Organic Maps is a for-profit venture that accepts donations. That's sketchy. Management also seems to have prior Kremlin links. Which is sketchy.
You mind sharing links / sources / etc. ?
I don’t understand why it is “sketchy”. Also do you have any proof on “Kremlin links”?
Local search will always be slow and bad.
But server search doesn't need that much. It's just that OS initiatives are severely understaffed. OS apps that have a Photon instance are already rare to find. Let's not talk about having an Overpass instance...
What is very hard to reproduce is Google's place review data.
It's golden to enable good search.
fake anyways (quite easy to get negative comments deleted), and even for bad reviews.
Best look elsewhere or not at all.
What's important is people talking about "has air conditioner" in a hotel review or "has vegan" in a restaurant. OSM has none of this data.
I was talking in deep in the weed OSM signal group and apparently its a split between the address data not being present, and OrganicMap / CoMap being bugged.
The way to triage is asking nominatim, the geocoder from OSM. If it can resolve : its on the client side, if not, its a data problem.
I'm just parroting here. Happy to learn more.
This is THE only issue I have with those OSM client ( I don't care about traffic )
It's obvioulsy expensive in terms of ops + dev, but also just to host.
It can't scale with only 0,0001 % of users donating to the app.
Fortunately, NLNet's there to fund work, but it's still nonethless only a tenth of what would be needed.
Plus map applications and general search engines don't talk to each other... I don't know why, but it is so. Maybe because all the well-known search engines are closed-source ?
CoMaps also has a better system for distributing map data now which isn't bound to app updates. Not sure if this has made its way back to the other app, but it's quite nice.