Depending on your threat model, it may be worth it to just use Bing Maps or Apple Maps. At least your searches and travels arenāt being tied to your Google account if you use that. Of course you also have to be aware of whether you have accounts related to those other offerings.
There is also MapQuest, but I donāt think itās trying to be privacy respecting. Hereās an alternative. ĀÆ_(ć)_/ĀÆ
I donāt think thereās any better Aurora Store alternatives but there are these map apps, the first one is on f-droid.
Organic Maps is really good and uses OpenStreetMaps Fdroid link to organic maps
And thereās Magic Earth which I havenāt used but heard itās pretty good. (Only on aurora store) Magic earth Google play link
Ive been 100% happy with āHERE WeGoā. Its literally a perfect replacement. You can even download the maps and use it offline. Just make sure to disable telemetry stuff when prompted at the first time opening the app
Only issue is that it doesnāt display traffic info so if you want to use it in the car, you may get stuck in traffic unfortunately. Most privacy-respecting maps donāt have traffic info either
Organic and Maps & GPS Navigation OsmAnd+ (Global Mobile Map Viewing & Navigation for Offline and Online OSM Maps) OsmAnd~ | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository both are missing one thing which MagicEarth seems to handle better, street number address search.
Most of the time I want to enter an address exactly not just the road.
I have yet to find a FOSS maps app that works the way I expect it to. All I want is to type an address and get directions on how to get there. For some reason each app I use does not have a clear way to input an address, and then if I can input an address the app canāt find the address.
For now, I just use Google Maps. If you turn off different settings on your Google account like not tracking your location history and not letting the data be used to show you ads, as well as only letting Maps use location services when in use, then I think youāre most of the way there. My goal is to make the Maps app as much like a dumb GPS as possible.
I can recommend Organic Maps as an alternative for Google Maps for both iOS and Android.
There is also no really faster version of Aurora Store, but you are able to login with an own Google account instead of a public one, so you can skip the sometimes pretty long waiting when starting Aurora Store and maybe also have a better experience in general with Aurora Store because the public accounts are sometimes pretty weird and buggy.