Google is a powerhouse today, but that power is built on a lot of the open source software (e.g., Android) that you claim cannot compete. I am willing to bet a significant sum of money that within the next 10 years Google (which by now forgot its "do not be evil" origins) will be successfully challenged on both the search and the mapping fronts by an upstart leveraging some open source software. My 2c.
I'll take "this kind of garbage" Every Single Day to the end of time.
The same thing could happen (and has) with proprietary software, and you are then out of luck.
With open source? Use the last known good version, fix wat you need to, even if you are the only one person on earth interested in that piece of software. Maintain it. Or just find someone else who is doing it (that's a "fork").
I've stopped using a lot of proprietary software and apps due to this, though examples are fading from my memory. On Android, I think I can name at least ES file explorer and Touchpal that went down the Adware hole.
Nowadays I only use FLOSS. Not even GAPPS. OSMAnd (which I donate to) is pretty nice and featurefull, it suits me as a maps power user, but it can be a bit daunting. There used to be a maps.me fork on F-Droid, but it was recently removed: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/7951/d...
Looks like the maps.me community is reorganizing, and hopefully it will re-emerge stronger and more resilient that it was before. Also, lessons learned with this might be useful to other projects.
> And who knows when the currently best fork will get taken over by the next wallet software huckster?
This is the reason why you should pick a project with strong guarantees: https://www.debian.org/intro/why_debian leads to https://www.debian.org/devel/constitution Only running open source software is my way of making sure I can escape lock-in and always have a way out.
The paid version of ES File Explorer is better than ever. (Though sadly neither version seems to be available on F-Droid…)
Free software is free as in freedom, not (necessarily) as in free beer. Developers have to eat too :
For instance, I bought every "simple mobile tool" app (from Tibor Kaputa) on the play store (even though I don't use Google Play, at least they are in my family library), as well as OSMAnd plus its plugins. I also bought some open source games on Steam, such as mindustry. Krita is there as well, but I prefer donating directly to KDE.
I am totally in favor of paying devs, though I generally prefer to make anonymous donations, trough liberapay (unfortunately not tax-deductible) for instance, as a way to cut the middle-man, (I tend to spend more than 600€ a year on free software donations, which is not negligible to me: almost half a monthly salary).
I don't really understand your point, to be honest: ES is "abolutely proprietary" as far as I know, so it won't be available on F-droid. I was trying to come up with examples of proprietary software that changed under me. Source access is a must for me, this is about freedom, not price. I also have trust issues with proprietary software.
It was first about the paid version of ES File Explorer being top-notch (unlike the ad-funded version), which could have mislead some people.
Perhaps I shouldn't have put it in the same message as the other point.
The point is that yeah, competing with Google in some field that isn't integral to Google's advertising business is quite possible and realistic. There are real-world examples.
2) commercial entity often develop open source software, this dychotomy is false
3) mapy.cz is strictly superior for hiking, and for most of foot navigation (at least in my opinion)
I tried out your idea -- I went to the official site, openstreetmap.org, zoomed in onto my neighborhood, and then searched for "Chinese restaurant" in the search. It returned a result for a place apparently literally named "Chinese Restaurant" in Portland, OR. That doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.
The data is usually there if you live in europe, it's just hard to search. There are two related things that make it hard, bad tagging of the data and the extreme diversity of data. E.g. this winter I've used osmand to find fire pits, it was a great way to use the data but there seems to lots of ways to tag firepits so a search might not find all of them.
POI quality is the worst part of OSM, Nominatim has quite weak search and POI Nominatim search is hilariously bad.