One of my biggest motivating factors is that I'm nearly trapped in google search for things that involve local search and wanting to see a map, distance to drive, x,y or z in my area.
I've also just recently stumbled onto the https://osmand.net/blog/osmand-android-4-1-released/ ability to load into my car so that's neat.
* The jank you mention - it was one of the first things I noticed as well.
* Search just doesn't work. They have addresses and POI in their database, but for whatever reason, search strings don't match, and addresses don't work at all either. It's completely broken.
* Really needs the ability to toggle direction mode, i.e. always pointing north, or pointing in the direction of travel or the device's compass.
I also would like to add a couple improvements that are not really flaws with the app:
* Ability to record GPS path
* Ability to share recordings/trails - would allow me to get rid of AllTrails
This largely rectified the address search in OSMAnd for me, though it does not update automatically and so requires occasional reapplication.
Hope that helps!
Also, the direction mode toggle you mention does exist, and works quite well. The flipside of Osmand's awesome configurability is that it takes me 5 minutes of digging to figure out how to enable things like this.
It does this.
> * Ability to record GPS path
It does this.
There is also an option for "pointing north", "pointing in the direction on the compass", "pointing in the direction of movement". It's not intuitive though: double-tap the compass icon.
I know that sounda crazy but here me out. One of Microsoft's old tricks is called FUD. It stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. The idea is that people's opinions of things can be nudged using fear, uncertainty and doubt. Enough to sway opinion at scale.
In this case, if you truly believed an app is superb, you're doing it a massive disservice by giving it your criticism publicly. I know, I know, how dare I suggest you not provide useful feedback on a public forum. But the thing is, I believe your single comment will prevent a not insignificant amount of adoption! Adoption by the masses often helps these projects undertake QoL improvements like what your comment describes.
Contradictorily, I believe honest critism of entrenched apps made by huge corporations is vital to help the smaller guys get a chance to share the wealth for exatly the same reasons.
I also firmly believe it can only backfire spectacularly. What you are explicitly advocating is asymmetric FUD "for the good guys".
And it's not like people won't notice the scrolling and re-draw of the app; I've experienced it myself and it's a massive deal breaker for regular usage :| . If anything, saying "I enjoy this app even with this crappy aspect", may help people get over that initial, immediate hump and see the value in rest of the product.
There is also expectation management, which is an important aspect in marketing. The goal here is to set the expectation of a future user at the actual value the product delivers to the user. This can go wrong in two ways: 1. Underdeliver - user will be disappointed, i.e. negative user experience. 2. Overdeliver - user will be content, but expects you to overdeliver in the future as well, which you will not be able to do indefinitely.
My point is: it is key to manage expectations of future users. Pointing out both strengths and weaknesses of the product makes sure expectations match actual value and make for an overall positive user experience when evaluating for adoption.
So.. You know, do the devs a favour and don't market against them? It doesn't harm you to just stay out of it if you don't have anything nice to say. Go dunk on the big corps. They can financially handle it.
Marketing is a much broader field [1]. Of course a part of it is about how to effectively convey an idea to someone. However, deceiving people will only work for short-term businesses, as it is much more work to build your image after a deception or schandal. That is why brands often cease to exist after a schandal, as starting a new brand is much easier.
I developed an open source app myself and I'd rather inform future users about its limitations before they use it. This way, they have a positive feeling towards the app, even though it could not deliver value in their case. This has nothing to do with budget (for my open source project, budget is ~0 anyways). You need budget for advertising, reaching out to potential customers, engage with your customers, etc. The budget needed for clearly communicating the value of your product is negligible.
You seem to think that downsides or limitations are inherently negative. Knowing a downside in advance is actually a huge advantage.
[1]: "Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services" - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing
One of the main benefits of OSS is to “see the truth” by seeing the source and can skip all the marketing lies from commercial products.
Lots of difference with open-source products.
As for my controversial take, I'm just trying to limit the abuse of our collective goodwill by marketers, generally. They take advantage of our good nature as we assume the best possible interpretation of their actions/words, or pretend as if the generosity of FOSS devs deserve the same criticism as a trillion dollar company just because the end results look the same on our phone. People would see it differently if they stood everyone at Google beside everyone at OSMAnd for example. Google has an astonishing 135,000 (or more) employees. OSMAnd has 20 if you include major contributors.
For visual reference, here is what 113000 people looks like: https://inteng-storage.s3.amazonaws.com/images/import/2017/0... Google has 20-30 thousand more than that.
20 people don't fill up a bus.
(I am one of contributors and recently completed small round of UX testing, see https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/discussions... )
StreetComplete is great but it is focused on updating broad range of existing objects. Every Door on the other hand is the best for adding and updating POIs.
But it seems to me case where data to enter is simply complex and I see no obvious way to make it easier.
What worse, typically multiple days have the same opening hours, so interface is optimized to make this kind of input easier (ability to select multiple days at once)
(I am one of contributors to that software)
It's been a while since I used it, but one thing that might help would be to look at the interface the for Alarms in Android. It looks pretty similar, but it's a little bit different, and I think a little bit easier to use.
Moonshot: Let users snap a picture and use OCR to suggest times that user can then edit.
Another idea to make it a bit easier for businesses with odd hours: A option for a wizard.
Something like:
1. Click here to start Wizard
2. Monday: Select open time (or say not opened)
3. Monday: Select closed time
4. Monday: Option to add another time block
5. Tuesday: Option to copy and modify times from Monday
6. Repeat
7. Option to copy time from Monday/Tuesday
8. Repeat, etc
I'm not sure how exactly this would play out, and it would only be good in the more complex cases but I personally think it would be easier.
Um... OK.