Hacker News Reader

Comment by usrn | Hacker News Reader

All modern map apps are completely terrible. Most of the time Apple maps doesn't draw any labels. The actual map is almost purely decorative.

View on HN

HERE maps was one of the last to keep scales and was guaranteed to label a street if you zoomed in. But after looking at their web viewer, both features have been dropped.

Most "map" apps are more for exploring where gas/food/etc is so directions can be generated and less about being a useful map.

When I need to orient myself better and especially when outdoors on foot I prefer mapy.cz, they have also a very nice Android app (I don't know if they have one for iPhones) which also gives offline maps. I think they at least partially use OSM, but very nice presentation and smoothness is there. Much better than OSM-And (which last time I used a few years ago).

OsmAnd "online maps" are much smoother than the default vector maps, because your phone doesn't have to render them (they also take more space).

I find OsmAnd incredible for

- hiking (lots of useful maps, possibility to add overlays like mountain slopes, satellite images, possibility to add maps from other sources as long as you have the tile URL, all maps can be downloaded and used offline, great Altitude/Slope graphs, POI searching),

- cycling (navigation works very well, CyclOSM shows useful information, BRouter for serious bike routing),

- driving (navigation works offline, good as a backup or if you don't like Waze showing you McDonald's ads every time you stop).

Also it's a free software (that you can still pay to help the developers).

Agreed, I hate when streets on maps don't have labels. It would be so easy to do.

Oh my god, this is such a huge pet peeve of mine, particularly when walking or riding a bike. They draw out the path on the map but 90% of the streets aren't labeled, including the street you're supposed to turn on.

I've been bitten by this recently and I think it's because they're still following paper map rules for labels - like they'll[1] put the street name halfway down the street even if you're zoomed into the first 5% of it because that's what you'd do on a paper map and it would work fine there.

(I'd also like the option for bigger / contrastier labels and a way to turn off all the business names because 99% of the time I don't want them cluttering up the map when I'm just flaneuring about London.)

[1] Apple Maps and Google Maps both suffer from this. maps.me also suffers from it but inconsistently - sometimes it'll put it at 50%, sometimes it'll double up at 33% and 66%, sometimes it'll just not label a road...

I don't understand why they can't figure it out, just fucking slide the text to where it's visible.

I find it almost impossible to read street names, park names, etc on Google Maps.

Maybe something on Open Street Map? Worst case, it's all open source so you could hack that back into a client.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com