I tried getting directions to the next stop on my rail line. When I searched for the station name it didn’t come up, but it did find a road under construction and two fences. I’m not sure why I would ever search for a fence. When I cancelled the search and selected the Transport category before searching, it found it but there was seemingly no way to view the route details beyond which line to get on and how long it would take.

With Google Maps, it will let you see the specific walking directions to the origin train station and how long it takes, it will tell you the line and direction to take, how long that train journey will take, which stops are between the two stations you are travelling between, which exit to leave the destination train station at, and walking directions to my destination once I leave the train station. It will also let me put in what time I want to arrive and work backwards to figure out what time I need to leave, taking the train schedules into account.

It’s great that there is an open source option available, but it has a long, long way to go before it’s a good choice.

Search sometimes isn't ordered by distance even in the US. The "obvious" answer I'm looking for can be the 3rd or 4th.

OSM data in my area is much higher quality than any of the commercial competitors. But, I guess that's because I and a community of local contributors improve them. I'm sorry to hear the quality is substandard in your area, and the amateurish vibe likely comes from the fact that most OSM data is contributed by amateur volunteers.

I use this app regularly and it doesn’t work in the US either. But I love the offline map feature. I just avoid searching for anything.

Searching is hard: OpenStreetMaps' Nominatim is not very good, but some products built around it like Mapbox's search is very good. Don't know what they add exactly, but there is a big gap.

Mapbox is a big company. They can run their geocoder ("Carmen", at least during the time it was open source) with 10x hardware requirements, have a full-time team of engineers and testers, and they add commercial licensed (paid) data sources. For Germany for example they use official government data, not OpenStreetMap or other open data.

Nominatim is very good. It's just tightly scoped (it doesn't claim to offer anything but rudimentary POI search, it's just focused on placenames), and limited by OSM data which doesn't have house-level addressing for most of the world.

To be fair, Google Maps gets it wrong pretty often in VN, too. Maybe not off by 132km, but it a few km in the wrong direction. It’s especially bad about assuming that odd number addresses should be across the street from even numbered addresses.

In the last few years, Apple Maps was just as good/bad in VN, so I switched to it.

Why did you expect it to work for every single place on the world? It's a free OSS project.

Because the title of the article is "An open-source maps app that doesn't suck" when it should have been "An open-source maps app that doesn't suck in the US".

There are people on here that don't live in the US, and it's sometimes exhausting to have to add these suffixes in your head by default. You always have to assume that, if the author doesn't specify, they're talking about the US, whereas most of the world doesn't actually live in the US.

I agree 100% with your second paragraph, and understand the frustration, but this isn't an instance of that. From what I've seen online, the most praise for OSM comes from European countries, where it seems to have better data than even the Google/Apple offerings. It has pretty good data here in India too, surprisingly good in some parts, pretty weak in others. But the main hypothesis holds - out of the many open source maps apps I've tried, Organic Maps is the one that sucks the least, in terms of usability, performance, robustness, etc.

I think there’s a difference between doesn’t suck and rarely makes mistakes. Maps.me works well in Europe. I haven’t tried it in Asia, but I will.

In the meantime, OSM is open source. If you are particularly concerned about non-US performance, perhaps the problem is not with blog authors but with OSS contributions to OSM outside the US?

The person in the comments merely noted that it doesn't work well in Vietnam. Given that this is the internet, and given that the author said it works well without giving a clear location as to where it works well, I think it's safe to say that in this specific instance, "Why did you expect it to work for every single place on the world?" has a simple answer: Because OP said so, in the article.

Nobody here demands that an OSS project works well in every part of the world. What is being criticized here is the US-centric view of the article author, and the original comment merely noted that you can't make a general assumption of suckiness based on one location.

Again, the problem isn't with the app. It's with the way the article assumes everyone reading this lives somewhere where the app doesn't suck.

Except OSM data is consistently better in Europe than in the US.

apple maps tends to do this to me as well (in germany).

i guess fuzzy-matching locations and sorting by distance is hard