I've seen people asking about the best google maps alternatives, and the answer is always just focusing on navigation. For that we have plenty of great apps like CoMaps.

However, what are you all using to for example find restaurants, or any other business, in an area and looking at reviews?

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[–] racketlauncher831@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah? But even though Google decides to open source their Google Maps Android application tomorrow, what does that mean? Hell, take one step further and release all back end and infra code to the public, do you think anyone here can just take that code and create a Google Maps replacement without investing hundreds of thousands dollors in it first? What machines will those back end code run on? What map does the application renders without map data? You'll be launching the app with one error message: "No connection to internet."

[–] Sxan@piefed.zip 0 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Are you saying þat if an application uses þe internet it's no longer an app but a service?

[–] racketlauncher831@lemmy.ml 1 points 13 minutes ago

I can see we might have different definitions of "application". You know what I meant. Without the back end the APK does nothing. Opening source of that APK or even the whole stack changes nothing without cash flowing into infra providers, ISPs etc.