It depends on the country, but for search what really matters are the points of interest and Apple Maps in my country doesn't have any, whereas OSM and Google Maps are competing head to head.
Even for driving, the OSM apps available, while lower quality, are more reliable when I travel to Bulgaria for example. The penetration of Google Maps in Eastern Europe isn't great and Apple Maps isn't worth bothering with.
Anyway, I wonder why DuckDuckGo is choosing Apple Maps. It makes no sense IMO from a user experience perspective.
Remember that if you're in California or New York, those are the primary markets targeted by all tech companies, so your experience with Apple Maps is not representative of the rest of the world.
In my travels OSM fares quite well in terms of its POS database and is the only one that can compete with Google Maps in that regard.
In Germany I use OSM exclusively for navigating and it is very good. Maybe not quite on the level of Google maps concerning things like live traffic, but certainly good enough to reach your goal and then some. Love the project and would have liked to have DuckDuckGo support it instead of using proprietary data.
Google Maps has shown what can happen if you use it for anything business critical.
edit:
Sadly OSM doesn't yet have services like forward adress search (might be too expensive to provide). It would enable many businesses to use it for adress comparison to clean up their own data for example. I think that could put OSM on the map so to speak.
Currently I am using Navigator for Android. It has the option to use osm or proprietary maps (TomTom I believe). The app itself is free but serves some adds in that case. You can download maps for offline use. Not the best app, but very reliable.
If I am not mistaken OSM will only give you a database but not the map tiles. For that you need to get them from some service such as MapBox, Google or Apple. Usually these are paid by tiles and Apple is currently the cheapest.
To my knowledge, OSM don't distribute tiles in bulk themselves (i.e. there's no way of downloading an archive of all the map tiles at all scales for a country), but they DO provide a tileserver (with a usage policy), and they DO provide tooling to generate tiles from their (open) database.
> Anyway, I wonder why DuckDuckGo is choosing Apple Maps. It makes no sense IMO from a user experience perspective.
It makes sense from a privacy perspective. Both of the companies are probably aware of the fact that Apple Maps are really fucking bad at the moment. So was DDG at the beginning. It's incredibly difficult to offer a product that matches Google's when you're two decades behind. The only way to improve is to gather more data. You don't need to collect personal data in order to improve the service, just data in general.
Including Apple Maps in a privacy-first search engine gives Apple the marketing boost in their target market: relatively rich people that do have something to hide. If you use a privacy-aware search engine, and you see that search engine partnering with Apple, it's easier to believe that Apple truly is privacy aware. I still have my doubts, but they're slowly but surely diminishing.
From DDG's perspective, it gives them relevance. They're no longer just a small player in the market trying to make a name for themselves. They're big enough to be able to partner with Apple. This isn't their first collaboration neither: Safari was the first major browser that included their search engine out of the box (Firefox was the second one, about two months later).
It also makes perfect sense for them to stick together, because their ultimate goal is the same: to offer an alternative to surveillance capitalism. It still doesn't make much sense in the short run, but it makes perfect sense in the long run. The more people distrust Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Amazon, the more they're gonna look for the alternatives. DDG, Apple, and similar companies just need to be stubborn. The market will find them, not the other way around.
I use Apple devices at the moment primarily due to privacy concerns, but I don't trust Apple in the long run as it would be foolish to do so.
Apple is one of the world's biggest companies and they'll do whatever it takes for them to stay on top. This year they may be privacy friendly, but what about in 5 years from now? Google was not creepy when they started out and even now they are more trustworthy than many other companies.
True privacy oriented solutions are open solutions, projects and databases that can be forked. And the forking aspect is essential, because these online services are locking people in.
This is why OpenStreetMaps is so important, because it can be forked, whereas Apple Maps cannot be.
DuckDuckGo can't be forked either AFAIK, which is also a problem. We need an open index of the web too.
It depends on the country, but for search what really matters are the points of interest and Apple Maps in my country doesn't have any, whereas OSM and Google Maps are competing head to head.
Even for driving, the OSM apps available, while lower quality, are more reliable when I travel to Bulgaria for example. The penetration of Google Maps in Eastern Europe isn't great and Apple Maps isn't worth bothering with.
Anyway, I wonder why DuckDuckGo is choosing Apple Maps. It makes no sense IMO from a user experience perspective.
Remember that if you're in California or New York, those are the primary markets targeted by all tech companies, so your experience with Apple Maps is not representative of the rest of the world.
In my travels OSM fares quite well in terms of its POS database and is the only one that can compete with Google Maps in that regard.