The first, and easiest, part of Google’s ecosystem to purge from my life, was Google Maps. Something that isn’t as integrated too much into the rest of my life, and if I don’t have access to it, I’m not faffing about or losing any important information.
Upon jumping onto the de-google subreddit, which I highly recommend you do as well (https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/), you’ll find a few alternatives thrown around, namely: OsmAnd, Organic Maps,and Magic Earth. Waze, Map Quest, and Apple Maps are out of the question for me, as Apple is no better than Google, Map Quest is iOS only, and Waze is unfortunately owned by Google.
If you’re willing to look beyond the menial details such as what you call the Gulf of America/Mexico, or whether Israel was the country of development, then OsmAnd, Organic Maps and Magic Earth seemed to be the choice selection.
I started off trialing Magic Earth, and honestly, haven’t looked back.
It’s UI undoubtedly takes a function over form approach, and searching up addresses does take more time than Google Maps. But hey… at least it doesn’t sell your data to the highest bidder… right?
Magic Earth continues to make up for it’s clunkier UI by having a shockingly accurate traffic build-up notification, alerting you to how many km’s until you reach traffic, how many km’s the traffic is backlogged for, and an estimate on how long you’ll end up in traffic. As a regular freeway commuter, I’ve found this useful to mentally prepare myself for the looming dread of a 20 minute traffic encounter.
I have also found Magic Earth’s placement of speed and red light cameras to be accurate and on-point. There is a function to report police, cameras, traffic and such, as you’d also expect from a mapping service in 2025.
As for it’s accuracy with arrival time predictions, I have found if there is little to no traffic, Magic Earth is accurate enough for me to trust it. In cases of traffic, it does jump around it’s estimates quite a lot.
A test I did was to have Magic Earth open on my personal Pixel 7 Pro, and then Google Maps open on my work’s iPhone 13. I found both map services to change their eta’s, though Google did less so. Ultimately, both ended up being within 5 minutes of each other, which I feel is an excellent outcome for any company trying to compete with the almighty Google.
Before I continue on about my experience with Magic Earth, I have also tried OsmAnd and Organic Maps. I found both of these options to be vastly inferior to Magic Earth on the UI front, and as I had already established Magic Earth to be accurate enough for my use cases, I decided against slogging through an even more clunky UI than I already had.
Back to Magic Earth – you can download maps for each state of Australia, which is useful, as cell service here is far worse than any of the providers would have you believe.
Outside of Parked Car tracking, Magic Earth takes me from point A to point B with little hassle, and I can’t ask more from a Mapping service. An interesting note, is Magic Earth has picked up on some slip lanes that Google Maps has not, and so in some ways is more accurate than Google Maps… It has however, not picked up on some roadworks which completely blocked off a road – whether Google Maps would have picked up on this, I’m unsure, but I’ve found Google to be on top of roadworks and road blockages.
I used Magic Earth on a recent hiking camp trip, and found that hiking trails and little creeks were recorded with much the same accuracy as Google Maps.
I honestly don’t have a good reason to not switch to Magic Earth. I can put up with the slower address search and clunkier UI because Magic Earth is free, can be used easily offline, good enough to get you where you need to go, doesn’t sell your data to random people and most importantly, more than satisfies the requirement of not being Google.
I don’t really know what else to say – Magic Earth is my choice, and will be my choice for the foreseeable future
A CyberSphere Haven 