Magic Earth is a proprietary app based on OpenStreetMap data. Its features include turn-by-turn navigation, live traffic information for route planning, speed camera warnings, public transport info, 3D and satellite maps, and the ability to download maps for offline use. The app may send position data to Magic Earth’s traffic provider to provide real-time traffic information, but the data is anonymized and only stored for 5 minutes.
This app is useful for users who require real-time traffic info, which is available in several countries.
Magic Earth is free of cost for all end-users but the developer also has a paid SDK for business partners. Because of this business model, they have decided against open sourcing the app.
Their privacy policy is too vague to really know specifically what they collect.
…This data includes IP-addresses, date and time of your requests, operating system type. We may also use real-time geo-location information of your device, search reference geographic position, routing and search preferences, crash reports and app version installed.
IMO Magic Earth just flat out works better than Organic Maps or OsmAnd. If OM or OsmAnd is even able to find the exact address you’re looking for, it can be buried in the results. Or in a lot of cases when I type an address all I get is block numbers. For example I search 123 fake st Miami, Fl, my results are “Address/Block” numbers and it’ll highlight a stretch of a road. That’s useless and inconvenient. People want something that will guide them to the exact address which Magic Earth does.
From a usability standpoint, Magic Earth is leaps and bounds a more effective mapping app than OsmAnd. OsmAnd can be borderline unusable if you’re trying to navigate to a specific address, often requiring you to settle for a cross street.
While I can’t speak to their actual privacy practices, they make some very strong statements about privacy. When enabling location permissions for instance, they claim to “never share your location. Ever.”
Talk is obviously cheap, but the fact that they produce such a better product than their competition makes them the only OSM app that is worthwhile for me.
Magic Earth appears to be introducing an annual subscription of $0.99, which is fair enough.
However, this change seems to have come with removing the ability to download the APK file directly from them. Their support originally provided me with a link to a download page for the APK upon request. However, this link is no longer working. Reaching out to their support once again to confirm if this is the case.
Support from Magic Earth has informed me that the APK version will only be unavailable for a short while due to app refurbishment. Seems like whatever upcoming changes they are making will not permanently effect the availability of the APK outside of the Google Play Store.
Despite not being open source, being able to get the app directly from them is nice for those who wish to avoid the Play Store.
Overall, my experience with Magic Earth has been very positive. The app has always worked well for me as a Google Maps alternative. No issues finding accurate addresses.
When I have a need for real-time traffic on Android app I prefer Magic Earth, who has a decent privacy policy. But can they be trusted? No idea.
However, if you want truly private, real-time traffic navigation, I suppose the only option is an old-school, dedicated device like a Garmin.
But unless you disguise your vehicle, cover your plates, put your toll transponder in a Faraday bag, disable your vehicle’s telematics, and are able to confirm you have not been tagged with a hidden GPS transponder, it is next to impossible to travel in your personal vehicle anywhere in the U.S. without being tracked in some way by the powers that be.
Similarly, when I need to navigate in real time I use Magic Earth, their privacy policy is very good and they claim not to sell or track users. And even in terms of real-time navigation, it’s the only application that accurately indicates the position of speed cameras, which is a plus.
As far as I can see Magic Earth fits all minimum requirements + 2 of the best case ones.
It is superior to Organic Maps imo in a couple of ways:
Public transport navigations works great in Germany, I am unsure if they are real time but it gives you great suggestions, tested in multiple german cities. Organic Map’s public transport is almost useless at the moment. It only provides one option instead of multiple ones to choose from. You can’t see the departure time nor any other detail besides travel time and walking distance. I can’t even express how useless this is. This might not be relevant for a car centric society like the US but it is highly relevant over here.
Real time traffic info
Has included voice navigation, does not require to install a seperate TTS on GrapheneOS
The route planning in Organic Maps is extremely bad in my opinion. I can’t change starting point or destination when tapping on manage route. I can’t even choose to not start the route from my location. There is no way to add more points along the route. This is seriously bad.
Don’t get me wrong. I really wish Organic Maps (or CoMaps) was the best solution, as I would prefer using a fully FOSS app. And I really hope they keep improving to make it my go to maps application some say, but until now this is just not the case. The only thing Organic Maps does better imo is the looks, the smoothness of using the app and POI-search. This is why I would strongly argue for including Magic Earth in the list.
I tried Organic Maps, but not a single address within a hundred-mile radius was supported by it. Magic Earth appears to be effective for that. I’ll demo it this week.
I don’t know anything about this app specifically, but I do think there needs to be an alternative to Organic or CoMaps. I live in the US and Organic Maps can’t find my address or even my doctors address which basically just makes it unusable for me.
In Europe Magic Earth is incredible, it works really well and I think Magic Earth should really be added to the list of the best alternatives to Google Maps, it’s a must-have for me.
That’s very unlikely. Most likely you input it the wrong way. The parser can be a bit finicky. You shouldn’t put ZIP code or town name in the address. Just street name. Sometimes number also cause problem, so try without one first.
If your doctor place isn’t listed on Open Street Map, feel free to add it. This is how we improve the system. Now if you talk about inputing the adress and not finding it, this merits investigation.
I tried each way you could put an address in. It will only allow me to search the road, and nothing else. I cannot pick an address anywhere, for example, on a 20 mile long road, without manually scrolling to it and long-pressing on the location to navigate to it.
In both these cases, this implies there are no volunteer mappers anywhere near your locations. Or, if in the US, your state hasn’t submitted its address database to the National Address Database (which has a compatible license so a remote OSM “arm chair” mapper could use it to add addresses).
I don’t know where you live, how close you are to a village, town or city, etc. But I will note there is a bit of a network effect: The more data in OSM then the more people will use it and the more people will contribute changes and updates. Germany seems to be the poster child for this and is reported to be very well mapped. The US, not so much.
When I moved to my current city (in the US) I made a point of walking around town mapping it. That did two things: It got me much more familiar with my new home. And it added a bunch of addresses and POIs (stores, offices, restaurants, etc.) to OSM for my area. A win-win. So people can use Organic Maps, CoMaps, OsmAnd, or whatever to get around my town.
At the very least, when you go on your errands, use the “add place to OpenStreetMap” feature that is in both CoMaps and Organic Maps to add your local stores, doctor’s offices, etc. Or use a dedicated app like Go Map! for iPhone (there are others for Android). It only takes a couple of minutes and you are very much helping with an infrastructure that allows people to be more private as nearly all OSM based navigation apps work off line and at least a few do zero tracking.