A new project, called "Mangrove Reviews", has been quietly

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.

Why people don't wanna switch from Gmaps

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).

However, navigation services like MapComplete and CoMaps

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).

is this real competition yet?

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.

Godot has succeeded on rivaling other game engines like Unreal or Unity

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.

Google maps has traffic info. That's the reason.

I'm aware that this is because it uses it's user's data for it which seems to make it impossible to mimic the feature for privacy friendly alternatives, but it's the killer feature nonetheless.

i don't think business hours and reviews are the main google maps has a monopoly. as someone who occasionally uses both google maps and openstreetmap, the main reason i use google maps is because it's just more reliable - some points of interest aren't on openstreetmap, and its search doesn't work consistently. i rarely actually use google maps for business hours, and never reviews.

Post sounds either like an ad piece, the bullet points of a sales pitch, or a LLM summary.

I use "Here We Go", at least as a navigation system for my car. It is backed by european cat companies, so it has all the traffic data, sometimes even better then google.

I am aware that its not perfect, since it is also controlled by companies and not open source, but it works very well and at least its not google.

Vela Maps is the best way to get accurate information about traffic and opening hours while interacting with Google only as little as you have to

It's like NewPipe but for GMaps

Oooh i gotta get on this, time to review all my favorite local spots 👌

I’m really happy with Organic Maps and not ready to switch unless something really better gets created, but I’d love something like this to be integrated in it.

Sorry if I lead to some misinformation. Correct me if you can

Why comaps? If its pretty much exactly like OSM, why not just work with OSM?