[vanderZwan]

I just had a discussion about this with a friend of mine, Jaffar Salih (we studied Interaction Design together so topics like this fascinate us), and what he remarked is that navigation apps could actually be educational tools for learning to navigate yourself. They just need to add clear markers of landmarks in their route descriptions.

Even more interesting: since Google already keeps track of where you are very often, it could use your favourite shawarma place or regular bus stop as a "personalised landmark". to give you things to orient by and help you connect the dots and fill in the gaps. Same thing with familiar routes.

My "counter-argument" was that it was not in Google Maps's interests to make you less dependent on their navigation app. But maybe someone should get on making an OSM-based kind of app that does it instead.