Since the #39c3 in December, every first Sunday of the month has been a "Digital Independence Day" for trying out alternatives to dominant/big tech platforms.
If you're looking to explore alternatives to Google or Apple Maps, why not give CoMaps – or any of the other open source map-applications that are based on data from #OpenStreetMap – a try!
You can learn more about the #DIDay here: https://edri.org/our-work/didit-edri-members-spark-movement-for-alternatives-to-big-tech/
#DIDit
Love CoMaps. But until there's a efficient streaming option to skip asking the user to download maps, it's going to be hard to offer as an alternative to Google Maps.
That's going to be extremely expensive for them to host a server (probably multiple all over the world), isn't it? Streaming images would probably not be as bad as video but still quite a lot of bandwidth / CPU usage, no?
(Personally I don't understand why you'd want to do that instead of downloading for offline use but I know I'm weird with not having mobile data anyway, so ...)
Not weird. I keep my phone on airplane mode unless I'm actively making a phone call, for privacy reasons (here in the USA, cell tower data is sold to anyone with money through data brokers). Using a mobile map app (Google, Bing, HereWeGo, etc.) with location services on would be pretty bad for privacy. I like the fact that CoMaps works even when the location service is off (unless I don't know where I am and I need the current location) and the airplane mode is on.