Maps
Open Street Maps is the only alternative that's atleast partly practical. The map data is crowd-sourced and under a libre licence.
They only have a web interface, though, with no official apps to download.
No worries, this is the world of open-source. There are a hundred and one apps built on OSM.
For Android, some alternatives are Organic Maps and OsmAnd.
These apps need an internet connection only to download maps, after which they work completely offline.
The navigation algorithm is also completely offline - it uses the downloaded map to decide a route.
Since these apps have no live traffic data, the route they show might not always be the quickest one, and one would need to be familiar with the traffic patterns of the route to be able to travel on the quickest route.
Organic Maps - My Experience
Accuracy of Map Data
Road data seems to be slightly outdated, with Organic Maps asking me to sometimes make U-turns that have since been blocked. The majority of info seems to be in order, though, so you can get from point A to point B using Organic Maps
Availability of Location Entries
Landmarks, buildings, businesses, anything - don't take Organic Maps, or Open Street Maps, as gospel. You'll miss out on a lot. Maybe the most private way is to look something up on Google Maps and then manually set the location in Organic Maps navigation? It's a hassle, yes. But on the flip side, I was also impressed at some of the places that I could find on Open Street Maps.
Navigation Algorithm
So the first thing I noticed was that Organic Maps is biased towards wider roads, where going through a bunch of narrow roads would be a somewhat shorter route. This leads me to believe that Organic Maps estimates travel speed based on road width and tries to estimate the quickest route based on that, which seems to be badly tuned for Indian roads.
A positive, though, is that I was more likely to get a route that's simpler and easier to learn using Organic Maps than Google Maps.
Notes
Most people use either the default notes app on their phone or Notion.
On an unrelated note, having a good Personal Knowledge Management system is quite important now. Tiago Forte has a book called Building A Second Brain which talks about a lot of stuff, but the two key concepts are:
- Organize your folders by frequency of use first. In the top-level of your folder structure, you must have folders for Projects (temporary tasks you are actively working on), Areas (responsibilities that require constant supervision, and can include a string of Projects), Resources (reference material sorted by topic), and Archives.
- Progressive Summarisation - have a copy of the full text, highlight key sentences, italicize key phrases, and embolden key words. Finally, summarize the text in your own words. This allows you to be efficient when rereading notes.
Obsidian
A really good Notion alternative. Notes are stored locally, and can by synchronised with Nextcloud (using an Obsidian plugin) or through Syncthing.
It comes with really impressive features as well.
Another bonus is that the notes are stored as plaintext. This means that if you ever need to migrate to another app, or just temporarily use a different editor, you can with no trouble.
Notes are also version-controlled, so you can view note history.
The only downside is that it is not open-source software.
QOwnNotes
A desktop-only app with version-control and the capability to integrate with Nextcloud Notes (which does have an android app).
It doesn't have any of the bells and whistles of Obsidian or Notion, but there is something to be said for the unreasonable effectiveness of plaintext.