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One of the great bright lights of open-source software and user-driven community projects is OpenStreetMap, which offers an open-source mapping platform similar to, but also very philosophically different than, Google Maps.
It manages to duplicate most of Google Maps using primarily the contributions of enthusiastic users, too.
In my experience, OpenStreetMap is every bit as accurate as Google Maps and quite frequently surpasses it, particularly outside the US. That it is even anywhere close to Google Maps is a testament to massive amount of time and effort the OpenStreetMap community has invested in the project.
One place that Google Maps has always had OpenStreetMap beat, though, is Google Street View, for which – until relatively recently – there was no OSM equivalent.
Telenav, one of OSM's major supporters, has now launched a new project dubbed OpenStreetView with the goal of crowdsourcing street-level photography for OpenStreetMap across the globe.
Experience for yourself at https://www.openstreetmap.org.
(Score: 2) by quixote on Friday December 16 2016, @06:45PM
I stopped using OpenStreetMaps a few years ago because it was so hard to make it stop using the local alphabet. You had to use a different URL and IIRC the map data was sometimes less up to date. And when I was traveling, that was a real showstopper. I don't read kanji and Hindi and Arabic and Thai.
If they've fixed that, OsmAND would be of real interest.