At least in terms of addresses, I feel like Magic Earth is significantly better than Organic Maps.

Proprietary software is not a better privacy choice than free software

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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.

HeartyBeast
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The two things are orthogonal

Thanks. Never heard of this before. I’ll take it for a spin.

But they don’t have more data than organic maps since they’re using OSM too.

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.

@teolan@lemmy.world
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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.

Lemongrab
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Agreed. Not FOSS though :(
Decent privacy policy.

Why do they need access to your phone, microphone, and contacts?

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.

(from the FAQ)

That’s a weird reasoning, as I can find plenty of FOSS that has paid “business” editions

That’s just saying “we want to sell access to our code, so we can’t make it open source”. Basically the definition of proprietary software, no?

Yes? Nobody was claiming they weren’t proprietary.

RBG
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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.

My point was that it’s not so much “fair reasoning” as just a statement of that fact.

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