Google Maps has a few quirks. Here in Germany it always prefers to send you through 30km/h residential zones. Which might be somewhat faster than taking congested main roads but those 30km/h zones are terrible to drive through. There's always cars parked at one side of the street so you have to wait for oncoming traffic. The streets usually are very narrow. So the stress level to the driver is way higher.

I also noticed a quirk where it would send me 2km down a road just to turn back and drive the 2km back to where I came from. First few times I thought I must have added a waypoint but nope - sometimes it just makes you waste time.

Apple Maps might be better but I can't use it as it has a quirk with "Environmental Zones" in Germany. There are 3 kinds of zones: Red, Yellow and Green. Your car has a badge with a color (depends on how environmentaly friendly it is). So a green badge can enter every zone, a yellow badge only yellow and red zones, and a red badge only red zones.

Now whenever Apple Maps encounters such a zone in the route the navigation switches to a waaaay zoomed out view (tends to display the whole route on a map). So you can't really see the next turn, etc.

To get rid of that view Apple Maps expects you to click on OK. Which really sucks while driving.

What's infuriating is that you can't turn off the env zone checking or even just tell Maps that "my car has a green badge so PLEAS FOR F SAKES STOP PESTERING ME EVERY TIME YOU ENCOUNTER A ZONE". (Those zones are very common - every bigger town is a green zone. So Apple Maps becomes _really_ unusable on longer trips).

I'm just annoyed that Google Maps still has no support for displaying speed limits in Germany or most of Europe. TomTom does show them.

That sounds horrible for yellow and red cars. I hope all new cars are green.

I hope cars are mostly forbidden in cities soon.

They are in most European cities anyway. I'm in a - for the US small, for Europe mid sized city with a pop of roughly 400k. City center is banned to cars. You're supposed to park on the outskirts or take public transport into the center. (Or bicycle).

The result is that almost no one goes there anymore. All the inner city shops are closing down - while the mall style shopping centers on the outskirts are flourishing.

Walkable cities sound great in theory. Until you realize that shopping groceries _really_ sucks when you have to carry full bags for 3 kilometers or have to use over-filled public transport.

Electric cars are all green, gas cars are green if they meet EURO 1, and diesel cars are green if they meet EURO 4 (or EURO 3 + retrofitted particulate filter)[1]. This is pretty loose for passenger cars: any made in the last fifteen years should all qualify [2].

[1] https://www.germanemissionssticker.com

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards

yeah, yellow is like very old diesels and red is for cars without a catalytic converter. so most cars (even my RAM 1500) have a green badge

> - planning a route _without_ asking for directions is near impossible because many street and landmark names are not displayed

This drives me absolutely batty. No matter how much I zoom in, I cannot see exit number labels. Sometimes they show up, at random places along the exit ramp, but I haven't figured out the rhyme or reason how.

Real maps clearly label exit numbers of every exit. I don't understand why this is so hard for Google Maps.

Or I'll see a street name I'm looking for, zoom in directly on that name, and it disappears.

Navigating through Romania using Google Maps, I can't see the names of towns.

I have switched to OsmAnd, and the only thing I miss now and then is a good geocoder.

>The only major thing it's lacking for me is traffic-aware navigation."

This. I use mostly OsmAnd, I especially like it when on bike or pedestrian mode. But yes sometime traffic info is a must so I use GM few times per year for this.

OsmAnd+ is my go-to maps app as well lately. It's fantastic. The only problem I have with it is the rendering for the actual map is super unoptimized, and leads to it having a very low refresh rate. Which, for someone who got a phone with 120 Hz as soon as I possibly could because the smoothness matters so much to me, it's a tad frustrating. Especially when I'm trying to scroll around the map manually. When I leave it in navigation mode while driving, the refresh rate doesn't really matter.

According to the GitHub Issues/Dicussions, this isn't an issue with the iOS implementation. Just the Android one. Hopefully something they can fix.

It drives me INSANE that I carefully align the map UI with the area I want to search, enter my search term, and then bam Google Maps automatically expands to the entire region.

This is NOT what I want ever.

Another thing that bothers me, when using the my phone as the map display I can search for places along my route and go back to normal navigation mode. Then as I drive whatever I am searching for will pop up along the route when we get close to it (say restaurants or gas stations). You can't do this in Android Auto, you have to always select the location or clear the results entirely.