Both OSM and Organic Maps are SEVERELY lacking in businesses. So many places aren't in the directory.
You search for fast food and only a couple pop up. Search for s fancy steakhouse by name, nothing. It shows about half of the weed dispensaries in my area...
Is there a way to update the "phonebook"?
Has shitgle been spending money trying to make all other maps unusable? It sure fuckin seems like it.
Yes, but as you say, they have a good privacy policy. Also their revenue model backs up their privacy policy, and I find their reasoning as to why they aren't FOSS fair:
Will Magic Earth be Open Source?
No; since it is also used commercially (we have a paid Magic Earth SDK for business partners), we cannot make the code public.
Yes, but people were claiming they had a good reason not to be FOSS. They could have easily just not mentioned it at all but instead they name a reason that isn't an issue for many others.
yes but the old school business model of selling access to code without giving someone a full on anal probe in the form of data collection is not bad. it's only because major applicationa became insane spyware that we all had to start screaming about FOSS in the first place.
Magic Earth is doing a great thing. they are giving you a decently private, "Just Werks" maps experience, while still making money to fund their business, which is necessary to make software that is high grade. if that involves proprietary code, then okay fine.
They are giving a great experience to the average user, even someone trying to be private or at least degoogled. I see no issue with Magic Earth.
Magic Earth isn't private as it sends back data. Even if it was, there is no way of doing they won't change something in the future.
I used to use it before Organic maps matured. Now organic maps seems to be the best option. I also use OsmAnd for a while but it is far to unstable and slow plus it takes up a lot of disk space.
They have live traffic data, which OSM doesn't have.
In terms of search, there are algorithmic ways to get smarter results compared to what is built in OSM per default. So if other users say that the results are better, magicearth might be doing some magic under the hood.
The post specifically mentioned POIs, and as far as I have tested (in France at least), Magic Earth has the same incomplete/missing POI database as organic maps, coming from OSM.