True, that is a bit annoying, although it’s getting better, if you move the viewport over the area you want to search on (if you’re not there already), it seems to try and show local stuff first.

I do use OM in preference to Google Maps because privacy and offline etc., but it is only usable maybe 75% of the time. If I’m in a hurry or otherwise unwilling to make some wrong turns, or if OM messes up, I end up using Google. Google simply works a lot better. Ugh.

That’s a shame. It’s pretty good where I live, and I can find most things I need to travel to, although yes, the index could be better.

It would also be nice if OM’s voice directions included street names, and that map updates didn’t download entire new maps, but those are features to be engineered. Still, the California map data is over 1GB all by itself, that has to be re-downloaded once a month or so. De Lorme Street Map in the Windows 95 era fit all the US streets on a CD-ROM (700MB) so while OSM data might be richer, there’s still a bunch of bloat going on. And streets don’t change that often, so the monthly update should be tiny compared to the initial download.

Fair enough. I’m in the UK, and both here and in Europe, sub-country areas are available for download, which helps. Maybe the streets don’t change often, but load of POIs change from one month to the next. This is just 1 day of changes from https://osmstats.neis-one.org/?item=countries:

A lot of it will be “trivial” metadata i’m sure, but still, there’s quite a lot of change going on!

What are peoples’ issue with Organic Maps? (seriously - it would be interesting to know) I use it all the time, and it’s great. Some of the routes are sub-optimal, but not often. Finally you can search with postcodes (that has been a problem in the past).

Maybe it’s not perfect, but I only ever have to default to google maps when someone sends me a crappy shortened link to something. Once I get the actual address, i can swap back to Organic Maps. It used to eat battery on my Fairphone 2, but I had other problems with that phone too!. I love it, and the offline maps are perfect for when I am travelling.