this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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👍🏽great stuff. BTW, stop using google products, there are enough good alternatives.
Is there a good alternative for maps?
CoMaps fulfills most of my needs
It depends on what you use Google Maps for. For straight-up navigation, CoMaps is good. And I mean it's good at the navigation itself for the most part. Although sometimes when you enter in an address it thinks you're referring to the entire street. But most of my favorite restaurants and a lot of locations that have been open for a while aren't on it, which I've been happy to add. Locations that have been closed for a while are still on it, which I've been happy to delete.
But if you use Google Maps for discovering places or looking at pictures or seeing reviews of businesses, or if you do a lot of multi-stop trips, comaps doesn't have those features even in the littlest, tiniest bit, and in that sense there is legitimately no (Foss) competitor. For instance, if you're out and about on a vacation and you're trying to find a restaurant, nope, comaps is useless for that. If you're trying to plan a trip by seeing what's around somewhere, nope, useless for that too.
It really just focuses on navigation itself, and it does a pretty good job of that. I use it to get around when I drive.
I really want CoMaps to be a valid choice. Its maps look are absolutely great, like Ordnance Survey Maps. But I don't normally use it for the reason I experienced again just today. I use Android Auto in the car with my GrapheneOS phone, but my phone SIM reader failed the other day, so this phone has no internet. Google Maps refused to work without internet. So I just used CoMaps again today. This is in the UK, and lack of traffic info matters. It does routes down the little country roads that are technically 60mph, but you literally can not drive that fast down them. Even with a death wish. But it plans them in assuming that speed. This results in bad routes and inaccurate times. (Though I do enjoy country roads, when used well.)
Yeah, this is a misunderstanding of speed limits by the app developer. In the UK, as far as I remember, these national speed limit roads have just never had a speed limit put on them. Things like accidents, petitions, zoning etc. is how everywhere else has gradually added speed limits.
So although you could say “well, national speed limit on a single carriageway is 60mph” by default, that has almost nothing to do with how fast people are able drive on them. To work that out, you’d probably have to do some Waze-type stuff.
I've very sympathetic to the developers. It's a stupidly hard problem to know what speed is likely, at what time of day, on these roads. Far far easier to just have the data of what people are actually doing on these roads. That's what Google do.
Though if you can detect country road, you could safely assume half the speed advertised.
It's also cultural. Country roads in my country are 90 km/h and unless it's dangerous, that's what you would do on them. Which means speed is lower than posted in tight spots and curves, but not normal roads.
That's pretty much the UK really. Only you are very rarely able to get close to the 60mph limit at all, let alone safely.
The are more dangerous by statistics. Some random links:
I love these roads and the British countryside, but it is definitely an eyes wide open environment. Certainly can be a shortcut, but often SatNavs without traffic info, use them when they really shouldn't. You used to often see signs telling people to ignore their SatNavs and not take this road, but it's less of a thing now as everyone just uses Google Maps. Basically, I want that traffic info as public access for all SatNavs. Not locked away.
On the plus side, it worked without internet!
So you're saying that you can't drive this speed limit on those roads because of the amount of traffic, right? not because of some sort of geographic feature or shape of the roads?
Yeah...hard to imagine much of a way to get traffic updates in comaps, or any OSM project honestly. It seems like it would have to be a separately maintained service. And either way, I'm guessing the number of users that would buy into something like that just wouldn't be enough to get meaningful data most of the time. Especially since it pretty much relies on tracking people's locations, which I feel like is counter to the purpose of most people's reason for getting into those services.
Oh it's not traffic. They are often quite empty. British country roads are narrow and often stone wall lined, or tree lined, or embankment lined, or all three. They are winding and can be quite steep. Corners can be almost back on themselves. Often there are bits down to a single lane for both directions, with passing points for someone to wait for the other direction to pass. If you encounter someone who can't reverse, you might have to reverse quite a way.
I think they do mean that the layout of the road means you can't drive at the speed limit. In the UK we have quite a lot of rural roads that are technically legally 60mph limit roads, but they are in reality very narrow, windy roads that you couldn't safely drive on at 60mph. I guess CoMaps goes by speed limit for estimates so it measures these roads as if they are 60mph but in reality you may only be able to go 20mph without dying
I'm pretty sure there are appropriate tags to mark that in osm. comaps should be using them if the roads are properly tagged
HERE WeGo (aka HERE Maps) is not FOSS, but has traffic, satellite view, offline mode, etc. Some POI might be outdated (due to it being not Google)
Here is trash and not open
Yes.
I have only one of their services that I do not see replaced any time soon. YouTube. What they do there is impressive, and very, very hard to replicate.
Not a fan of YouTube, don't get me wrong. But I see nothing comparable out there (maybe AWS, but they just run some infrastructure orchestration).
Google will kill YouTube long before anybody else is able to pull off the same stunt.
Or is there a service comparable for video streaming?
Nebula.tv is great, but won't replace all of YouTube.
Been using Newpipe/Pipepipe for the longest time, but Google has been screwing with the Youtube API so the Newpipe Extractor hasn't been working properly for the last two updates. Can't keep a video playing in the background for long, can't download OPUS audio files, playlist albums from YouTube Music are still iffy.
Genuinely about to switch to Nebula or Peertube. Fuck Google, I hope Pichai dies.
Those are just YouTube clients, though. The 1st-party YouTube client apps are pretty widely regarded as crappy, but they are far from the main problem. The YouTube content and its distribution are almost totally unmatched and almost certainly operate at a loss. Google is uniquely willing and able to operate it that way because it adds more value to their other business units than it costs them.