On 27 March 2012 19:33, Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au> wrote:
Osmand provides functionality which is in many ways equal to Google Maps, apart from the fact that Osmand has no satellite maps and no good search interface. On the up-side downloading vector maps for all of Australia is less than 200MB of Zip file and thus you can use Osmand without net access (I plan to use it next time I'm on a cruise ship). This is one significant Osmand feature that Google Maps will never have, Google Maps allows you to cache 10 miles square regions.
Maverick is a closed-source app that suppose to allow using Nearmaps images. You can download this without Google Market at: http://codesector.com/downloads Having said that, I haven't been able to get Nearmaps to work recently. Don't know why. Haven't tried to investigate yet.
When you install CyanogenMod you are permitted to use the same binaries that you had on your phone with the stock Android distro. But in practice most people who run the Google App market on CyanogenMod probably just download an archive of Google Apps from someone else - it's one of those things which is illegal because the copyright laws are insane.
Originally they were bundled with CyanogenMod, however Google complained and they stopped doing it. The argument is that this is the only way Google has to ensure that Android phones meet a minimum standard, and we don't have a maze of different products that are incompatible with each other. As much as I don't like this, they might have a point. Even with the current restrictions, manufacturers still are making lots of changes to Android for the sake of making their product different, when customers don't necessarily want this. These changes typically mean it takes longer to get updates, and exposes the manufacturers to legal challenges due to issues that aren't always present in the base Android code. This in turn gives Android competitors an advantage. -- Brian May <brian@microcomaustralia.com.au>