Navigation is really a bear... It's easily Google's killer product, and extremely difficult for the open source community to replicate in any meaningful sense just due to the difficulty in acquiring data; we lack the necessary resources. I'm not sure how to solve that properly.

For offline navigation there is data, the OpenStreetMap, for most places on the planet. There is no very good app though, which would have seemed to be the smaller problem.

For real time navigation, Waze type solution could work -- aggregation of real time data from users. Also, smart city projects have open traffic data APIs, although not sure wether there is something properly real time, or it something like hourly aggregates.

So that would be still a giant project, but data does not seem to be the bottleneck.

> aggregation of real time data from users

This seems like exactly the kind of thing that users who opt specifically for a privacy conscious OS are not going to readily share

Its an issue. But if all the code is open and audited, there should be a way to ensure only aggregates are used, and the reports are anonymous. There would also be a related issue of bot accounts who would try to sabotage the statistics for fun, but should also be reasonably solvable.

I still wouldn't provide that data for two reasons. Firstly, all the assurances in the world aren't going to convince me that there's no risk in transmitting my location to a random computer in the cloud. I'm not going to personally comb through an open source project to make sure my data is not being abused. I would have to ' trust' strangers that it is not. And if I'm trusting strangers with my location data well then we're back to square one.

Secondly, and this is really a different issue and perhaps not that widespread, I don't like turning on location on my devices simply because it reduces battery life. It's not a privacy issue but it's another roadblock (pun not intended) to gathering navigation data

I think some kind of privacy sandbox & data escape logging would suffice to allow data leaking apps, to run on a libre type OS.

The main thing an OS like this needs is the a ability for it's users to run their own "cloud" infrastructure and attach that to their own phone.

Company can offer this as a SAAS service paid, providing they to proper end to end encryption and are not able to read the data they store. Also a good way to fund future development.

Navigation? Really? I don't drive, so maybe I'm somewhat atypical in that sense, but on those rare occasions when I do use my phone to navigate, I find Osmand(+) to be extremely useful.

I drive but I never use navigation as the handful of times I have I've found it distracting and it's led me astray a couple of times. I prefer to just look at a map. Often that nap is on the phone, but I don't need it to tell me where I am or where to go

Navigation for public transit makes a huge difference. Hours every day are saved because of it. And you can "sidetrack" out of your plan thanks to that, while you couldn't do it if you left your bus map at home, or if there were deviations.

I can't really say since I don't use google maps so much but I expect search to be better than in osmand (while online).