As somebody who also uses paper maps for hiking still: I find google maps got a lot worse over the years, and is pretty much unusable for just looking at maps, while osmand provides easily readable maps.

Sounds like you just dont know how to use a map. Google maps is horrible to anyone who wants to actually use it like a map.

It is clunky and takes tinkering to get it just right for each use case, which can be a pain especially for new users. But once it's set up it works very well and most importantly works everywhere. While traveling abroad without cell data OsmAnd saved our asses more than once when Google Maps failed!

It's like Call of Duty vs Arma. Call of Duty is slick and is very good at a very specific experience. Arma isn't nearly as smooth or pretty, and it has a learning curve but once you get past that it can do a wide variety of amazing things the other simply cannot match.

At least it has a great and well recognizable name!

To each their own I guess