For having a dedicated topo setup I would recommend OSMand. CoMaps/OrganicMaps does contour lines too but you can configure things way more in OSMand and it makes a huge difference. I have both apps so here are screenshots of the same place to compare

If you don’t want to use a phone because of privacy concerns there are also stand alone meshtastic devices with blackberry style keyboards too

OSMand seems kinda clunky but it lets you do more stuff to really customize it if you want but I still find myself getting lost in the menus sometimes. But I like it for hiking/outdoorsy stuff

Organic Maps/Comaps is slick and smooth and really easy to use for most everyday stuff we’d use Google Maps for

Other people have mentioned it but one of the best things you can do is a little mapping of your local area on OpenStreetMap. Try to include the places you go to the most, or at least making notes so other know what needs added. That makes any app or service that uses it better for yourself and others around you

You can hit the x and continue. This just a stern warning with no consequence for now

It’s not surrounded by a ton of corporate bs. I know the us govt has their own openstreetmap setups (like this basic unclassified one) and wiki sites (intellipedia) because it’s a proven framework to set up and add your own information.

gps too

If we’re judging all products by the personalities of people who run them we’d have nothing left lol

For most people Organic Maps is the move.

I love OSMand and it has become my digital pin board of places I’ve been to over the years. It can do a lot (for example I have a preset with sat imagery and a transparent topo map overlay for hiking) but it can be clunky, and a lot of cool stuff is hard to find and change in the menus.

Meshtastic is cool I wish there were more public users around me.

OpenStreetMap and their editors are great and I use them a lot, but if you really want to have great flexibility with your map design QGIS is Open Source

Here’s a video on how to use it

You can use CalTopo’s print pdf to print that OSM data too

A guarantee of deploying to europe would be great for military retention! Everyone is tired of fighting forever wars in the desert

powerwolf intensifies

It is clunky and takes tinkering to get it just right for each use case, which can be a pain especially for new users. But once it’s set up it works very well and most importantly works everywhere. While traveling abroad without cell data OsmAnd saved our asses more than once when Google Maps failed!

It’s like Call of Duty vs Arma. Call of Duty is slick and is very good at a very specific experience. Arma isn’t nearly as smooth or pretty, and it has a learning curve but once you get past that it can do a wide variety of amazing things the other simply cannot match. But admittedly it’s not for everyone

Part of my job is traveling by air, so I got a $30ish sandisc mp3 player with a 200+gb sd card. I have a bunch of music and sometimes podcasts on there. Saves my phone battery, has zero ads, and as a bonus it has fm radio for surfing the stations below as they fade in and out every minute or so.

It’s interesting to think about. Banks can track where a person buys and how much is spent. Individual businesses gather data on customers in various ways that bigger corporations can pay to look at. But there’s only so much one business sees. And they might not want to share that in the first place.

Scanning trash for logos, barcodes etc can give you nice “average consumer” stats for an area without paying a bunch of companies. It doesn’t matter if a bottle of sunscreen came from a small business, walmart or bought online direct, they’ll know people in your area bought it and used it.