What apps would you love to have open-source alternatives for?

ClearCutCoconut@lemmy.world to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 269 points –

It seems like the FOSS community is continuing to grow, and FOSS apps keep getting better (Immich reallh blew my mind recently), which is a big win 😎 but there are still many apps I use that I would kill for an open source alternative. I am curious what you guys think? Are there any apps you'd love alternatives for?

447

You are viewing a single comment
View all commentsShow the parent comment

OSM is not that user friendly as Google Maps for sure, but if you really want you really can replace GMaps. It probably heavily depends on your country and if the OSM community is active there, but for example here in Germany the mapping information is basically on par with GMaps

How do I get directions with OSM?

There are many APPs build on top of OSM that can do directions in a user friendly way. Personally I use MagicEarth, which uses OSM but isn't itself open source. They include live traffic from some other nav provider.

My goal was to degoogle my phone and MagicEarth was the app which came closest, but I bet you can find all sorts of webapps or fully open source ways to get directions if you don't care for live traffic.

Gotta look at that. Live traffic info is one of those things, that OSM lacks...

Is there no browser version? Do I have to get the app?

Visit openstreetmap.org or osm.org for short and where you can search for a place there's an icon with arrows beside it. Hit that and then you can put in the From and To. You can pick car routing or bike routing or walking.

But no public transit?

AFAIK someone is working on it. But the problem is the high dynamics of public transport. Routes and schedules get changed quite often, schedules might be quite irregular (think only Sunday at 3:14). And all that data has to be stored offline. Stops might be changed do to construction work for a week. And that is in the optimal case: In some countries the bus comes when it comes, and stops if it wants to stop.

Currently you can see where the lines of a bus or the metro go, but that's about it, I think.

You have to use an app for that. OSM is mostly a big database with an API access to it. There are a lot of them out there with a lot of different focusses. For navigating with a car OSMand is pretty good. They are on fdroid.