this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2026
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DeGoogle Yourself
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Calling it a new project is a bit of an stretch, I would say, considering this project was around for maybe 6 or so years.
Also, for anyone unaware, mangrove is not only for reviews of places, but also websites, books, companies. Found a bad site which scams people? Write an review. Found bad company? Review it.
I wish there were more options, such as videogames, software, food and non food (Open Food Facts can be used for identification, in similar vein that OpenStreetMaps is used for places), and more (and more then 1000 symbols per review in general), but currently we have only that.
I do not want to be that person but I think the main reason is people do not give a fuck about any of that. Or just in general not giving enough fucks for anything.
They have working shit on their devices (in this case — Google Maps), which do what they want and have many features, which varies from "nice to have" to "this is very important to me to the point of not being able to live without this feature". Traffic data, reviews, and so on.
And when you try to introduce something else to them (especially something as fragmented as open source real life data "stack", OpenStreetMaps + mangrove reviews + transitious + more) — you would not be meet with enthusiasm, especially if this other service is just worse for one or other reason.
What is the point if they want to input some address in, for example, CoMaps, and they get nothing in return because nobody had added that place and address for 10 years and doing address search is hard? (Both of which Google happened to master to a much higher degree then OpenStreetMaps).
Calling MapComplete an navigation service is definitely a choice. Or CoMaps for that matter, conspidering that they currently are not providing much of an navigational services for public transport, and that their routing engine sometimes can lead with the most weird paths (but this one is more of an issue with OpenStreetMaps data, which only highlights my previous point).
Right now it is definitely not. Many-many-many places lack even single review which says "good place", so for the most of time you do not even notice that service.
Eh... Maybe in indie, sure, it might shaked Unity somewhat, but many games still made with Unity and other proprietary engines. Big studios still on Unreal and some even switching from their in-house engines to Unreal, so eh.
Also I meant it in the context of a tech-savvy user, not for the general public
Eh, even in context of tech-savvy users it is still questionable. It is not like tech-savvy users do not need to get from place to place in time with public transport or an car, they are just a regular people, just like non savvy folks.
I, for example, could consider myself one (tech savvy), but even I can not deny that this projects and services kind of... stink, and not usable as big corpo solutions.
Do not get me wrong, I am in love with OpenStreetMaps, with Open Food Facts (and related projects like open prices facts), with Mangrove Reviews, and so on, and I contribute when I feel like it, but damn me if there would had been usable programs and UIs for using Transitious service (and especially with fully offline functionality), or program that use Open Food Facts data for anything even remotely useful (I once made feature request to CoMaps about adding open food facts data, so it can be used for searching food and non-food items on map or opening place and scrolling through list of items it has with prices, but this PR was quickly closed as too niche
¯\_(ツ)_/¯, and then couple months later we have mangrove reviews, which is even more niche and has even less data but hey, what do I know), and for other related projects.Thanks for correcting me. I figured the MapComplete was just a map editor before you commented but I was lazy too edit my post. Also, the wording on the Gmaps switch part is a bit vague. Once again, too lazy to edit my post