this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
1278 points (97.0% liked)
DeGoogle Yourself
9474 readers
400 users here now
A community for those that would like to get away from Google.
Here you may post anything related to DeGoogling, why we should do it or good software alternatives!
Rules
-
Be respectful even in disagreement
-
No advertising unless it is very relevent and justified. Do not do this excessively.
-
No low value posts / memes. We or you need to learn, or discuss something.
Related communities
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Time for a repeat comment: Organic Maps does everything Google Maps does (except traffic conditions), and is FOSS. Please encourage places to contribute business information to Open Street Maps.
Also doesn't do public transport routes
"Except traffic" is not a little thing. It's like putting up an ad for a house with all the features you'd expect, except a roof.
With my daily commute, there are a dozen routes I can take and traffic conditions make it so that from day to day, there can be an hour difference between different routes. It's literally the only reason I use navigation apps over a cheap GPS unit with no live online connection requirement to navigate.
Traffic condition can only be provided if you track millions of phones. I don't want that, so I opt out. I don't want Google to manage traffic for me.
Or you can do it like News stations do and just use a fucking camera feed and police acanner to have someone say "hey - there's a lot of cars at Interstate 99 and Main" or "There's reports of a wreck at 300 Elm street".
Traffic reporting doesn't require device-level tracking.
In order to do this at scale, that's a lot of someones who all need to be paid. You'd need several people, per city, to manually review traffic cameras and manually issue reports.
Unless you want to pay $200/mo for traffic updates, you can't do this using humans.
Growing up, we had 5 TV stations and 20 radio stations that managed to do it just off of cereal advertisements. I'd gladly pay 5 bucks a month for it, and with millions of people in the metro area just having 1% of people use a $5/month service you'd be looking at 6 figures a month, which is plenty to pay for the service.
The only way to know if it would work would be to roll the dice and make a startup. You'll need enough cash to cover a year or two of projected operations, the capital to develop the application and infrastructure in addition to the money required to advertise the service.
At the same time you have to realize that your proposition for potential customers is 'You can pay us $5 to get the service that Google gives you for free and it only works in this one metro area.' De-googling is a popular topic on nerd social media but the average person would gladly trade all of their privacy to pay less money.
If we could magic wand a company into existence and capture all of the privacy focused customer base in a large metro area then yeah, the company could pay the operating expenses. But going from 'This is a cool idea' to 'We have a successful service that has a positive cash flow' is a hard, capital intensive, process.
I think a municipal economic development corporation grant could be an answer.
EDCs exist in lots of cities. The usual setup is they're given a percentage of local sales tax, and they provide grants to businesses to move into town or start up. When the business is sucessful, they'll end up paying back more in taxes than was given to them initially, both through direct taxes, but also by providing higher-paying jobs for residents, who will pay more in their property taxes and spend money at local businesses, bringing in more sales tax.
The EDC could pay for the startup to provide the service locally, and then it can spread to other cities, who can either pay for it as a municipal service, or through subscriptions.
I think this is important. That said, traffic info is the whole ballgame for many people. People who live, work, and drive in metro areas frequently use map applications even when driving everyday routes to avoid traffic.
I don’t see Google/Waze/Apple maps getting any less popular unless there is a FOSS alternative that includes live traffic, which does not seem possible while remaining free. People will choose free every time, especially since Google maps works so well.
Personally, I would pay some amount for a privacy-minded alternative, something like OrganicMaps with live traffic. But I doubt it could ever attain the user base it would need to provide accurate traffic info.
Yea, I really wish I had more spare time. Algorithms like this are an area of expertise for me, and I'd love to build an anonymized service that works with Organic Maps. It's annoying when I know it is something I could make that would support high volume, but just don't have time for (mainly because of all the ongoing optimization it would require).
Talking about FOSS; I prefer OsmAnd because its licence is GPLv3, as opposed to the Apache 2 licence from Organic Maps.
Yup, big OsmAnd fan, too. We use it for backpacking and biking, but have found OM to be more driver friendly, which is why I recommended it here.