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I'll gladly give it a try, but I have a question...
How to this company make money?
There are no ads, and they claim to not sell my info, yet they appear to have the funds to make a nice app with a lot of interesting features, how to they accomplish this?
Right I have taken a test drive with the app, without navigation but having the map up, and there are a few things I dislike.
I hate audio warnings, I use navigation apps as a complement to driving, like they say in avaiation "aviate, communicate, navigate", any automatic warnings tend to just distract me.
Ok so, sound was disabled, on to location accuracy.
Good when on a road, but I turned on to a parking lot and it refused to acknowledge that I had left the road, so road snapping is set too high
Ok, what about the map itself, the design of it?
The map looks great!
But the 3D view is set at a too shallow of an angle and shows me the horizon, that is just distracting to me, and I could not find a way to change it.
Ok, what about the UI?
Nice, I like it apart from the speed display on the map overlay.
It is too distracting, and I don't like that it shows your speed in bright red as soon as you go 1kmh over the limit.
Ok, what about the data?
It is unforutnately outdated or just wrong in the area I drove in.
Sadly I will probably be going back to google maps.
Good question. I think it's basically a demo app for their location based libraries you'd use to build like a custom ambulance service routing solution.
I'm a little confused. You said you didn't use navigation. What kind of warnings would it give you when not navigating?
Is it notably more distracting than the speed display Google has? That turns red when you're over the limit, but I've never really noticed it except when looking at it.
According to other comments, these guys apparently just use OSM. So this is something you could definitely help fix yourself. Though I appreciate if it's more than a small handful of errors that would be too much of a task.
Yeah that was unfortunately my experience last time I tried an alternative mapping application. Organic Maps, I tried, on recommendation of some Lemmy users. But search in Organic Maps is literally unusable. You can't always search for full addresses, only street names (I can put in numbers on some addresses, but not mine, apparently), and even that is useless because the results list contains "street name", "city", and "state". It doesn't tell you suburb. Which means if there are multiple streets in the same city with the same name (which, at least in my city, happens all the time), you have no way of knowing if you've clicked on the right street. It also required me to turn off "avoid tolls", because it incorrectly reports one of the best routes I regularly take as being a toll road because if you go straight at this one intersection where I turn right, then you would be on a toll road.
Add to that the loss of things like location history and crowdsourced realtime traffic data, and it quickly becomes too big of a trade-off.
It's unfortunate because I want to be able to support FOSS and get my data away from Google. But like you've just experienced with Magic Earth, I just find the competition isn't good enough to actually use.
It warned me about something called "static camera" or similar, where there are none.
It also warned me about my speed being too high, at that time it was accurate, but later I saw the speedlimit display show the wrong information.
The speedometer is more prominantly displayed in Magic than in Google Maps, it shows on a dark black background while Google maps has their speed info so that it blends into the background, making it less distracting, also Maps shows it only when I am actively navigating, Magic shows it constantly.
What they mean by that (whether it's accurate or not is another question) is a speed camera or a red light camera that's located in a fixed spot, as opposed to a mobile speed camera that might be pointed out the back of a police van, or handheld by a cop standing on the side of the road.
I suspected as much, but in the decade I have been living here, there has never been a camera in that area...
It stems from General Magic - look them up on WIkipedia. I saw this quote and realised how forward thinking those guys were "In 1990, Porat wrote the following note to Sculley: "A tiny computer, a phone, a very personal object . . . It must be beautiful. It must offer the kind of personal satisfaction that a fine piece of jewelry brings. It will have a perceived value even when it's not being used... Once you use it you won't be able to live without it." Nailed it.
I know about them, I didn't realize that they were the same company here, interesting.
The have a paid sdk for businesses, not for endusers, Magic Earth is just a byproduct.
They also collect anonimized traffic data from users:
Both info is from their faq: https://www.magicearth.com/faq-en/