It's not hard to make a case against gettext, despite its maturity and large ecosystem.

IMHO pluralization is a prime example, with an API that only cleanly handles the English case, requires the developer to be aware of translation gotchas, and honnestly confusing documentation and format. Compare that to MessageFormat's pluralization example (https://github.com/unicode-org/message-format-wg/blob/main/s...) which is very easy to understand and fully in the translator's hands.

> IMHO pluralization is a prime example, with an API that only cleanly handles the English case

That’s not true at all? Gettext is functionally limited to source code being English (or alike). It handles all translation languages just fine, and competently so.

What is doesn’t have is MessageFormat’s gender selectors (useful) or formatting (arguably not really, strays from translations to locales and is better solvable with placeholders and locale-aware formatting code).

> fully in the translator's hands.

That is a problem that gettext doesn’t suffer from. You can’t reasonably expect translators to write correct DSL expressions.

> Gettext is functionally limited to source code being English (or alike). It handles all translation languages just fine, and competently so.

The *ngettext() family of functions take two strings (typically singular/plural) and rely on a language-wide expression to choose the variant (possibly more than 2 variants). There's no good reason for taking two strings, this should be handled in the language file, even without a DSL. Ngettext handling a single countable makes some corner-cases awkward, like gendering a group with possibly mixed-gender elements. The Plural-Forms expression not being per-message means that for example even in English "none/one/many foo" has to be handled in code, and that a language with only a rare 3rd plural has to pay the complexity for all cases.

Arguably, those are all nitpicks, Gettext is adequate for most projects. But quality translations get cumbersome very quickly.

> You can’t reasonably expect translators to write correct DSL expressions.

This feels demeaning. Translators regularly have to check the source code, and often write templates, they're well able for a DSL like MessageFormat's, especially when it's always the same expressions for their language. It saves a trip to the bugtracker to get developers to massage their code into something translatable. You can't reasonably expect a English-speaking developer armed with ngettext to know (and prepare their code for) the subtleties of Gaelic numerals.

You'll need 100s of areas if you want to minimise your local storage usage, and micro-managing that would be a PITA. GM announces 'up to 1750mb' to download the part of my country I traveled to in the last month, it's a non-starter.

Compare that to the 179mb/113mb that I need with OSMAnd/Maps.me for the whole country without fiddling. Add to that the fact that OSM's data is significantly better than Google Map's for my country (YMMV) and that there's no such thing as "offline mode not available in some regions" with OSM.

OsmAnd is great but its target users are OSM contributors and map geeks, not "Joe User looking for a GM alternative".

For your usecase, have a look at mapswithme instead. It's proprietary but very neat. Does only the basics but does them well.

There are plenty of mobile apps using OSM data, some of them high quality and improving regularly. If one app doesn't suit you, look around. Have another look if you last tried many months ago.