Organic Maps was my go to app for a navigation app where you can fix errors yourself immediately! So much better than having to work for free on the proprietary apps, and hope they accept your edits
There’s a fork from one year ago, CoMaps, that is gaining different features
E.g., I am adding CarPlay Dashboard support that you can test by joining the TestFlight
We are in great need of both more testers and some proper iOS devs (I am not). We’re racing to get scene lifecycle support by September, perfect opportunity if you like modernising old codebases!
Nota bene: those end up as notes on the map which another mapper has to input manually. There's a lot of spam and dubious entries so I often no longer bother entering them, especially in places I don't know or where I cannot verify the information.
I was using Street Complete for some time and was always wondering if using these apps is considered helpful or if it only creates churn/noise. Is there a general consensus on that in the community?
Would it be more accepted to just do a few small, potentially not metadata-complete edits myself or is the review structure (if there is any) geared more towards fewer, more steady contributors?
Did one direct edit once and iirc it took ages to land in the map and I wasn't able to grasp if came from new editors' edits being scrutinized more carefully by too few reviewers, from the nature of the edits (deleting a bunch of buildings after demolition and probably not replacing it with the right area type) or if the release cycle for new edits to be included is just way longer than I would have expected.
As a frequent contributor myself I love StreetComplete and I wouldn't worry about it perhaps generating a few changesets more than strictly necessary (it tends to make one changeset per quest (with multiple amendments for individual answers) and also only during a certain time frame. Sure, that means that adding information to a staircase creates multiple changesets (incline, step_count, surface, handrail), but that doesn't really matter.
What StreetComplete is very good at, in my opinion, is simply QA on the ground. SC asks about features existing on the map (benches, bus stops, shops, roads, barriers, etc.) and some of them might go stale. So asking about opening hours of a shop might cause someone to look and notice that the shop is closed now, or replaced by another one, so in many cases the quests that add detail to objects have the nice side-effect that those are being looked at and reviewed whether they still exist, which otherwise does not happen often. The barrier to adding new data is often lower than fixing or removing outdated information.
And it's such a low barrier to entry, especially for people not familiar with OSM's tagging, since the UX is very well designed for beginners in my eyes (while still being useful for advanced mappers), that you can easily recommend it to people who like those kind of hobbies (e.g. geocaching, Pokémon Go). For me it was an excuse to go outside more, also to places I haven't been, during COVID-19, just to tick off another quest.
The review does not block the data being added, it's more of a request for feedback.
Different maps have different update cycles. The slippy map on osm.org is meant to update as quickly as possible, usually a few minutes, but sometimes there are hiccups. Zoom levels that show larger areas also update a little slower.
As long as what you are adding is up to date/accurate, I wouldn't worry about whether you've captured everything about the features. "This thing is here" is a lot better for the map than no information.
Yes, CoMaps lets users submit basic data that updates OSM for addresses and POIs. It's a harder problem than you may initially think too, quite often the delivery format of OSM data differs in schema from the DB format. In the case of OrganicMaps and CoMaps, they both generate offline-optimized map formats for distribution.
They can’t do so automatically. Osm Editors must approve. Apparantly OSM fears legislation when people copy info from google maps. They like to see evidence, like street sign photos. In my limited experience anyway.
I occasionally contribute to OSM. You just send your edit and they are directly live. I don't think there's prior moderation. On these apps you log in to OSM using an OSM account IIRC (though I mostly use EveryDoor or directly osm.org for this, occasionally StreetComplete, I don't contribute using Comaps)
Some apps don't edit OSM directly, but rather add a note on the map for others to edit. Maybe that's what they meant.
E.g., OrganicMaps often creates these kinds of notes: https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/5377887 which for certain kinds of edits is safer than trying to directly edit. StreetComplete does the same in many cases when something no longer exists. I think, shops and other places can often be added directly, though since that has little to no ties to existing data.
But yeah, I'm using mostly StreetComplete (SCEE) when outside, sometimes Every Door and Vespucci. For offline map apps like Organic Maps it's likely not easy resolving potential conflicts with live OSM data that might be weeks or months newer than the map data in the app.
I can imagine it is not the same everywhere. I guess I have an active local chapter of editors. Given that I have 2 comments disagreeing and none concurring I guess this is an exception.
I've been editing OSM since 2015 and contributing to FOSS OSM apps for about half that, there have been conflicts or special cases in the past but edits on StreetComplete, OsmAnd, Organic Maps, and CoMaps all go live without any mandatory review. There's a "request review" checkbox on OSM changesets, but it's somewhat rare to actually get a review and the edit is live in the meantime
Do you have the slightest idea what OpenStreetMap is and how it works? It sounds like you have absolutely no clue, and it still doesn't prevent you from using that kind of language.
> CoMaps forked out of OrganicMaps after a row about money
Organic Maps is organized as a for-profit entity. CoMaps is not. This is a real difference, and the former asking for donations makes it look like a scam.
Looking at the OrganicMaps app on iOS and it seems to be free, with an option for donations in the menu . What does OrganicMap specifically do in order to make profit?
Always the rows about some kind of BS that fragments, fractures, and defuses the efforts into pet projects instead of ever actually being a viable alternative for the majority of people to corporate offerings.
The hardest thing about any effort that is two or more people is the interpersonal, coordination, consensus, and organization aspects. Everything else is easy in comparison.
How hard a sell that is depends heavily on how much that person values their time. I know people who are experts in their field, who have had their with-source Wikipedia edits reverted to incorrect or misleading information by people who have more time to argue online than they do.
I have used OsmAnd+ for well over 15 years by now, which also uses OSM data, just like these. And I have used JOSM on my PC to fix the OSM data myself.
Does Organic maps / CoMaps offer anything OsmAnd+ doesn't for someone who uses it for car navigation (especially on back roads in the wilderness) as well as hiking? (All in the Nordic countries.) I also record tracks with it.
I also use OsmAnd~ for hiking, and even more for cycling. I tried CoMaps after a friend recommended it. In my experience, OsmAnd is much more powerful, and if you can tolerate its complexity and battery-drain, it's worth it.
- CoMaps is much simpler, but lacks features. OsmAnd has (too many) features and requires heavy configuration, e.g. to disable some features I never use and optimize battery life.
- Loading a track (GPX) in CoMaps is cumbersome (you have to "Open with..." from a file navigator). OsmAnd can load tracks from within the app, and just display them or turn one into a route. With CoMaps, I couldn't load more than one on a map. My GPX routes are prepared with BRouter on my desktop computer, since both apps are unable to build routes of 150 kms
- CoMaps is better at energy saving. OsmAnd drains my battery in 5-6 hours when the screen is on (the screen roughly accounts for half of the drain). YMMV. For long rides, I switch the phone off as soon as I don't absolutely require its help for navigation.
- OsmAnd has features that I would never give up. Notably, displaying markers on "drinking water" POI, so that I know when I'll be able to refill, or decide if I must deviate my route toward a drinking tap.
- There are more maps and data in OsmAnd than in CoMaps, and more visualisation options.
- Last time I tried CoMaps (from F-Droid), at some point the screen went blinking, alternating between home and CoMaps. The only way out was to shutdown the phone.
> Notably, displaying markers on "drinking water" POI
In CoMaps, they are shown under: search > categories > water (then you can press "show on map"). Not straightforward, but it is there. Fairly enough, don't know if "water" includes drinkable ones only.
OsmAnd~ is great for hiking, when you need topographic contour info, 3D relief shading, etc.
CoMaps is a much simpler and faster interface, that I use for driving navigation. (I use a 7 year old S10e, though, so it's possible that on a modern phone you'd not notice the difference?)
YMMV, but they're both free, so it's easy to try and see for yourself :)
I ditched osmand because the interface is so
convoluted. Ridiculously so. Plus theres a facebook pixel in there somewhere, at least there was when I dropped it 10 years ago.
CoMaps seem sincere.
For Nordic/outdoors, outcomes using either osmand/comaps/etc in practice are going to be very similar.
Not sure where in the Nordics you are, but just want to plug ut.no and norgeskart.no for really fantastic Norway navigation.
Both have free apps (norgeskart has a 50kr / year subscription to support and add more features), and both are incredible for navigating trails, marked and otherwise, anywhere Norway.
>CoMaps is better targeted to the needs of most people.
Thank you. Both use OSM. The similarities are so slight I'd be inclined to recommend a region specific map, as is our friend with norgeskart.no for those particular cases.
I admit I haven't reloaded OsmAND this year, but I do every year, and delete it every year. Moreover, for me, using OSM is partly to get away from trackers, and facebook at all costs.
In my experience from years ago, OsmAnd was always very slow when searching and also didn't find much, as if it required a 100 percent match for anything one searches. Really annoying. Then I discovered Organic Maps, which behaved better, and more recently switched CoMaps, due to ideological reasons.
I've been making some custom maps for both Osmand and Comaps. The main big positive for Comaps I've seen is Android Auto being available freely (but you have osmand+ so moot point). But having used both, the tooling for osmand is far more mature. Creating an obf file (osmand file type) is a lot easier than the process for an mwm file (comaps file type). Far more routing or ui customization options in osmand and routing.xml files for even more advanced custom time penalties/weighting profiles.
I'm working on something that is best described as Komoot meets Mastodon. Self hostable and federated. It's pretty early, and the UX is pretty bare bones still.
If you're keen on checking it out you should be able to find it in my recent Github contributions, following the link in my profile.
The difference is the planning, I'm building my tool around a collaborative use case. I'm often doing multi day bikepacking trips with my close friends. The planner supports real time collaboration, so multiple people can plan on the same route together.
Also for me it's an experiment in AI driven development (which I hope won't alienate people to much).
There is a federated application called Endurain [0] that can be self-hosted, and is compatible with Strava and Garmin Connect. Not a phone app, but a web front-end. I don't know how well that works on mobile.
You can record tracks with (I think) both Organic Maps and CoMaps. If you are interested in the social aspects of sharing tracks https://wanderer.to/ and a few others offer imports of GPX and other track formats.
Track recording in comaps is super finicky, at least for me. I’ve lost multiple recordings while checking the map mid hike.
I can’t say what the exact cause is. Should probably work that out. But I’ve taken to recording using it and all trails at the at the same time with plans to bring the missing data over to comaps at some point.
I just go on Wikiloc to find tracks, then export the GPX file into CoMaps. I know that Wikiloc is not OSS, but at least I can do navigation with custom routes that way.
Any ones which tries to avoid realtime traffic, especially in India? Also ones which detects some shortcuts as narrow, meandering roads that will be extremely slow.
This looks really solid. It's the thing that would make me switch over. 90% of the time I know exactly where I'm going but need Google Maps to tell me what's unexpectedly in the way while I'm trying to get there.
My problem is that more often than not the road or business name I'm trying to find us just not in the database. If I'm at home I'll try to add it but if I'm driving that is not going to happen and I'll just use something else.
Yeah, that's a great call-out. While I can reckon my way most places, memorizing cross streets isn't my strength. Not having at least decent recency on top of traffic makes it tough.
I'll preface this by saying I can't speak for India. I live in the US. Use your own discretion to decide what here might apply to you.
I've been using Organic Maps for almost 3 years. I lived in Chicago during this time, as well as some smaller American cities. I go back and forth between Organic Maps and GMaps depending on the situation.
I've found that Organic Maps' lack of traffic data isn't a big deal for me. It doesn't always give you an accurate ETA, sure, but it isn't any worse at actually getting you to your destination.
The thing with GMaps is that everyone has traffic data, so nobody has an advantage. Google's alternative routes end up equally saturated as the main routes, meaning a "dumb" maps app that always takes the main route will get you to your destination in basically the same amount of time. This is backed up by my own personal experience, and some academic research [1].
Now, when I do need an accurate ETA, I go back to GMaps. I'll also use GMaps to route to businesses sometimes, because OSM doesn't have up-to-date info about businesses throughout most of middle America.
> I've found that Organic Maps' lack of traffic data isn't a big deal for me. It doesn't always give you an accurate ETA, sure, but it isn't any worse at actually getting you to your destination.
Some places live traffic information gives you a choice between a 10 minute way and 40 minute way though, if you get stuck in the wrong spots it really truly sucks, and for us who live in these places, being able to easily route around those spots saves us a bunch of time and energy.
I want to use any client app that uses OSM for car navigation, as I contribute both money and map fixes, but currently nothing seems to come close to either Wave or Google Maps when it comes to traffic information, which ends up being pretty important (for some), so I end up using Organic Maps only for when I walk on foot.
> Some places live traffic information gives you a choice between a 10 minute way and 40 minute way though
I lived in one of those alleged places (Chicago) and didn't observe this in practice. When Google sees that 10-minute route, it quickly starts routing drivers that way, and eventually both routes equalize around, say, 30 minutes. When two routes are that disparate, by the time you actually get midway through the faster one, it's just as congested as the slower route.
I think there's a weird psychology to these apps. When Google gives you a wack route through a residential area, it feels like you're getting an advantage. It feels like you're beating traffic. But you never beat traffic in a car, because you are traffic. And Google never sends only one car on a faster detour. It was always half a dozen of them or more. I saw this a million times in Chicago.
Getting pretty local here, but I remember one of Google's favorite alternate routes vividly. Instead of taking the Edens south into the Kennedy junction, it would have you exit onto Foster and then take some rando residential street south to Montrose or Irving Park. Every single time it did this, I'd see a parade of cars in front of me and behind me. The white glow of GMaps on a new car's infotainment screen is unmistakable. I could see what was going on, all of us could see what was going on. Meanwhile, you're driving past a bunch of kids waiting for their bus, or a ride home from school, and those are all delayed because me and a hundred others are using a side street as a commuter artery. This saved, on a good day, five minutes on a 35 minute commute. It was more antisocial than it was efficient.
> The thing with GMaps is that everyone has traffic data, so nobody has an advantage.
It's not necessarily about "advantage", especially on longer journeys. What if there is a crash on the Autobahn 1 hour in front of me? Even if I don't reroute, I at least have a choice of planning my toilet and lunch stop _before_ the crash site.
It is also possible to plan a different route if the crash is visible so far ahead. There are usually multiple routes I could take, and I decide based on the traffic and other factors, where I go. It can depend on the time of day, the time of year, etc. Maybe usually I don't take the one which is 100kms longer, but in the case of a crash, or even just heavy traffic it could be quicker still.
So for any non-trivial journey, I always use navigation, even if I could drive to the other place blindly. It's not really about navigation, it is about the current situation on the roads.
That would be interesting to try, but unfortunately, at least on iOS, it’s region-locked by account region, so as someone who goes back and forth between the US and Europe often, despite being in Europe, I’m entirely unable to install it at all without making significant changes to my Apple account.
Comaps can display your current speed and (if it's in the data) the speed limit for the road you're on - everything you need to avoid speeding tickets!
It would be really cool to see the social situational awareness sharing feature be implemented in an open client over an open censorship resistant protocol. Because to me Google maps is just mass surveillance by the pigs even if it does happen to help you today, the long term incentive for big tech is to erode user freedom and collude with corrupt governments.
This is a nice feature, I'll give you that, especially when you're in a new place. Social conventions of driving vary a lot, and "hey there's a cop ahead" is a good reminder to check yourself.
I'm no speed demon (it's just not worth it IMO). But, in Chicago you can do 10-15 over on an interstate and nobody cares. The cops are doing 20 over. If I saw someone actually doing 55 on the Dan Ryan I just assumed they were stoned, and I'm only half-joking. Elsewhere around the Great Lakes, it was more like 5-10 over. Meanwhile, in the Bay Area the flow of unimpeded traffic is usually only 0-5 over.
Have they tried/are there any plans of upstreaming that somehow? While I rely on proprietary services for car navigation today, if I move to a OSM-based services next, I'd want it to be similarly structured to actual OSM, not some proprietary bolted-on-top-of-OSM startup that will disappear/enshittificate within years.
Magic Earth is 10+ years old by now. Only recently they've introduced a (very reasonable, I think) Premium subscription to cover their costs. I guess the live traffic data is bound to some licenses so they can't just "upstream" that.
> Despite being advertised as a community-driven project, key decisions, including financial management, partnerships (with Kayak, for instance), and the inclusion of proprietary components in the code were made by a small group of shareholders, often without input from the broader contributor community.
This is sketchy. The entity at the bottom of the page is Organic Maps OÜ, which is an Estonian private limited company. Estonia has non-profits (MTÜs). The fact that this isn't organised as one makes it a commercial venture, except one that asks for donations.
Indeed and this is one of the key reasons we have started CoMaps. The main OM shareholder made it clear to us that interests of the company and the shareholders are at the forefront.
The original authors are from Russia, and their first product maps.me was sold to a Russian company with ties with Kremlin. I wouldn’t touch anything they do, so Organic was a no-go for me. Since it’s a new thing now, I can give it a go.
This assumes that OP would make a different app choice if OP knew this context. And it also assumes OP does not know this context. Neither are supported by the evidence, since HN links are posted without OP commentary. Not everybody cares so much about this sort of thing and perhaps OP was drawn to the app for other reasons. HN is not a monoculture.
Are you suggesting a Google/Apple Maps alternative with the differentiators being privacy-focused, "No ads. No tracking. Developed with love by the open-source community"hits #1 on HN and somehow the OP or HN polyculture doesn't care about being forked aver governance concerns, the inclusion of proprietary components in the code, using project’s donation funds for personal expenses, and running ads because of "other reasons"? Please say more.
The differentiator is that Organic Maps works offline, and is better than Google and Apple for hiking trails. I guarantee you that 100% of the install base does not care about FOSS swamp discourse. Those people are an irrelevant rounding error.
A lot of normal people I know used to love maps.me but have become dissatisfied with the ads and other unwelcome commercial elements. They would definitely chose coMaps over Organic Maps just to lessen the risk of that happening again.
Just downloaded CoMaps. Why does it start with a zoomed out view of the entire world, especially given that I gave it location services and it shows my current location (in North America). The very first UX experience this app gives is "I am primarily for people interested in maps and geography"
Contrast this with Apple Maps - when you open it, there are 4 big tap controls for actions like "Home" "Work", a search bar, and a map that covers a 1-mile radius around you .
I'd encourage your UX flow to go something more like: request location services > if granted, immediately start downloading their local tileset in the background > zoom to a 20-mile radius around the user
Unfortunately I have yet to find an OSM app that offers a properly usable modern interface. Most are passable if you are a nerd who doesn’t mind being inconvenienced and can work around the quirks; my non techy friends open the app once and immediately delete it. We really need an Apple or Google maps clone.
And the online mapping ecosystem is completely fragmented. Half the apps out there demand a $25/month subscription, creating these hermetic, proprietary silos. They are gating and monetizing trails, hikes, and routes that were crowdsourced by the community in the first place. I’m not paying $300 a year to buy back data that I personally contribute to. There are gazillion similar apps, with slight variations, and the more powerful ones look like something straight from 2000s.
Instead of a pay-to-access model, a sustainable consumer map ecosystem could look like Wikipedia, or better yet, a peer-to-peer network like IPFS where you trade compute (route calculation) and storage. It could be a barter: you get to use the collective resources of the network because you are actively hosting tiles, routing data, or contributing metadata back into it. But that requires a critical mass to take off (like bitcoin did).
OpenStreetMap is great, but what we actually need is a modern consumer frontend built on top of an open, distributed layer: decentralized public registry for user-generated content, keeping your routes and trip itineraries discoverable by any client app rather than locked inside VC-backed silos.
Furthermore, current open-source projects miss a lot of quality-of-life features that commercial apps have—things like crowd-sourced opinions and reviews about places, public transit schedules, real-time traffic alerting and reporting, location sharing, street-view, and dependable speed limits during navigation. Without these active, live-data layers, the map looks stale and lagging behind the real world.
The user interface also needs to shift from a passive viewport to a high-contribution editor. Right now, if you want to make serious geometry edits, you’re forced into JOSM. It’s hard to boot, clunky, and quite clearly has never seen a proper UI/UX designer, scaring away everyone but the most hardcore power users. I'm a person who doesn't give up easily, but when I tried adding parking zone regions for the city I gave up after 2 days of trying to make some sense of this software. A modern mobile UI should let you freehand draw a route that snaps to paths, edit regions on the fly, or drop advanced metadata — like parking restrictions — in just three obvious taps, without a steep technical learning curve.
Finally, the client app itself should be a pluggable core. Instead of building every feature from scratch, it should allow users to plug in open modules for whatever they need, whether that's live public transit routing, traffic estimates, location sharing, or advanced 3D metro overlays. The data is there, and the rendering tech is there; we just need a shared, distributed network structure so companies can't charge us a premium to gate the social and metadata layers. I wish there was an EU initiative to have a fully featured app like that, unifying all the existing ones in place of N abhorrent, barely functional implementations in all of the different local public transport apps (looking at you italian AMT genova or you, french IDF mobilites).
When I downloaded it via F-Droid earlier today it did what wanted. Unfortunately Android Auto is only enabled in the Play Store Version, so I downloaded that and there it went the same as for you. At least it immediately prompted me to download my local tile set when I tapped the geolocation button to zoom in.
Maps.me was sold and the acquiring company moved to a new proprietary code base. The quality dropped considerably. That's what motivated the original Maps.me founders to start Organic Maps.
And for 99.9% it will not make any difference, but I'm sure for some percentage of users missing hiking trails in CoMaps will make difference for sure.
Why use fork of a fork which lacks features of the previous one?
Users don't care about dev drama, if it doesn't affect them.
I was hoping for an offline open map with specifically tracking (My tracks from Google or now 3rd party) so I can log my adventures. bonus if I can save a printable thing for my wall or something...guess I know what this weekends project is.
OSMAnd is similarly OSM-based, offline, and FOSS (available from F-Droid) and does tracking. It is not typically recommended in posts like these because its wealth of options is daunting to the general public, while Organic Maps and CoMaps are more streamlined.
I have been a happy user of OsmAnd+ for over 15 years at this point, I can strongly recommend it if you need power user features.
(Yes the OsmAnd+ is the paid version, but it is the old pay-once version and I have definitely got my money's worth at this point, and it supports an open source project.)
I don't think there was an opt-in, at least at first. The Kayak links were there and they had a generic OM referral code attached so they got the credit
Some parts of the server were closed source for a bit. No longer the case. Also people got upset that the developers used the product funding to pay for their personal expenses. The idea is folks want the developers to isolate all the money they make from this project and use it to only pay expenses directly related to this project. If they need to eat or something they should get a job, presumably.
> If they need to eat or something they should get a job, presumably.
The tone of this comment is quite different from the text of the open letter to which you refer. Specifically this section. I don't have any personal knowledge either way, but this stood out to me.
> As it was revealed by Roman @rtsisyk it wasn't unusual for the Shareholders to use project's donations as their own money e.g. Alexander @biodranik paid for his personal holiday trip expenses this way. At the same time all other contributors were consistently denied any access to any financial information (even to the totals of money donated/spent). (It's fine for developers to be reimbursed for their hard work, but it should be done in a fair, transparent and accountable way.)
>(even to the totals of money donated/spent). (It's fine for developers to be reimbursed for their hard work, but it should be done in a fair, transparent and accountable way.)
Hardly disagree with this claim. Donation is something you give without any expected usage - otherwise it is a fundraising, payment, investment, etc.
It is not common for American for-profit corporations to accept donations. What you are paying is a retail price for Apple products. (Post edited after a check of the legality, but donating to Apple would still be highly unusual, and if the parent admits to doing this, he’s not going to get any less grief.)
> Some parts of the server were closed source for a bit. No longer the case.
In fact, nowadays there are many more closed parts in OM's map generator - many OM's bigger new features like hiking, cycling and bus routes depend on closed source improvements to the map generator. And some binary files required to build the app (e.g. packed_polygons.bin) are nowadays distributed under a custom non-FOSS data license.
I.e. nowadays its basically impossible to fork OM as is with all its features - and the "right to fork" is a cornerstone of FOSS.
I think it's fair for people to be surprised when their donations to the project are used for personal expenses when that is not clearly spelled out. There's nothing wrong with crowdfunding what is effectively a salary for a F/OSS project, but it needs to be explicit when soliciting donations.
I would recommend people use comaps instead which is the actual FOSS fork. OM has a long history of malicious behaviour like quietly adding ads, turning a part of its previously open sourced code proprietary and misappropriating donations. OM has lost most of its community a year ago to comaps and are now rushing vibe coded features to compensate.
> OM has lost most of its community a year ago to comaps
> rushing to compensate
I understand that you, being a contributor to CoMaps which people can see on your page, want to promote it, but it’s just spreading false info. Just one Russian community of OrganicMaps in Telegram has 4000+ members, CoMaps RU is not even at 200. Global group of OM is at 1650, CoMaps is at 840 of it.
It’s not OM who is compensating all over the place in this thread.
The quality of the maps is getting better, much more useful and detailed than Google Maps. I find it much easier to locate myself on Organic Maps than Google Maps. For example parks are only a green blob on Google Maps, while benches, walking paths, drinking water points, toilets and other landmarks and buildings are visible on Organic Maps. I find that adding transit lines or cycling routes as an overlay is also a great feature. Even the search feature is getting broken on Google Maps, when making a search, it would show up advertised results (in red squares instead of red circles) and when browsing the map there are more advertised useless places surrounded by an almost empty map. The only advantage of Google Map is to find the best way from point A to point B and places reviews.
That's OSM Carto[1] on the bottom, the default renderer/style on osm.org, but there are many alternative ones too. For example, Maptiler[2] has a bunch of cleaner styles, closer to Google's, yet with greater detail. Here is a basic one used my OSMApp[3] for that place as well: https://i.ibb.co/7dD05Ldp/Captura-de-ecr-20260706-092411.png
In some places it always was better (it's OpenStreetMap data) e.g. in the Puna de Atacama desert in Argentina/Chile, Google Maps is years behind in therms of map precision. Lots of roads are missing from Google Maps. Plus, OrganicMaps working totally offline, it's perfect for such a place where the only Internet would be by satellite.
But it really depends not only on the presentation theme but also on the data set itself and that varies by region. I'm sure that there are still places where the sources Google is buying are better than whatever is on OSM, just like there are regions where OSM is just so much more detailed than everybody else. And yet others, where OSM is generously fed by an entity that also supplies Google and all the others because they are not doing it for the map, they are doing it for the place.
The great thing about OSM is that if an area someone cares about is sparsely covered, that's a self-solving problem. There are parts of the world with great detail in OSM only because I happen to care about them.
The fact that OP just posted Organic Maps URL here with no context, and not mentioning that it is a dying project with its user base massively shifting to CoMaps, that is a red flag on its own.
comment doesn't seem very objective, OM receives monthly updates the same way it did for years, also getting new features each time. so define what you mean here by repeating "dying project" two times?
Display of marked hiking/cycling routes is a different feature from display of trails and tracks.
I.e. a marked route is usually a well-known and/or official one and often quite long (sometimes international even) route which goes through many different trails and tracks and even some roads etc.
And - as it had been mentioned above already - its coming to CoMaps too.
Organic mentions Open Source, but I just saw that FDroid mentions the following: "This app contains non open source components - compiled binary data files (including but not limited to .mwm map files) under a non FLOSS license"
Anyone has context on the following not hidden over Git-* issues (I was left thoroughly confused trying to understand it)?
Plus the code that's necessary to generate the map files that OM relies on is no longer openly published. So while true that the actual app code is open source, you can't use it without relying on their proprietary map files.
StreetComplete is one of my favorite apps. It's like Pokemon Go mixed with Wikipedia because it gamifies contributing to OpenStreetMap, which powers (all?) mainstream opensource maps.
Looking forward to iOS support so more people can use it.
You can use the things overlay and add a camera, but it'll not ask you for any properties because of a decision that StreetComplete doesn't want to ask about private objects and cameras without some public tag might be private...
Maybe this flock camera situation would provide some impetus to getting this conversation moving again
With SCEE you can add the camera and then select it and use "edit tags" to add all the properties. I find it a nice middle ground between a full editor like Vespucci and the quick and easy SC. Haven't tried EveryDoor or MapComplete yet though (the latter's website aims to be as good as a native app would be, idk if they also have an app nowadays but it's an option either way) though
This is a good way to get outside and do challenges like jogging every single street in your town. I figured that OSM was basically complete, but info was severely lacking for my area. It’s really easy to make local maps MUCH better.
I noticed that when I used one of these OSM based nagivation apps (I forget which one now), it suggested I leave my house by heading over my retaining wall, driving down a wooded hill, through a swamp, and then onto a nearby road. But because it was OSM based, I was able to discover the problem, fix it, and then when the app updated their data, the issue went away.
I have since noticed, to my frustration, that whatever map data Uber uses has the same issue, and will send Uber drivers to this road behind my house that doesn't actually have any access. Trying to explain this to Uber and get it fixed is basically impossible.
Yeah, especially accessibility-related data (especially especially crosswalk info) is apparently sorely lacking in OSM, given that every time I fire up StreetComplete in a new place the vast majority of the questions are things like “Do both ends of this crosswalk have tactile paving?” or “Does this crosswalk have an island?”.
Sounds like a visibility issue though. Is it available in any other map?
StreetComplete makes painfully visible that OSM is missing this info in a lot of places, but I never heard of any other map even trying to provide this accessibility info
In German cities I find that it's relatively complete btw, but yeah many places (also in Germany) don't have any data at all. Maybe there should be some collaboration where people can sign up for being notified if a blind person would like to visit an area near them and they can do a survey. It's not like it takes a lot of time to answer some questions about the five crossings a given village(-sized area) will have
Indeed. I have been slowly but surely completing a11y info in my area for a while. It seems never ending, but it's a good excuse to go take some long walks outside. Hopefully the data is useful to someone in need too :)
No. You cannot even click on a bakery to open its page. It's a bad Web client for the general public, and the vector style is hidden all below.
Osm.org is the reference website, the one where all data is always up to date and above all, where you edit the map.
But it's not a good OSM client.
Cool; but this is one of those instances where I wish the wonderful and benevolent FOSS developers of the world would consolidate efforts behind existing projects to make fewer better things instead of many never-finished forks. Especially since there is not yet a single open source map ui that is polished enough to compete with enterprise maps.
Agree. In terms of features Organic Maps has never been more than a pale imitation of OsmAnd, only "more ergonomic". The developers admit this themselves. So why couldn't they have just invested their time and energy into making OsmAnd more ergonomic! Ego-fueled duplication of efforts is a real problem in FOSS.
Last I checked, Osmand uses an unconventional map rendered. I would want to contribute to it, it's lagging on so many devices, I can barely use it. Comaps is perfectly smooth.
I'm not saying ego problems don't exist of course. But taking Osmand and making a simple general public app out of this is a huge effort (human and tech), probably more than building a side app.
We at cartes.app have discussed with some people Comaps. We've made links from cartes.app to Comaps, e.g. for navigation, a feature that we don't have.
We've not seen anything from their side. We don't really understand why they wouldn't want a proper Web version.
It's even worse in the non-open source world : Kagi's maps are bad. Qwant dropped their cool map project, too expensive. Ecosia has none, redirects to Google, its main competitor.
They could "just" clone cartes.app and run `bun i && bun start` and `ansible-playbook` to launch their instance of cartes.app, but we can't reach them. Or fund the project.
What's important though is that we collaborate on the tools we all use. OSM, MapLibre, Photon, Pelias, Protomaps, Motis, Brouter, etc. are all tools that we somehow share, each end-user app having their own combination of them.
We also thought like you do when outside of this world. But now, its a human problem. How to reach people and how to gain the time that it would take to collaborate ? We don't have the keys.
Would you consider using cache storage for enabling offline capabilities? Maybe I am in the minority but I usually go to organic maps for offline usage.
Yes it's planned. Should work in theory, but no one tried before.
Maps are so often done as native apps that to my knowledge no one tried to just use the PWA capabilities to cache tiles on the Web. Of course what's hard is cache invalidation. Does the user want to update the tiles ? Never ? Daily, weekly ? Only some regions ? Or manually ?
FWIW, I have an experimental open-source implementation of offline-capable PWA protomaps. Haven't advertised it much, because I haven't sorted out performance (particularly on mobile), and it's a bit buggy still. Also, don't have cache invalidation. But it does work. Usually. xD
I didn't dig too deeply into it, because explicitly storing locally just gives a bit more control. Also, since I was kind of imitating the style of Organic Maps, I wanted to give the ability to download entire tiles. I view caching responses more like a performance enhancement, whereas I wanted explicit offline support.
That makes sens. Both features combined would be cool. In any case, a cache invalidation feature should be always visible to the user, so that he knows that clicking this button will switch to online mode.
> TilelessMap is an open, offline-first mapping engine designed for critical field use,
such as forestry, emergency services, and humanitarian work.
Built with C and optimized for mobile performance, TilelessMap enables full local map
rendering without relying on cloud infrastructure — even in areas with poor or no
internet connectivity.
They have an Android app with maps of Yellowstone, Sweden and Norway.
There are no tiles. All geometry is loaded and rendered directly from an SQLite database on every render.
Geometry is stored as TWKB (Tiny Well-Known Binary) to reduce storage and transport size. During decoding, they do clever work using aggregate functions and reusing buffers across rows to reduce allocations.
There is real potential in the tech, but unfortunately little momentum behind it.
I would define a tile as a slice of geometries, not whole features.
The difference with Tileless' approach, is that they load whole features from the database and don't split them into tiles. So if a feature extends outside the current view, they would load the whole geometry rather than the intersection of the tile's extent and the geometry.
Vector tiles are optimized for concurrent downloads and browser / CDN caching and doing a good job of that.
Hi
I am th author of TilelessMap (ResilientMaps).
The idea is to not destroy data. In a tile the geometries are cut into smaller pieces. That is important to be able to do efficient caching. Vector tiles are also often simplified to fit each zoom level. This means that the data is quite worthless for anything byt rendering.
So far tilelessmap is also just rendering. But it opens up the possibilities for any gis processing/analyses that you can do on desktop gis.
Since it is difficult to cache without tiles it has to be a very efficient render path. So, all polygons are pre-triangulated from the server. If you are familiar with gpu rendering you know that the gpu only can render points, lines and triangels as primitives. Triangulation is a quite expensive step. In a tile-redenerer that is solved by very aggressive simplification. At each zoom level quite few geoemtries and vector points are actually shown. In tilelessmap a polygon is encoded in twkb as a list of vertices, and after that, indexes into the vertex list how the gpu builds triangels. The vertex list is decoded into VBO (vertex buffer object) and the triangle index list is decoded into EBO (element buffer object) This is very efficient, and even in a phone many geometries and vertices can be rendered. No cache needed, which reduces complexety and makes it possible to keep large geometries without cutting them in tiles.
Also, the storage in the db is relational. This means that you can keep a full datamodel all the way out to the deveice. This opens a lot of possibilities.
I hope that I will get time to furhter develop this. I think this is filling a gap in gis of today. More like a modern version of ArcPad (but so far without the functionality). It is all GPL v3 licensed.
Hope this helps understanding the incitaments for the project.
Not yet. I hope, if the Android version gets some attention to do that. But App-store gives some issues with licensing with GPL. Dual licensing will be needed, but I would like to limit the more permissive license, but not contrain anyone from develop to iOS. I don't really know how to do it. I do not want a closed source fork for iOS by me or anyone else. I just want all ideas and work on this to be open to anyone. Apple don't really like that thinking.
But most of this is written in C and many platform-differenties is handled by SDL3. So, I think it should be very possible to port it.
Not necessarily. That's one way to do it, but e.g. OsmAnd just has big region-shaped files and not a load of tiny square tiles like a web viewer has that loads the data piecemeal
I used comaps on a hike. It really is good at not draining your battery.
I've wanted to run it on my wear OS watch, but while you can sideload the APK, wearOS does not have a file browser, so it's not possible to import a planned route or similar. Has anyone here any idea for how to solve this?
Using CoMaps gave me the "Oh shit!" moment for the first time that the convergence of enough high quality open map data and a reasonably designed maps app to consume it was finally happening. It's crazy to think about how much thankless work it took to the point where we have something that is in many ways at parity and even exceeding in some dimensions the user-hating map software.
There is still a super long way to go until it suits everyone's needs, but the end + even further is starting to come into sight.
In the old times, I bought a Nokia smartphone (5230) because it shipped with offline maps – Nokia had the license for satellite data before Google Maps existed. I also drive a VW with built-in GPS and map loaded from SD card.
Offline maps are an obligatory "survival" tool. Most people trust too much they'll have connectivity, but it'll be the first thing to go down when it's most needed (extreme weather, blackouts, conflicts, etc).
Organic Maps finally made Hong Kong a region this year. Previously they required you to download the entire “China South” region, which was an extremely weird and wasteful choice.
Next it should standardize region naming.
For example, the new region is called “China Hong Kong” (every online ordering form out there does simply “Hong Kong”). Simultaneously, Taiwan is just “Taiwan”, so it’s clearly not about following a party line. Simultaneously, places like Falklands (not without its own disputes), South Georgia, Saint Helena have no mention of UK in their respective region titles, while Hawaii and Puerto Rico both lead with USA.
I think they should stick with toponyms, instead of trying to be some sort of political arbiter.
> the same people, who created MapsWithMe/Maps.Me app
Ah, the same people who I bought Maps.Me from in 2012 - that when I went to use it recently now bombards me with "sale ending in 4 hours!" pro subscription ad popovers in order to restore functionality (more than 10 offline map areas) that existed at the time I bought the app? No thanks.
Maps.me got sold to a series of subsequent owners. It was those subsequent owners who enshittified the app, not the original developers mentioned in your quotation. The original developers only later returned to the codebase, because it was freely licensed, and forked it in a different direction.
Why do people inflict this on themselves? OsmAnd has all the features of Organic Maps and CoMaps and MapsMe (in fact three times more features) and in 15 years of using it I have not any of these problems.
We’re on a nerd forum, so of course some of us love OSMAnd. But the general public finds that app too confusing. I know this firsthand because I’m in a travel subculture where OSMAnd provides a very useful tool that Maps.me/Organic Maps/CoMaps does not, but whenever I recommend OSMAnd people react very badly to the app and get angry at me for directing them to something so unpleasant.
You're right, of course. Whenever I evangelize for OsmAnd, what always surprises me is that nobody has even heard of it. Must be for a reason.
The developers seem a serious bunch, the issue tracker has been actively curated for years (although it's snowed under). They have a subscription business model, which is a bit opaque but seems to be functional. And yet everyone always has the same complaint about the app: terrible UX.
If only the Organic Maps people had contributed their undoubted skills to improving OsmAnd.
when opening the page for a place, the bottom for me regularly displays the "donation" ask which in good big tech fashion gives you the "ask again later" option.
The interface is a bit cumbersome, but it got way better over time and there are some really engaged developers behind it you can always contact. It's intended for biking and hiking, but you can also use it for cars. Meanwhile, they even support android auto.
It's the type of app that grew massively over decades and that offers basically every functionality that you can imagine.
I'm very pleased to see open source mapping/navigation systems. I have had the hypothesis for a while that many of the UI/UX designers on the google maps team do not actually drive a car.
People at Apple are not left-handed, they don't drive, they don't work out, and they don't seem to go out in the cold very much. Oh, and they definitely don't play video games.
Is there a nautical map equivalent of osm or organic maps? One that emphasizes waterways by drawing them thicker when zoomed out like regular maps draw roads thicker? Plan routes over the water? Even google maps lacks a nautical layer.
it depends what type of waterways you’re after.
for the sea, https://map.openseamap.org/ is very good (but no route planning sadly - for that you’d need opencpn and some charts obtained.
For inland waterways i can only speak for the English canals, for which i recommend https://opencanalmap.uk/ which uses data from both OSM and the Canal and River Trust. Again, sadly no route planning but for that I use https://canalplan.org.uk/
OM and CoMaps should also work, though you might need to wait awhile for a GPS fix and be near a window. Google's main hiccup will be an internet connection for the maps.
I tried to use it while biking but it's extremely confusing for bike trails (colors and parallel routes display, not highlighting real bike trails). I vastly prefer mapy.com in just showing a simple red dashed line for any official bike trail. The elevation is also displayed in 50m increments which is too little for bikes.
This belongs to a class of thing I've been predicting for a while: as non-volatile storage (not RAM but flash etc.) gets cheaper and cheaper, offline snapshots of quantities of information that used to require an Internet connection to practically access become possible.
Example: a modern mid-high end phone can contain this, a complete copy of Wikipedia, and a small LLM capable of understanding natural language queries and using tools. All on board, no connection needed.
Plus it an also carry most peoples' complete music and book collections and a meaningful chunk of most peoples' movie collections.
A mid-high end laptop can carry all of it and then some. Laptop and desktop storage is gigantic by previous generation standards. Mine is a higher end laptop but has 8TB storage. 512GB to 1TB is mainstream.
Offline-first used to be the norm before everything started requiring an internet connection for some reason. I was using OSM data offline 15 years ago on smartphones.
The reason it moved to the internet was not that it wasn't possible to stay offline-first. If the app depends on your server, then the owner can monetise that (e.g. with subscriptions) or track the users. It is more interesting for companies than allowing the users to buy a snapshot of the maps once and never come back.
Offline-first nowadays comes from open source projects, not from companies.
This sounds like an optimistic comment from a decade ago. Cost of storage has gone up recently, as a glance at data-hoarder fora will show. Phones have less storage capacity nowadays inasmuch as many manufacturers are removing SD card slots. The idea is that normies keep stuff in the cloud; self-storage of very large amounts of data is an edge case.
In my country, the typical laptop purcase from a retail chain is still 512GB or so, and moreover, few and fewer people own a laptop since it is becoming normal for a smartphone to be one's only computing device outside the workplace (even uni students are foregoing "real computers" now). Anything more than such a basic laptop is a premium product, and premium products cost premium prices.
there's an app too, some features are paid, and there are some long-standing bugs, but is otherwise quite fine. I use it when I want a map, not just uniform gray void with roads that is google maps.
This is exciting!! I was not aware of organic maps until today. I use offline maps in google maps also. It's not fully private if it requires GPS connection though!! That's why I have been working on https://github.com/deepanwadhwa/anumaan for a while now. The focus is on navigating without internet and without GPS.
> It's not fully private if it requires GPS connection though!!
How so? GPS is like FM radio: you send nothing, you only receive.
Apps like organic maps or comaps let you use the maps fully offline and you can compute itineraries without GPS when your need this (from point A to point B, with as many stops as you wish).
I strongly recommend you to seriously look into comaps or organic maps if you don't know them.
Now, "GPS isn't working or depletes my battery, what do I do?" is an interesting topic worth looking into. It seems you are trying to automate what we all do when GPS doesn't work well. I find that relatively easy in a city, not so much in a road on the countryside.
With the important caveat though that a lot of devices use AGPS, I don’t understand in too much detail and I think on some devices it can be disabled but I think this reveals some info
This is correct but if the phone's internet is off, there is no way for BSSID look up but maps might collect this in the background for telemetry and send it to the server once the internet is turned back on.
You are largely correct about everyday location privacy but I was thinking more in the adversarial direction (read military/ GPS denied zones) when I started this work. There have been news about GPS being denied/spoofed over european region. When your phone can't get the GPS signal, it would try to retrieve alternative signals (A-GPS, cellular network etc) - this is where an adversary could be listening for leaks. So GPS denial could effectively be a trigger and the follow ups after that trigger could lead to leaks.
If by AGPS you are referring to the use of nearby WiFi and cellular networks and querying a service for that (there are ways to have that info purely offline, but I do believe such databases rely on many people leaking their positions to exist at all), I'm not convinced your approach helps much:
1) if you run stock iOS or Android with the Google services, I believe you are already screwed anyway: I wouldn't trust them not to constantly leak stuff about you in the background even if you don't actively use the GPS, at least to build their traffic info and to keep their access network-based location database updated. If you are concerned about the privacy aspect of this stuff, you should be getting rid of the Google services anyway. That leads to the next case:
2) If you are running a phone without the Google services, then you don't have that kind of AGPS. Unless you go the extra mile of explicitly configuring microG to enable network-based location. I used to do this, but on my current phone, getting the position purely from GPS has been so reliable and quick that I didn't bother setting this up (I suppose it could provide some battery saving, but there are privacy concerns indeed, and not relying on such databases that basically depend on people giving up bits of their privacy is always nice). Your main concern there would be the shady blobs most phones run that could be doing you don't know what behind your back, but that's regardless how you use your phone.
If by AGPS you mean the download of the data about the positions of the GPS satellites (MSA) then yes, indeed, I agree, you will leak to your service provider (but not more than if you are not already fully offline - so basically if you use your phone like a phone you already leak as much) and to the server providing the data (which is probably Qualcomm (XTRA) or Google, or possibly your service provider). Then the solution is fully offline, and your current options are non assisted GPS, which can take 10 minutes in good conditions to get a fix if you haven't used it in a while, and reading the map. From what I understand, your current strategy is to help with the latter, which needs to be better than eventually getting a GPS fix (which feels somewhat niche, but I can see some advantages).
(There's also AGPS MSB where you basically ask a remote server to compute your location from what your GPS receiver gets and nearby cellular networks, the leak here is obvious but from what I've read this is quite rare nowadays, it was more useful when GPS receivers didn't have enough compute power to do the compilations themselves, so that would be mostly irrelevant.)
All in all, if I'm not wrong (happy to be proven wrong): as far as privacy is a concern, depending on what you mean by AGPS, your approach only applies to, respectively, devices without the Google Play Services or similar stuff, or to fully offline devices. It needs to be better than, respectively, GPS assisted with the satelite positioning data (which can be good for up to 7 days and then updated through regular GPS if I'm not wrong), or regular GPS. I believe your angle of attack can be battery usage, or better than the time to get a GPS fix. That seems quite tough especially that your approach as I understand it is intrinsically scoped (works mostly in cities where it's easy to ask about what's around).
I believe a stronger angle of your approach is resilience: less dependency on the GPS system which can indeed be jammed or which can fail (although there's redundancy: we do have several constellations of satellites from different countries, so a general failure seems unlikely, and a GPS failure would be catastrophic because many critical things depend on it).
Now, there are devices or places (especially in dense cities with high buildings) where the GPS simply doesn't work well, so a convenient, privacy-preserving alternatives to the GPS would be great in those situations6!
>>if you run stock iOS or Android with the Google services, I believe you are already screwed anyway: I wouldn't trust them not to constantly leak stuff about you in the background even if you don't actively use the GPS, at least to build their traffic info and to keep their access network-based location database updated.
are you sure this is true? - i can still run the phone on airplane mode(with GPS off) after i have the maps downloaded and can go anywhere afterwards. i don't think there is any communication with the outside world after that.
I am not sure if you looked at the repo I linked. In the intro I clearly state that I am doing this work for my own curiosity and for a hypothetical scenario (where GPS is denied). Moreover, the tech I am relying on (TERCOM) has applications in other fields as well such as navigating under water (submarines use a version of this). Or missile systems such as tomahawks which use tercom extensively.
> I am not sure if you looked at the repo I linked
I did skim it to get a grasp of your approach. But I'm answering statements made here too.
I think your project is worth pursuing. I'm genuinely curious what you come up with. This is actually why I spent quite some time writing my comments: I hope they helped you in some way. I do believe your project could use clearer presentation of the motivation (here or in the readme). In particular, the "GPS is not private" statement and the fact you didn't know about the existing private open source offline mapping solution also rang an alarm in me (a comparison with the "state of the art" would be nice). "Imagine GPS is jammed / is not available at this time at your place with your hardware" is actually sufficient as far as I am concerned. Relying on a privacy-preserving solution out of principles even on a spy phone comes with caveats that need to be exposed but I believe in this approach.
I'm not pushing back. If you have something like a blog that I could follow, I would subscribe to its RSS feed because I'm quite interested actually. If not, well it's already quite nice you share your curiosity work with the world.
>>the fact you didn't know about the existing private open source offline mapping solution also rang an alarm in me
why? that's a bit of an overreaction from your alarm bells honestly. i didn't know about organic maps because i never looked up for this solution and never came across this specific app in my readings. what i am working on (and want to figure out) has less to do with commercial angle of privacy (which organic maps solve) and more to do with navigating without relying on any external signal. i truly think we should be able to navigate earth (land/sea/air/subs) without any external human controlled signal (GPS/Internet/radio etc); that in my mind is true offline navigation. but you can argue that organic maps is also an offline navigation app and i think for an everyday user that's true.
your comments are helpful. thanks for being so thorough with your thought process. i am trying to write on https://trulytyped.com/user/4f448758/deepan-wadhwa - but i have not written anything technical yet and there is no RSS button there yet. let me add it today haha. thank you.
>> the fact you didn't know about the existing private open source offline mapping solution also rang an alarm in me
> why? that's a bit of an overreaction from your alarm bells honestly.
Maybe. Let me explain myself. In a former life, I worked in academia and you kinda triggered my research mode (which is, believe it or not, quite positive for you). There, your work is easily more solid and convincing if you reaserched a bit the state of the art. By working on an alternative to GPS navigation, in such a setting, I would expect you to know the field well.
Now, I understand that you didn't particularly look into apps pretty much focused on GPS positioning since they are not supposed to do what you want, and I'm aware that you aren't doing academic research nor pretending to.
> let me add it today haha. thank you.
No pressure, I'll try to think of coming back to check once in a while. Thank you as well.
I bought Maps.me Pro in 2012, used it while traveling then and was happy. Fired it back up for a similar trip this year and in spite of having paid for it already, I don't have Pro features and I get aggressive "Sale ending in 4 hours!" popovers every time I launch the app.
Organic Maps a great app in many ways, but I still don't get how people can actually use it every day and say it replaces Google Maps when its search feature totally stinks. I know it's a hard problem, but this is the number one thing that needs to somehow be fixed. I can't tell if I'm just too dumb or if FOSS/degoogle fanboys are just pretending. I just know I've tried to use it exclusively many times and always had to give in to Google Maps because the search totally failed.
I actually think the search feature rocks, because you have high fidelity OSM maps to query. Can't search for drinkable wells in Google Maps!
But then, it of course isn't Google Maps. It is likely to be more out of date and will not understand "natural" search queries as Google does. I believe it just takes some getting used to. There is overlap between the two, each service has its strengths and weaknesses, but also unique features.
+1 That, and it works in mountainous areas like the Alps or Pyrenees, where you're lucky to have GPS and most definitely can't rely on 4G for Google Maps
Sorta. It’s still worse than proprietary solutions: in reality when on wilderness backroads (US and CA) I find myself juggling four apps at a time.
CoMaps for course tracking, offline apple or google maps for navigation and satellite, Gia or All Trails for accurate topo and trails (even though I hate having to use it), and an ArcGIS app for information like additional land ownership or historic data.
It’s frustrating juggling apps, but the lack of accurate (or sometime any) topo or additional map layers in CoMaps is the most galling.
I’ve tried finding springs with OSM but I find i still have to verify on findaspring.org.
Would be great to have am OSM based app that did it all, but that seems unrealistic given a) the horrible data accuracy and OSM’s (entirely understandable) unwillingness to pirate and consolidate large proprietary data sets from multiple competitors b) unpaid developer hours needed to create and maintain an accessible user friendly and modern UX that can compete with premier apps.
We the FOSS world just have 100 to 10000 less budget to implement this feature. It's a hard problem, and you can't ignore that lots of other features are missing. E.g. street view or place comments.
This is more about OSM than Organic Maps, and I agree that looking for businesses it's not great. But looking for mapped features such as toilets, water taps, benches, fountains, etc. is far superior.
How does Organic Maps differ from Maps.Me (which it also mentions), or PocketEarth mentiond in comments here? Or CoMaps for that matter?
I've had Maps.Me on my phone for some years; it's often not as accurate or polished as the commercial offerings (Google, Here Technologies), but it's pretty nice. What might make me switch?
In terms of forks, I believe it was Maps.Me -> Organic Maps -> CoMaps.
So all forks of the same project. Maps.Me is not open source anymore (I think?), and CoMaps was started by a subset of the Organic Maps community that wasn't happy with the Organic Maps governance.
> What might make me switch?
Different reasons for different people, but OpenStreetMap is a great community project, for one. What I really like with those apps (I am now using CoMaps) is that they are open source, offline first and the UI is quite minimal and clean.
With CoMaps I don't think, there are any original authors involved (?). In any case I prefer organic, the original. Donated and very grateful that this app works so well (except for search where I sometimes use another app).
I didn't say "founders", I said "community". The community is more than just the founders. If anything, the part of the community that left did it because of their disagreeing with the founders.
Google Maps will always have better POI data because they have a larger userbase and they've gamified adding POIs with the "Local Guides" badge.
The main reason to switch is to have an offline-first experience. Google Maps does not provide offline maps everywhere, e.g. South Korea. And if you've ever tried using the Google Maps app on a weak connection, it's frustrating because it still tries to download remote tiles instead of using the ones you've downloaded.
Lastly any contributions you make in OpenStreetMap will show up in Organic Maps / CoMaps for everyone.
Personally, I use Google Maps on a daily basis, but have Organic Maps and regions downloaded for travel and just switch between the two. It's good to have a reliable fallback.
I remember over 15 years ago my wife and I were honeymooning in Europe (rom the US). While we had iOS devices that could use maps, the data services then were terrible, and GPS was effectively useless
We ended up taking screen shots of Google Maps where we zoomed in on local streets, on an ad hoc type atlas. I wish we had this app back then
As a active OSM contibutor with 7k+ changesets, Organic is my favorite map app I use for years traveling around the world, also donated to them. Only use GMaps for finding businesses.
Tried CoMaps, saw no reason to migrate to it at all - why migrate to basically no-name app (in terms of popularity) which is developed by who knows who (not even a Maps Me or OM devs) if Organic is totally good, has updates, stable, works well and has no ads? Have no idea what is this ad talk to be honest.
OSMAnd is nice, but too cluttered, OM is much easier to use. Only cool thing is being able to get live updates to a map if you changed something in OSM, but never actually used it for real.
I'm also a regular OSM contributor and I cycle between various apps/layers. I'm in the alpine region, regular hiker, and osm is the only map source I use (frankly, I find gmaps to be garbage for anything except looking up businesses).
I regularly try comaps, but while it's pretty smooth at rendering, the detail is visibly lacking at anything except maximum zoom level. When enabling contour lines, it's cluttered and hard to read. I tried to use it a few times on hikes, and while it's still much better than gmaps, if you're looking for something to use on a hike as an actual readable map and not just something to follow directions on, I'd say bite the bullet and get osmand.
osmand has indeed confusing interface, but the map rendering itself is excellent and can be heavily customized as needed.
On the web front, tracestack and mapy are both excellent presentations.
I use OrganicMaps a lot for long walks and it's great. Works perfectly offline if you have downloaded the map of the region beforehand, which is helpful if you are in an area with poor reception or just want to conserve phone battery by turning off data. And being OSM, it is great for showing less prominent paths/trails and other useful info like drinking water sources, picnic benches etc. And supports importing GPX trails. So IMO it's way better than Google Maps for this use case.
It's also very easy to edit some basic data through the app so if you notice an error in the map it's usually possible to fix it right there and then.
It's a fork from Maps.me, the streamlined map app popular with normies. I myself use and love OSMAnd, but in the travel communities I am active in, most people react badly to OSMAnd as something arcane and nerdy.
The performance advantage is small to nil, IME. The UI is admittedly cleaner, though partly (as you say) that's simply because it has a ton less features.
The difference mostly comes from the default detail levels and shape optimization. You can make it as fast in OsmAnd as both are GPU-accelerated, but OsmAnd renders the map more detailed by default.
Same in OsmAnd though. Someone recently posted a screenshot of an area they thought was badly mapped (with AI or at least not using the "make square corners" tool). Turns out to be Osmand's coordinate rounding as part of the map data compression
Comparing a building in my city between the two maps by flipping between the apps, it looks identical to me. Not a scientific test though
Yes, you can toggle a setting to use the network colors. I use it mostly for hiking. The UI is a learning curve, 100%, I am curious to check another tool
This is my regular hiking and cycling map, fantastic for offline use as well!
Edit: didn’t know about the ads / proprietary server issues. I guess this is the only sort of place to find out unless users are browsing the GitHub repo.
A.T. is extremely trail oriented including user-submitted routes and reviews, but it may miss some less popular raw OSM-based paths. OSM based apps like OsmAnd and CoMaps just display all the data neutrally, such might be better for people who want to see raw reality and make their own route.
I had bad experience tracking my bike ride with it on iOS - seems like app offloaded and didn't record half of the track. Strava and OutRun don't have this problem.
The killer feature of Organic Maps and OSM is the POI markers for small things. If you are cycling, knowing where the nearest bike rack is to your location is crucial.
Google Maps is very good at showing car parking spaces, which is the requirement if you live in a suburb in California like its developers.
I had my first hiking in a route without network connection one month ago, that was the first time I used the GPS without network by Organic Maps even I knew I could do it in the past. It showed me the possibility that some feature work well without network. It's a really good experience.
Excellent open-source mapping alternative. The fact that it's fully offline-capable and privacy-respecting makes it invaluable. The community-driven OSM data model is powerful. Great to see projects like this thriving.
I'll repeat a question asked in an earlier thread on OM:
Do there exist apps that share their offline map data? As in: install app A, dowload offline map data for country xyz, use in app A, install app B, use same map data in app B (or C, D etc) without re-downloading the map data?
As I understood, that was not the case as each app uses its own format which is some underlying public geo info (presumably too big to have on device), filtered / processed in per-app fashion.
The sillyness & waste of this is obvious. So: any progress in resolving this situation?
Until you realise that there is not one true way to show a map, and that different apps may actually have different needs. Suddenly it becomes obvious that not all apps can use the same shared offline data.
To further back this up, just because OSM might be a map's data source, it doesn't mean they use the same rendered vectors or images for the tiles.
I make changes to OSM so they can be propagated to a cycling-specific mapping tool I use (it's a commercial tool with their own custom map layers) - it takes about 3-4 weeks from when a change is made on OSM for it to be incorporated into their data set.
So yeah, it's not as simple as "we all use OSM so we'll just share all our rendered mapping values".
There's no fundamental reason that underlying map data used by a good % of mapping apps, couldn't be stored 1x on-device, in some standard format and shared across apps.
Users could pick & choose what subset(s) of map data they want to store locally. Different apps could pick & choose what features to offer, how to use available data & how to render it.
Sad to see that such a conceptually simple problem hasn't been addressed yet. We're talking a good # of apps here, many millions of users, and enormous amounts of storage & bandwidth wasted.
Edit: I'm assuming that last bit is a problem for the app developers themselves, too.
There are a few fundamental reasons: 1. at least iOs app privacy/sandboxing model makes sharing any data files pretty difficult, if impossible. I suspect Android has similar issue. 2. there is no such thing as "just map data" - every app has to do opinionated decision what they need in their maps data (e.g. aerials, elevation, choice of POIs, languages etc), how it gets styled (it makes requirements to actual data). And this is for just simple base map data, you have also routing, address search databases etc on top. So there is not much to share really, and not easy to share. Not even talking about huge challenge to standardize it.
(I'm founder of Nutiteq, we also did FOSS SDKs for offline maps)
Every version of Organic Maps and CoMaps (and probably to some extent OsmAnd) use slightly different formats of maps; consider a new feature to support park bench backrests/colors/materials. That info likely wouldn't have been in the map files before for efficiency, and now it needs to be. But any given other app may not have that feature at all, and instead decides to save space and bandwidth by compressing the files instead. And a third app might improve performance on old devices by preprocessing routes and storing them in a new format in the map data.
So you can see the work of keeping map files cross-compatible would either hamper the release of new features, or take a bunch of work, all to save a few hundred MB on people's phones
Again, I don't think you understand how it works in detail, and you just assume from a high level that "it all looks the same, therefore it must be simple to make it all work together".
Some apps show raster tiles. Which means that if you want a different style, you just cannot share them. If you want the same style but you don't want to show exactly the same data, you can't share them. "Ok, you say, I personally don't care about raster tiles, I believe that everybody should be happy with vector tiles". That is wrong, but let's assume it.
Vector tiles are much more compact, but at the cost of the rendering engine: it has to read the information stored in some format and render the map according to different things like the style. How do you load the data to access it and rendering rapidly? Maybe you want to remove data so that it's more efficient and doesn't lag, or maybe you really want all that detail and more phones will lag when loading. Maybe you want to optimise the storage, so you remove the information you don't want to show, etc. Those requirements are incompatible, it's a tradeoff. Different apps choose different tradeoffs and therefore don't share resources.
Don't get me wrong: some apps could decide to share resources, and that would be fine. But it's not like all apps have the exact same needs and should obviously be sharing all that.
If you think that maps are "obvious" and a "conceptually simple problem", then you surely don't know much about what goes under the hood when you load a map in your phone. It's is actually quite complex.
This used to be a thing on Windows Phone, you could download maps in the settings and they would be available in the default Maps app, but also in HERE Maps, Transit, etc.
1. Address lookups. Many of the buildings in OSM have yet to get street addresses added, so navigating to an address is a bit hit or miss. This gets fixed with time as people update the maps and wouldn't be a show stopper.
2. Real time traffic and detour navigation. This is really needed when navigating around busy cities where a wreck on a major highway can result in significant delays. This needs a combination of an external service (separate from OSM) but also one that has enough adoption to have usable data.
1. This is largely country-dependent with some governments being quite adamant that address data should be in the public domain, and some governments doing the opposite and selling address databases to private companies for some quick cash, where private companies then sell address lookups for some absurd per-lookup price for the next few decades. Most of the world though is probably just not rich enough to compile, publish and accurately maintain a national address database.
OpenAddresses is perhaps the gold standard for open source address data compilation from government datasets. Note for the future that alltheplaces.xyz (project I contribute to) is looking like it may eventually perform the automatic address data download/extraction/compilation that OpenAddresses currently performs. This has the benefit that in backwards countries, alltheplaces.xyz also obtains some addresses through other means--such as advertised location of international restaurant chains. And quite often, being within +/- 100 address numbers on a road is good enough for navigation. Google Maps obviously crawls addresses from all over the Internet AND has quite a high tolerance for errors, hence will perhaps always seem more complete than OSM.
2. Some further ideas for open source mapping applications trying to determine real time traffic situations:
2a. Use GTFS/GTFS-RT feeds for bus networks to detect real time delays but also to compare planned bus route schedules for different times of the day (different traffic conditions) where buses share the road with the public. There's already a few maps out there that overlay nearby GTFS-RT feeds for the city of interest and usefully provide a visual indication of how well public transport vehicles are currently moving.
2b. alltheplaces.xyz extracts public traffic camera feeds which could be presented to users when they plan/commence a journey as an indication of what lies ahead on the route.
While default osm data is great, I've been very impressed with the partnership/collective of Overture Maps data. It's osm + esri/tomtom + corporate processing/funding.
Unfortunately they don't support opening hours in the schema, it's a deliberate choice as it's high value data the contributors would rather license to you
That being said, it's hard to fault them for trying to monetize some dimensions that are not well supplied by the public, and that companies work to acquire. Still, I agree, it's disappointing.
Also current place names. You can sometimes find a business on OSM that has correct metadata, but in many areas the majority are missing or stale (like, closed 10+ years ago.) Solving this is an "interesting" problem to say the least when many businesses these days have nothing more than an Instagram/Whatsapp handle.
See alltheplaces.xyz for continuously updated straight-from-the-primary-source opening hours of chains of shops and restaurants, public facilities such as libraries, etc. This is probably as accurate as it gets AND you have the confidence of knowing exactly where the data came from (down to the URL) and when it was last checked.
Some OSM contributors go brand-by-brand/operator-by-operator in making sure OSM features have the most up-to-date opening hours added to them from matched ATP features. As such, OSM may be fairly accurate for chains too.
For a standalone shop or restaurant the opening hours situation is usually still better with Google Maps rather than OSM. There aren't enough OSM contributors who care enough to check and maintain opening hours for every shop, restaurant, fuel station, etc.
Both this and addresses is something that's really easy to survey with StreetComplete.
Google has the benefit of having their own street-level imagery for house numbers and street names, Android devices for real-time traffic info, and the ability to simply scrape web pages for shop data including opening hours. but in places with a reasonable number of active mappers, OSM is so much richer and more up to date.
At least in my experience for large retail chains or restaurant chains, hours on their websites are very accurate. I think where Google might benefit from calling to verify hours is, for example, where they've scraped https://schema.org/openingHours from the web page for an independent store, but the website has used an invalid/incorrect format, and some manual human check or clean-up is necessary, but this work would be too time consuming for each of 100,000's of independent stores which exist.
There are cases where a brand might have broken opening hours information such as "Mo- Tu - We 09 00 -4 p m". For alltheplaces.xyz scrapers, a human is often able to make sense of the situation and fix the problem through a few lines of extra code. Contacting the business to get the hours confirmed would only be necessary in very rare cases.
Where it would perhaps make the _most_ sense to contact a business to confirm opening hours is:
1. Ahead of public holidays to confirm planned temporary changes to opening hours. Many brands don't bother to update hours on their websites for such temporary changes, or at least don't list those hours until the week prior, which is usually too late for OSM, ATP, offline maps, etc which would ideally want to know these changes to hours up to a year in advance.
2. To confirm actual dates of permanent store/restaurant closures. Many brands in liquidation tend to fire the website developers (or can't pay them to work) and leave an outdated website online until the final shop or restaurant is closed. Commonly it's only some "CLOSING DOWN SALE LAST DAYS EXTENDED TO FRIDAY" post on social media that informs visitors accurately.
IME there is no reliable source: Stores' (including restaurants') own websites are inaccurate enough that I need to call them if I need to be sure. Yelp, etc. are at least equally inaccurate.
I'm sure it annoys the stores that keep their website and Yelp etc. updated but there is no way to know who is reliable.
Yeah (2) is the killer feature especially in totalitarian shitholes (pretty much every country nowadays) full of money grab ops disguised as police checkpoints and cameras.
I wonder if we can build a decentralized version of such a reporting service.
In fact they are called "Public GPS Traces" and can be enabled in the OSM layer inspector. I am not sure if anyone started distilling track recommendations from them yet though.
That's possible. I use RideWithGPS, maybe a lot of people use it around here. Or maybe only two other people have ridden the route, it doesn't say, but it's still super useful for finding routes.
Always loved this. There are still parts of the UK where you’ll have no data offline navigation is great, and the walking paths are better than you can get elsewhere.
Tried it for while, works with GrapheneOS and Android Auto well enough.
What I absolutely can’t stand is the routing. It once tried to send me through residential Oakland on some Manhattan-grade staircase labyrinth instead of just taking normal streets.
Organic Maps has quietly become my default for anything offline. Downloaded a whole region before a trip with no signal and it just worked, search and turn-by-turn included, no account, no tracking. The OSM data is genuinely better for walking and trails in a lot of places too. Good to see it on the front page.
>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
>Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
>When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
That comment is against the guidelines. You should make a new comment that avoids breaking the guidelines if you want people to see your criticism.
The offline-first approach is underrated.
Most mapping apps assume connectivity as a given —
Organic Maps treating it as a luxury is the right call for global users.
Organic Maps was my go to app for a navigation app where you can fix errors yourself immediately! So much better than having to work for free on the proprietary apps, and hope they accept your edits
There’s a fork from one year ago, CoMaps, that is gaining different features
E.g., I am adding CarPlay Dashboard support that you can test by joining the TestFlight
We are in great need of both more testers and some proper iOS devs (I am not). We’re racing to get scene lifecycle support by September, perfect opportunity if you like modernising old codebases!
https://www.comaps.app/ https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps
All these apps rely on the data provided by OpenStreetMap (OSM). It is a Wikipedia-like project where anybody can contribute edits.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/
For business operators this can be done with a low-friction web page: https://www.onosm.org/
Nota bene: those end up as notes on the map which another mapper has to input manually. There's a lot of spam and dubious entries so I often no longer bother entering them, especially in places I don't know or where I cannot verify the information.
I was using Street Complete for some time and was always wondering if using these apps is considered helpful or if it only creates churn/noise. Is there a general consensus on that in the community?
Would it be more accepted to just do a few small, potentially not metadata-complete edits myself or is the review structure (if there is any) geared more towards fewer, more steady contributors?
Did one direct edit once and iirc it took ages to land in the map and I wasn't able to grasp if came from new editors' edits being scrutinized more carefully by too few reviewers, from the nature of the edits (deleting a bunch of buildings after demolition and probably not replacing it with the right area type) or if the release cycle for new edits to be included is just way longer than I would have expected.
As a frequent contributor myself I love StreetComplete and I wouldn't worry about it perhaps generating a few changesets more than strictly necessary (it tends to make one changeset per quest (with multiple amendments for individual answers) and also only during a certain time frame. Sure, that means that adding information to a staircase creates multiple changesets (incline, step_count, surface, handrail), but that doesn't really matter.
What StreetComplete is very good at, in my opinion, is simply QA on the ground. SC asks about features existing on the map (benches, bus stops, shops, roads, barriers, etc.) and some of them might go stale. So asking about opening hours of a shop might cause someone to look and notice that the shop is closed now, or replaced by another one, so in many cases the quests that add detail to objects have the nice side-effect that those are being looked at and reviewed whether they still exist, which otherwise does not happen often. The barrier to adding new data is often lower than fixing or removing outdated information.
And it's such a low barrier to entry, especially for people not familiar with OSM's tagging, since the UX is very well designed for beginners in my eyes (while still being useful for advanced mappers), that you can easily recommend it to people who like those kind of hobbies (e.g. geocaching, Pokémon Go). For me it was an excuse to go outside more, also to places I haven't been, during COVID-19, just to tick off another quest.
The review does not block the data being added, it's more of a request for feedback.
Different maps have different update cycles. The slippy map on osm.org is meant to update as quickly as possible, usually a few minutes, but sometimes there are hiccups. Zoom levels that show larger areas also update a little slower.
As long as what you are adding is up to date/accurate, I wouldn't worry about whether you've captured everything about the features. "This thing is here" is a lot better for the map than no information.
do these damn projects even push the proposed edits up back to openstreetmap?
insanely shameful if not
Yes, CoMaps lets users submit basic data that updates OSM for addresses and POIs. It's a harder problem than you may initially think too, quite often the delivery format of OSM data differs in schema from the DB format. In the case of OrganicMaps and CoMaps, they both generate offline-optimized map formats for distribution.
They can’t do so automatically. Osm Editors must approve. Apparantly OSM fears legislation when people copy info from google maps. They like to see evidence, like street sign photos. In my limited experience anyway.
I occasionally contribute to OSM. You just send your edit and they are directly live. I don't think there's prior moderation. On these apps you log in to OSM using an OSM account IIRC (though I mostly use EveryDoor or directly osm.org for this, occasionally StreetComplete, I don't contribute using Comaps)
Some apps don't edit OSM directly, but rather add a note on the map for others to edit. Maybe that's what they meant.
E.g., OrganicMaps often creates these kinds of notes: https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/5377887 which for certain kinds of edits is safer than trying to directly edit. StreetComplete does the same in many cases when something no longer exists. I think, shops and other places can often be added directly, though since that has little to no ties to existing data.
But yeah, I'm using mostly StreetComplete (SCEE) when outside, sometimes Every Door and Vespucci. For offline map apps like Organic Maps it's likely not easy resolving potential conflicts with live OSM data that might be weeks or months newer than the map data in the app.
Yes, OrganicMap pushes new places and metadata edits directly. I think they only use notes for deletions.
In batches, to be exact. Multiple edits in relatively short intervals (a few minutes) are commited as one.
This isn't true, I don't know any FOSS OSM apps that have any approval process.
I can imagine it is not the same everywhere. I guess I have an active local chapter of editors. Given that I have 2 comments disagreeing and none concurring I guess this is an exception.
I've been editing OSM since 2015 and contributing to FOSS OSM apps for about half that, there have been conflicts or special cases in the past but edits on StreetComplete, OsmAnd, Organic Maps, and CoMaps all go live without any mandatory review. There's a "request review" checkbox on OSM changesets, but it's somewhat rare to actually get a review and the edit is live in the meantime
yet google was caught red handed stealing openstreetmap data for years and all it led to was a timid Ooopsy letter.
the real reason is that user content, either you don't have anybody contributing, or you're flooded with abuse. there's no middle.
I assume they all do, it's nigh impossible to maintain your own data fork and keep reconciling your users' edits and the updates from OSM.
> do these damn projects even
Do you have the slightest idea what OpenStreetMap is and how it works? It sounds like you have absolutely no clue, and it still doesn't prevent you from using that kind of language.
Of course they do.
yeah, so were LibreOffice and OpenOffice relying on the .odt format
CoMaps forked out of OrganicMaps after a row about money
> CoMaps forked out of OrganicMaps after a row about money
Organic Maps is organized as a for-profit entity. CoMaps is not. This is a real difference, and the former asking for donations makes it look like a scam.
Looking at the OrganicMaps app on iOS and it seems to be free, with an option for donations in the menu . What does OrganicMap specifically do in order to make profit?
Charge for downloading map data.
I have downloaded many maps and not paid anything.
Here is the open letter to Organic Maps owners written by people who then forked it to Comaps, if you are interested: https://www.comaps.app/news/2025-04-16/1/
Always the rows about some kind of BS that fragments, fractures, and defuses the efforts into pet projects instead of ever actually being a viable alternative for the majority of people to corporate offerings.
The hardest thing about any effort that is two or more people is the interpersonal, coordination, consensus, and organization aspects. Everything else is easy in comparison.
It makes sense. People generally want at least one of: money or decision-making power.
If they have to negotiate, constantly settle, and get no money, that's a hard sell.
How hard a sell that is depends heavily on how much that person values their time. I know people who are experts in their field, who have had their with-source Wikipedia edits reverted to incorrect or misleading information by people who have more time to argue online than they do.
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”
I have used OsmAnd+ for well over 15 years by now, which also uses OSM data, just like these. And I have used JOSM on my PC to fix the OSM data myself.
Does Organic maps / CoMaps offer anything OsmAnd+ doesn't for someone who uses it for car navigation (especially on back roads in the wilderness) as well as hiking? (All in the Nordic countries.) I also record tracks with it.
I also use OsmAnd~ for hiking, and even more for cycling. I tried CoMaps after a friend recommended it. In my experience, OsmAnd is much more powerful, and if you can tolerate its complexity and battery-drain, it's worth it.
- CoMaps is much simpler, but lacks features. OsmAnd has (too many) features and requires heavy configuration, e.g. to disable some features I never use and optimize battery life.
- Loading a track (GPX) in CoMaps is cumbersome (you have to "Open with..." from a file navigator). OsmAnd can load tracks from within the app, and just display them or turn one into a route. With CoMaps, I couldn't load more than one on a map. My GPX routes are prepared with BRouter on my desktop computer, since both apps are unable to build routes of 150 kms
- CoMaps is better at energy saving. OsmAnd drains my battery in 5-6 hours when the screen is on (the screen roughly accounts for half of the drain). YMMV. For long rides, I switch the phone off as soon as I don't absolutely require its help for navigation.
- OsmAnd has features that I would never give up. Notably, displaying markers on "drinking water" POI, so that I know when I'll be able to refill, or decide if I must deviate my route toward a drinking tap.
- There are more maps and data in OsmAnd than in CoMaps, and more visualisation options.
- Last time I tried CoMaps (from F-Droid), at some point the screen went blinking, alternating between home and CoMaps. The only way out was to shutdown the phone.
[edit: BRouter for routing]
> Notably, displaying markers on "drinking water" POI
In CoMaps, they are shown under: search > categories > water (then you can press "show on map"). Not straightforward, but it is there. Fairly enough, don't know if "water" includes drinkable ones only.
> CoMaps is better at energy saving. OsmAnd drains my battery in 5-6 hours …
Have you considered a dynamo hub with a headlight with USB output?
OsmAnd~ is great for hiking, when you need topographic contour info, 3D relief shading, etc.
CoMaps is a much simpler and faster interface, that I use for driving navigation. (I use a 7 year old S10e, though, so it's possible that on a modern phone you'd not notice the difference?)
YMMV, but they're both free, so it's easy to try and see for yourself :)
I ditched osmand because the interface is so convoluted. Ridiculously so. Plus theres a facebook pixel in there somewhere, at least there was when I dropped it 10 years ago.
CoMaps seem sincere.
For Nordic/outdoors, outcomes using either osmand/comaps/etc in practice are going to be very similar.
Not sure where in the Nordics you are, but just want to plug ut.no and norgeskart.no for really fantastic Norway navigation.
Both have free apps (norgeskart has a 50kr / year subscription to support and add more features), and both are incredible for navigating trails, marked and otherwise, anywhere Norway.
Great detail on norgeskart.no. Thanks for the headsup.
> I ditched osmand because the interface is so convoluted. Ridiculously so
OSMand is a cartographer's friend - it does everything and more... With all the drawbacks of doing that.
CoMaps is better targeted to the needs of most people.
>CoMaps is better targeted to the needs of most people.
Thank you. Both use OSM. The similarities are so slight I'd be inclined to recommend a region specific map, as is our friend with norgeskart.no for those particular cases.
I admit I haven't reloaded OsmAND this year, but I do every year, and delete it every year. Moreover, for me, using OSM is partly to get away from trackers, and facebook at all costs.
In my experience from years ago, OsmAnd was always very slow when searching and also didn't find much, as if it required a 100 percent match for anything one searches. Really annoying. Then I discovered Organic Maps, which behaved better, and more recently switched CoMaps, due to ideological reasons.
The question I ask every time there's a breathless new post about the supposedly revolutionary Organic Maps.
I've been making some custom maps for both Osmand and Comaps. The main big positive for Comaps I've seen is Android Auto being available freely (but you have osmand+ so moot point). But having used both, the tooling for osmand is far more mature. Creating an obf file (osmand file type) is a lot easier than the process for an mwm file (comaps file type). Far more routing or ui customization options in osmand and routing.xml files for even more advanced custom time penalties/weighting profiles.
I happily own a car with nothing fancier than a bluetooth radio. No touch screens and no Android Auto is a blessing.
But from this and sibling comments it seems that CoMaps have nothing to offer me (except possibly better search).
What do you mean by "scene lifecycle support"? In general, I like cleaning up old code bases. But I don't see how that relates to testing?
We need to do this transition, or contributors on macOS 27 won't be able to compile the app...
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/UIKit/transitionin...
Regarding testers we had a TestFlight build with non-functioning CarPlay, and it was only discovered by me (and I don't even own a car..)
If you're interested in taking a look, the easiest way to get involved would be to join our Zulip instance (Slack clone): https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/src/branch/main/docs/CONT...
Any recommendations for an OSS maps app that provides tracks like Strava,l and Komoot?
I'm working on something that is best described as Komoot meets Mastodon. Self hostable and federated. It's pretty early, and the UX is pretty bare bones still.
If you're keen on checking it out you should be able to find it in my recent Github contributions, following the link in my profile.
ok cool, i see there is already a similar project called wanderer, so i assume the difference would be in the planning module? thx
Yes, I like wanderer (http://wanderer.to/) a lot!
The difference is the planning, I'm building my tool around a collaborative use case. I'm often doing multi day bikepacking trips with my close friends. The planner supports real time collaboration, so multiple people can plan on the same route together.
Also for me it's an experiment in AI driven development (which I hope won't alienate people to much).
There is a federated application called Endurain [0] that can be self-hosted, and is compatible with Strava and Garmin Connect. Not a phone app, but a web front-end. I don't know how well that works on mobile.
[0] https://docs.endurain.com/gallery/
You can record tracks with (I think) both Organic Maps and CoMaps. If you are interested in the social aspects of sharing tracks https://wanderer.to/ and a few others offer imports of GPX and other track formats.
Track recording in comaps is super finicky, at least for me. I’ve lost multiple recordings while checking the map mid hike.
I can’t say what the exact cause is. Should probably work that out. But I’ve taken to recording using it and all trails at the at the same time with plans to bring the missing data over to comaps at some point.
I just go on Wikiloc to find tracks, then export the GPX file into CoMaps. I know that Wikiloc is not OSS, but at least I can do navigation with custom routes that way.
Do you mean tracking your workout? If so there's Fitotrack on Android.
Any ones which tries to avoid realtime traffic, especially in India? Also ones which detects some shortcuts as narrow, meandering roads that will be extremely slow.
There’s actually work ongoing on live traffic support from various public sources!
https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/projects/21877
This looks really solid. It's the thing that would make me switch over. 90% of the time I know exactly where I'm going but need Google Maps to tell me what's unexpectedly in the way while I'm trying to get there.
My problem is that more often than not the road or business name I'm trying to find us just not in the database. If I'm at home I'll try to add it but if I'm driving that is not going to happen and I'll just use something else.
Thank you for contributing! The task of mapping every street and business in the world sounds impossible, but openstreetmap.org does really well.
Yeah, that's a great call-out. While I can reckon my way most places, memorizing cross streets isn't my strength. Not having at least decent recency on top of traffic makes it tough.
I'll preface this by saying I can't speak for India. I live in the US. Use your own discretion to decide what here might apply to you.
I've been using Organic Maps for almost 3 years. I lived in Chicago during this time, as well as some smaller American cities. I go back and forth between Organic Maps and GMaps depending on the situation.
I've found that Organic Maps' lack of traffic data isn't a big deal for me. It doesn't always give you an accurate ETA, sure, but it isn't any worse at actually getting you to your destination.
The thing with GMaps is that everyone has traffic data, so nobody has an advantage. Google's alternative routes end up equally saturated as the main routes, meaning a "dumb" maps app that always takes the main route will get you to your destination in basically the same amount of time. This is backed up by my own personal experience, and some academic research [1].
Now, when I do need an accurate ETA, I go back to GMaps. I'll also use GMaps to route to businesses sometimes, because OSM doesn't have up-to-date info about businesses throughout most of middle America.
[1]: https://trid.trb.org/view/1495267
> I've found that Organic Maps' lack of traffic data isn't a big deal for me. It doesn't always give you an accurate ETA, sure, but it isn't any worse at actually getting you to your destination.
Some places live traffic information gives you a choice between a 10 minute way and 40 minute way though, if you get stuck in the wrong spots it really truly sucks, and for us who live in these places, being able to easily route around those spots saves us a bunch of time and energy.
I want to use any client app that uses OSM for car navigation, as I contribute both money and map fixes, but currently nothing seems to come close to either Wave or Google Maps when it comes to traffic information, which ends up being pretty important (for some), so I end up using Organic Maps only for when I walk on foot.
> Some places live traffic information gives you a choice between a 10 minute way and 40 minute way though
I lived in one of those alleged places (Chicago) and didn't observe this in practice. When Google sees that 10-minute route, it quickly starts routing drivers that way, and eventually both routes equalize around, say, 30 minutes. When two routes are that disparate, by the time you actually get midway through the faster one, it's just as congested as the slower route.
I think there's a weird psychology to these apps. When Google gives you a wack route through a residential area, it feels like you're getting an advantage. It feels like you're beating traffic. But you never beat traffic in a car, because you are traffic. And Google never sends only one car on a faster detour. It was always half a dozen of them or more. I saw this a million times in Chicago.
Getting pretty local here, but I remember one of Google's favorite alternate routes vividly. Instead of taking the Edens south into the Kennedy junction, it would have you exit onto Foster and then take some rando residential street south to Montrose or Irving Park. Every single time it did this, I'd see a parade of cars in front of me and behind me. The white glow of GMaps on a new car's infotainment screen is unmistakable. I could see what was going on, all of us could see what was going on. Meanwhile, you're driving past a bunch of kids waiting for their bus, or a ride home from school, and those are all delayed because me and a hundred others are using a side street as a commuter artery. This saved, on a good day, five minutes on a 35 minute commute. It was more antisocial than it was efficient.
> The thing with GMaps is that everyone has traffic data, so nobody has an advantage.
It's not necessarily about "advantage", especially on longer journeys. What if there is a crash on the Autobahn 1 hour in front of me? Even if I don't reroute, I at least have a choice of planning my toilet and lunch stop _before_ the crash site.
It is also possible to plan a different route if the crash is visible so far ahead. There are usually multiple routes I could take, and I decide based on the traffic and other factors, where I go. It can depend on the time of day, the time of year, etc. Maybe usually I don't take the one which is 100kms longer, but in the case of a crash, or even just heavy traffic it could be quicker still.
So for any non-trivial journey, I always use navigation, even if I could drive to the other place blindly. It's not really about navigation, it is about the current situation on the roads.
In Europe you could use NUNAV, which does collaborative routing to avoid this scenario (I work for the company that develops it).
That would be interesting to try, but unfortunately, at least on iOS, it’s region-locked by account region, so as someone who goes back and forth between the US and Europe often, despite being in Europe, I’m entirely unable to install it at all without making significant changes to my Apple account.
I prefer Google Maps cause they'll tell you where pigs camp out.
Saved me a lot of speeding tickets on the interstate.
Comaps can display your current speed and (if it's in the data) the speed limit for the road you're on - everything you need to avoid speeding tickets!
It would be really cool to see the social situational awareness sharing feature be implemented in an open client over an open censorship resistant protocol. Because to me Google maps is just mass surveillance by the pigs even if it does happen to help you today, the long term incentive for big tech is to erode user freedom and collude with corrupt governments.
Waze is way better for that and where Google gets its data, but delayed it seems, because they’re both Alphabet.
Fwiw, Waze is owned by Google. Google acquired the crowd-sourced navigation app in 2013.
a cool hack i found to avoid tickets is to make sure to drive at the speed limit, saved me many times!
This is a nice feature, I'll give you that, especially when you're in a new place. Social conventions of driving vary a lot, and "hey there's a cop ahead" is a good reminder to check yourself.
I'm no speed demon (it's just not worth it IMO). But, in Chicago you can do 10-15 over on an interstate and nobody cares. The cops are doing 20 over. If I saw someone actually doing 55 on the Dan Ryan I just assumed they were stoned, and I'm only half-joking. Elsewhere around the Great Lakes, it was more like 5-10 over. Meanwhile, in the Bay Area the flow of unimpeded traffic is usually only 0-5 over.
There’s Magic Earth which uses OSM map data but also integrates live traffic information. Not sure whether it works in India, though.
https://www.magicearth.com/
Have they tried/are there any plans of upstreaming that somehow? While I rely on proprietary services for car navigation today, if I move to a OSM-based services next, I'd want it to be similarly structured to actual OSM, not some proprietary bolted-on-top-of-OSM startup that will disappear/enshittificate within years.
Magic Earth is 10+ years old by now. Only recently they've introduced a (very reasonable, I think) Premium subscription to cover their costs. I guess the live traffic data is bound to some licenses so they can't just "upstream" that.
M.E. is closed source and some would argue somewhat enshittifying
Has there been any discussion about moving the Android codebase to Kotlin?
This seems like an interesting project to contribute a little bit to, but I can't deal with Java anymore...
Yes, there are some initial discussions around that!
It's probably easiest to discuss in the project's Zulip: https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/src/branch/main/docs/CONT...
Switch to Kotlin: https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/issues/1984 Migrate to Compose: https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/issues/4298
Comaps works for free with android auto.
I did buy OsmAnd a long time ago, but have since used the OsmAnd~ and needed an OSM client for a car.
I like OsmAnd because it is very powerful, but comaps is more elegant.
There is also CoMaps (https://www.comaps.app/) which is a fork of Organic Maps, after concern over the governance of Organic Maps https://itsfoss.com/news/organic-maps-fork-comaps/
Thank you! This is highly relavant. I wish OPs would put a bit more research into what they post
https://itsfoss.com/news/organic-maps-fork-comaps/
> Despite being advertised as a community-driven project, key decisions, including financial management, partnerships (with Kayak, for instance), and the inclusion of proprietary components in the code were made by a small group of shareholders, often without input from the broader contributor community.
> a small group of shareholders
This is sketchy. The entity at the bottom of the page is Organic Maps OÜ, which is an Estonian private limited company. Estonia has non-profits (MTÜs). The fact that this isn't organised as one makes it a commercial venture, except one that asks for donations.
Indeed and this is one of the key reasons we have started CoMaps. The main OM shareholder made it clear to us that interests of the company and the shareholders are at the forefront.
e-Residency is most likely the main reason for this 'run' from Estonia.
The original authors are from Russia, and their first product maps.me was sold to a Russian company with ties with Kremlin. I wouldn’t touch anything they do, so Organic was a no-go for me. Since it’s a new thing now, I can give it a go.
This assumes that OP would make a different app choice if OP knew this context. And it also assumes OP does not know this context. Neither are supported by the evidence, since HN links are posted without OP commentary. Not everybody cares so much about this sort of thing and perhaps OP was drawn to the app for other reasons. HN is not a monoculture.
Are you suggesting a Google/Apple Maps alternative with the differentiators being privacy-focused, "No ads. No tracking. Developed with love by the open-source community"hits #1 on HN and somehow the OP or HN polyculture doesn't care about being forked aver governance concerns, the inclusion of proprietary components in the code, using project’s donation funds for personal expenses, and running ads because of "other reasons"? Please say more.
The differentiator is that Organic Maps works offline, and is better than Google and Apple for hiking trails. I guarantee you that 100% of the install base does not care about FOSS swamp discourse. Those people are an irrelevant rounding error.
A lot of normal people I know used to love maps.me but have become dissatisfied with the ads and other unwelcome commercial elements. They would definitely chose coMaps over Organic Maps just to lessen the risk of that happening again.
Just downloaded CoMaps. Why does it start with a zoomed out view of the entire world, especially given that I gave it location services and it shows my current location (in North America). The very first UX experience this app gives is "I am primarily for people interested in maps and geography"
Contrast this with Apple Maps - when you open it, there are 4 big tap controls for actions like "Home" "Work", a search bar, and a map that covers a 1-mile radius around you .
I'd encourage your UX flow to go something more like: request location services > if granted, immediately start downloading their local tileset in the background > zoom to a 20-mile radius around the user
Unfortunately I have yet to find an OSM app that offers a properly usable modern interface. Most are passable if you are a nerd who doesn’t mind being inconvenienced and can work around the quirks; my non techy friends open the app once and immediately delete it. We really need an Apple or Google maps clone.
Murena (the company behind the /e/ mobile OS) is developing a FOSS app, maybe it will suit your needs : https://murena.com/en/murena-maps-your-questions-and-answers...
And the online mapping ecosystem is completely fragmented. Half the apps out there demand a $25/month subscription, creating these hermetic, proprietary silos. They are gating and monetizing trails, hikes, and routes that were crowdsourced by the community in the first place. I’m not paying $300 a year to buy back data that I personally contribute to. There are gazillion similar apps, with slight variations, and the more powerful ones look like something straight from 2000s.
Instead of a pay-to-access model, a sustainable consumer map ecosystem could look like Wikipedia, or better yet, a peer-to-peer network like IPFS where you trade compute (route calculation) and storage. It could be a barter: you get to use the collective resources of the network because you are actively hosting tiles, routing data, or contributing metadata back into it. But that requires a critical mass to take off (like bitcoin did).
OpenStreetMap is great, but what we actually need is a modern consumer frontend built on top of an open, distributed layer: decentralized public registry for user-generated content, keeping your routes and trip itineraries discoverable by any client app rather than locked inside VC-backed silos.
Furthermore, current open-source projects miss a lot of quality-of-life features that commercial apps have—things like crowd-sourced opinions and reviews about places, public transit schedules, real-time traffic alerting and reporting, location sharing, street-view, and dependable speed limits during navigation. Without these active, live-data layers, the map looks stale and lagging behind the real world.
The user interface also needs to shift from a passive viewport to a high-contribution editor. Right now, if you want to make serious geometry edits, you’re forced into JOSM. It’s hard to boot, clunky, and quite clearly has never seen a proper UI/UX designer, scaring away everyone but the most hardcore power users. I'm a person who doesn't give up easily, but when I tried adding parking zone regions for the city I gave up after 2 days of trying to make some sense of this software. A modern mobile UI should let you freehand draw a route that snaps to paths, edit regions on the fly, or drop advanced metadata — like parking restrictions — in just three obvious taps, without a steep technical learning curve.
Finally, the client app itself should be a pluggable core. Instead of building every feature from scratch, it should allow users to plug in open modules for whatever they need, whether that's live public transit routing, traffic estimates, location sharing, or advanced 3D metro overlays. The data is there, and the rendering tech is there; we just need a shared, distributed network structure so companies can't charge us a premium to gate the social and metadata layers. I wish there was an EU initiative to have a fully featured app like that, unifying all the existing ones in place of N abhorrent, barely functional implementations in all of the different local public transport apps (looking at you italian AMT genova or you, french IDF mobilites).
CoMaps does have this exact UX flow actually. Unfortunately it is somewhat flaky and frequently falls back to not doing it.
When I downloaded it via F-Droid earlier today it did what wanted. Unfortunately Android Auto is only enabled in the Play Store Version, so I downloaded that and there it went the same as for you. At least it immediately prompted me to download my local tile set when I tapped the geolocation button to zoom in.
It should zoom in and automatically download.
Disagree.
> if granted, immediately start downloading their local tileset in the background
Nope. I do not want any app to start downloading hundreds of megabytes without my permission.
And Organic Maps is itself a fork of Maps.me, started ...due to concern over the governance of Maps.me (introduction of commercial elements I think?).
This app has had quite a history.
Maps.me was sold and the acquiring company moved to a new proprietary code base. The quality dropped considerably. That's what motivated the original Maps.me founders to start Organic Maps.
So sad. I imagine 99.9% of organic maps users will never know.
And for 99.9% it will not make any difference, but I'm sure for some percentage of users missing hiking trails in CoMaps will make difference for sure.
Why use fork of a fork which lacks features of the previous one?
Users don't care about dev drama, if it doesn't affect them.
I was hoping for an offline open map with specifically tracking (My tracks from Google or now 3rd party) so I can log my adventures. bonus if I can save a printable thing for my wall or something...guess I know what this weekends project is.
OSMAnd is similarly OSM-based, offline, and FOSS (available from F-Droid) and does tracking. It is not typically recommended in posts like these because its wealth of options is daunting to the general public, while Organic Maps and CoMaps are more streamlined.
I have been a happy user of OsmAnd+ for over 15 years at this point, I can strongly recommend it if you need power user features.
(Yes the OsmAnd+ is the paid version, but it is the old pay-once version and I have definitely got my money's worth at this point, and it supports an open source project.)
Comaps can record tracks if that's what you need :-)
what are the concerns over governance of organics maps ?
They tried to put ads into Organic Maps, and they only backed down because CoMaps sprung up in response.
Others in the thread highlighted other issues, like Organic Maps' proprietary license for some parts of the repo: https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/blob/master/DATA_....
‘Ads’ is a bit of a stretch. They put opt-in referral links.
I don't think there was an opt-in, at least at first. The Kayak links were there and they had a generic OM referral code attached so they got the credit
Please no. This is why I left Maps.me, every time I opened maps.me I'd have to click through ads.
https://www.comaps.app/news/2025-04-16/1/
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Some parts of the server were closed source for a bit. No longer the case. Also people got upset that the developers used the product funding to pay for their personal expenses. The idea is folks want the developers to isolate all the money they make from this project and use it to only pay expenses directly related to this project. If they need to eat or something they should get a job, presumably.
https://www.comaps.app/news/2025-04-16/1/?ref=itsfoss.com
> If they need to eat or something they should get a job, presumably.
The tone of this comment is quite different from the text of the open letter to which you refer. Specifically this section. I don't have any personal knowledge either way, but this stood out to me.
> As it was revealed by Roman @rtsisyk it wasn't unusual for the Shareholders to use project's donations as their own money e.g. Alexander @biodranik paid for his personal holiday trip expenses this way. At the same time all other contributors were consistently denied any access to any financial information (even to the totals of money donated/spent). (It's fine for developers to be reimbursed for their hard work, but it should be done in a fair, transparent and accountable way.)
>(even to the totals of money donated/spent). (It's fine for developers to be reimbursed for their hard work, but it should be done in a fair, transparent and accountable way.)
Hardly disagree with this claim. Donation is something you give without any expected usage - otherwise it is a fundraising, payment, investment, etc.
Going on holiday is why I work. And I use organic maps when I’m on holiday. And donate. Good luck to them.
> And donate
How do you square this with Organic Maps being organised as a for-profit entity?
Same as when I donate money to Apple.
You donate money to Apple?
Yes. Wilfully.
It is not common for American for-profit corporations to accept donations. What you are paying is a retail price for Apple products. (Post edited after a check of the legality, but donating to Apple would still be highly unusual, and if the parent admits to doing this, he’s not going to get any less grief.)
> As a USA for-profit corporation, Apple is unable to accept donations
I don't think this is true. You can donate to a for-profit corporation. It just counts as income to them and isn't deductible to you.
How does Apple accept donations?
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So yeah, if you donate money to Apple, Inc., Organic Maps makes sense for you. For everyone else, it seems like a scam.
Calling developers who providing you a great OSS app a scam because you don't like how project run is very rude imo
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> Some parts of the server were closed source for a bit. No longer the case.
In fact, nowadays there are many more closed parts in OM's map generator - many OM's bigger new features like hiking, cycling and bus routes depend on closed source improvements to the map generator. And some binary files required to build the app (e.g. packed_polygons.bin) are nowadays distributed under a custom non-FOSS data license. I.e. nowadays its basically impossible to fork OM as is with all its features - and the "right to fork" is a cornerstone of FOSS.
Also ref to: https://isitreallyfoss.com/projects/organic-maps/
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I think it's fair for people to be surprised when their donations to the project are used for personal expenses when that is not clearly spelled out. There's nothing wrong with crowdfunding what is effectively a salary for a F/OSS project, but it needs to be explicit when soliciting donations.
The people that develop the project have needs like anyone else. That includes vacations.
And they are welcome to crowdfund for them. But they need to be explicit about what exactly the money is funding.
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I would recommend people use comaps instead which is the actual FOSS fork. OM has a long history of malicious behaviour like quietly adding ads, turning a part of its previously open sourced code proprietary and misappropriating donations. OM has lost most of its community a year ago to comaps and are now rushing vibe coded features to compensate.
> OM has lost most of its community a year ago to comaps > rushing to compensate
I understand that you, being a contributor to CoMaps which people can see on your page, want to promote it, but it’s just spreading false info. Just one Russian community of OrganicMaps in Telegram has 4000+ members, CoMaps RU is not even at 200. Global group of OM is at 1650, CoMaps is at 840 of it.
It’s not OM who is compensating all over the place in this thread.
Thanks for the heads up, I wasn't not aware of that. I never got a single ad in OM though
It's the Kayak referral links on hotel POIs, which some people consider ads
> which some people consider ads
How are they not ads? Is this the "icloud storage promotion in ios settings" discourse again?
The quality of the maps is getting better, much more useful and detailed than Google Maps. I find it much easier to locate myself on Organic Maps than Google Maps. For example parks are only a green blob on Google Maps, while benches, walking paths, drinking water points, toilets and other landmarks and buildings are visible on Organic Maps. I find that adding transit lines or cycling routes as an overlay is also a great feature. Even the search feature is getting broken on Google Maps, when making a search, it would show up advertised results (in red squares instead of red circles) and when browsing the map there are more advertised useless places surrounded by an almost empty map. The only advantage of Google Map is to find the best way from point A to point B and places reviews.
I often reference this comparison in this context: https://i.xkqr.org/gmapsvsosm.png
It's often more nuanced than that IMO.
OSM in my experience is better at features (roads, hiking trails, and stuff like that), i.e. what's shown in that comparison screenshot.
Google Maps is better at place-metadata, such as opening hours; as well as user-contributed content like reviews and photos.
So I end up using both, depending on usecase.
Indeed. OpenStreetMap is the better map, Google Maps is the better address book and business directory.
That's OSM Carto[1] on the bottom, the default renderer/style on osm.org, but there are many alternative ones too. For example, Maptiler[2] has a bunch of cleaner styles, closer to Google's, yet with greater detail. Here is a basic one used my OSMApp[3] for that place as well: https://i.ibb.co/7dD05Ldp/Captura-de-ecr-20260706-092411.png
[1]: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap_Carto [2]: https://www.maptiler.com [3]: https:/osmapp.org
"There's no life where data broker isn't needed"
In some places it always was better (it's OpenStreetMap data) e.g. in the Puna de Atacama desert in Argentina/Chile, Google Maps is years behind in therms of map precision. Lots of roads are missing from Google Maps. Plus, OrganicMaps working totally offline, it's perfect for such a place where the only Internet would be by satellite.
One is an ad medium, the other isn't.
But it really depends not only on the presentation theme but also on the data set itself and that varies by region. I'm sure that there are still places where the sources Google is buying are better than whatever is on OSM, just like there are regions where OSM is just so much more detailed than everybody else. And yet others, where OSM is generously fed by an entity that also supplies Google and all the others because they are not doing it for the map, they are doing it for the place.
The great thing about OSM is that if an area someone cares about is sparsely covered, that's a self-solving problem. There are parts of the world with great detail in OSM only because I happen to care about them.
When you realize that Google Maps is a business directory that also happens to do mapping, things make sense.
To the best of my knowledge, Organic Maps is a dying project.
CoMaps was forked from Organic Maps because of shift in how things were being done and ignored. I mean, those in IT know very well how that is ending.
CoMaps is highly active and receiving new features release by release.
If you wanna use a 5 stars app based on OpenStreet Maps: https://www.comaps.app/download/
The fact that OP just posted Organic Maps URL here with no context, and not mentioning that it is a dying project with its user base massively shifting to CoMaps, that is a red flag on its own.
comment doesn't seem very objective, OM receives monthly updates the same way it did for years, also getting new features each time. so define what you mean here by repeating "dying project" two times?
Does this amazing new fork of a fork have colored hiking trails as this "dying" Organic Maps?
I know the answer, tried both, I will let myself out...
No, because that part of OM is closed source, one of the main reasons for the fork!
It’s coming though: https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/pulls/4111
It is already implemented and it works like a charm.
I have been using it to explore trails and 4WD tracks, just enabled it on the map at the top left corner.
You will see Outdoors which enables the trails/4WD tracks, Contour Lines and Subway.
Display of marked hiking/cycling routes is a different feature from display of trails and tracks. I.e. a marked route is usually a well-known and/or official one and often quite long (sometimes international even) route which goes through many different trails and tracks and even some roads etc.
And - as it had been mentioned above already - its coming to CoMaps too.
Yes, CoMaps has it and I used it this weekend.
Trails and 4WD tracks have a distinctive colour semi-continue lines. I am using exactly that to discover new places and it has been awesome.
Organic mentions Open Source, but I just saw that FDroid mentions the following: "This app contains non open source components - compiled binary data files (including but not limited to .mwm map files) under a non FLOSS license"
Anyone has context on the following not hidden over Git-* issues (I was left thoroughly confused trying to understand it)?
OrganicMaps rolled their own 'data license' for the actual map files: https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/blob/master/DATA_...
Plus the code that's necessary to generate the map files that OM relies on is no longer openly published. So while true that the actual app code is open source, you can't use it without relying on their proprietary map files.
>Plus the code that's necessary to generate the map files that OM relies on is no longer openly published.
Seems like a big red flag. And another reason to migrate to CoMaps.
>Seems like a big red flag. And another reason to migrate to CoMaps.
Why do you think OM user base forked and mass migrated to CoMaps?? haha
StreetComplete is one of my favorite apps. It's like Pokemon Go mixed with Wikipedia because it gamifies contributing to OpenStreetMap, which powers (all?) mainstream opensource maps.
Looking forward to iOS support so more people can use it.
https://streetcomplete.app/
https://www.openstreetmap.org/
For the more experience OSM contributors, there is also a fork called SCEE[1] that adds some extra "quests" and a ton of UI customisability!
[1]: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/SCEE
Every Door is very good if you know what info you'd like to edit. It is my go-to app for editing POIs on the go.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Every_Door
I wonder if that one lets you add flock cameras. I can't find the option in Streetcomplete.
You can use the things overlay and add a camera, but it'll not ask you for any properties because of a decision that StreetComplete doesn't want to ask about private objects and cameras without some public tag might be private...
Maybe this flock camera situation would provide some impetus to getting this conversation moving again
With SCEE you can add the camera and then select it and use "edit tags" to add all the properties. I find it a nice middle ground between a full editor like Vespucci and the quick and easy SC. Haven't tried EveryDoor or MapComplete yet though (the latter's website aims to be as good as a native app would be, idk if they also have an app nowadays but it's an option either way) though
There is a tag for ALPRs on OpenStreetMap:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:surveillance:type%3D...
So you can just add them using a normal OSM editor like EveryDoor or Vespucci
This is a good way to get outside and do challenges like jogging every single street in your town. I figured that OSM was basically complete, but info was severely lacking for my area. It’s really easy to make local maps MUCH better.
I noticed that when I used one of these OSM based nagivation apps (I forget which one now), it suggested I leave my house by heading over my retaining wall, driving down a wooded hill, through a swamp, and then onto a nearby road. But because it was OSM based, I was able to discover the problem, fix it, and then when the app updated their data, the issue went away.
I have since noticed, to my frustration, that whatever map data Uber uses has the same issue, and will send Uber drivers to this road behind my house that doesn't actually have any access. Trying to explain this to Uber and get it fixed is basically impossible.
I think Uber might use OSM, but might not update very often, or might use different logic than other apps
Yeah, especially accessibility-related data (especially especially crosswalk info) is apparently sorely lacking in OSM, given that every time I fire up StreetComplete in a new place the vast majority of the questions are things like “Do both ends of this crosswalk have tactile paving?” or “Does this crosswalk have an island?”.
Sounds like a visibility issue though. Is it available in any other map?
StreetComplete makes painfully visible that OSM is missing this info in a lot of places, but I never heard of any other map even trying to provide this accessibility info
In German cities I find that it's relatively complete btw, but yeah many places (also in Germany) don't have any data at all. Maybe there should be some collaboration where people can sign up for being notified if a blind person would like to visit an area near them and they can do a survey. It's not like it takes a lot of time to answer some questions about the five crossings a given village(-sized area) will have
Indeed. I have been slowly but surely completing a11y info in my area for a while. It seems never ending, but it's a good excuse to go take some long walks outside. Hopefully the data is useful to someone in need too :)
iOS has Every Door[1] and there’s also MapComplete[2] which works as a PWA.
[1]: https://every-door.app [2]: https://mapcomplete.org
Didn't know that, very helpful.
Anything like this in iOS?
Organic Maps and its fork Comaps still lack a Web client.
We're this on https://cartes.app, trying to push the Web further (even on mobile devices) so that you don't even need an app for most use cases.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/ has a good web client :)
No. You cannot even click on a bakery to open its page. It's a bad Web client for the general public, and the vector style is hidden all below. Osm.org is the reference website, the one where all data is always up to date and above all, where you edit the map. But it's not a good OSM client.
Cool; but this is one of those instances where I wish the wonderful and benevolent FOSS developers of the world would consolidate efforts behind existing projects to make fewer better things instead of many never-finished forks. Especially since there is not yet a single open source map ui that is polished enough to compete with enterprise maps.
Agree. In terms of features Organic Maps has never been more than a pale imitation of OsmAnd, only "more ergonomic". The developers admit this themselves. So why couldn't they have just invested their time and energy into making OsmAnd more ergonomic! Ego-fueled duplication of efforts is a real problem in FOSS.
Last I checked, Osmand uses an unconventional map rendered. I would want to contribute to it, it's lagging on so many devices, I can barely use it. Comaps is perfectly smooth.
I'm not saying ego problems don't exist of course. But taking Osmand and making a simple general public app out of this is a huge effort (human and tech), probably more than building a side app.
We at cartes.app have discussed with some people Comaps. We've made links from cartes.app to Comaps, e.g. for navigation, a feature that we don't have.
We've not seen anything from their side. We don't really understand why they wouldn't want a proper Web version.
It's even worse in the non-open source world : Kagi's maps are bad. Qwant dropped their cool map project, too expensive. Ecosia has none, redirects to Google, its main competitor.
They could "just" clone cartes.app and run `bun i && bun start` and `ansible-playbook` to launch their instance of cartes.app, but we can't reach them. Or fund the project.
What's important though is that we collaborate on the tools we all use. OSM, MapLibre, Photon, Pelias, Protomaps, Motis, Brouter, etc. are all tools that we somehow share, each end-user app having their own combination of them.
We also thought like you do when outside of this world. But now, its a human problem. How to reach people and how to gain the time that it would take to collaborate ? We don't have the keys.
Hi! How have you tried to reach us? We have an open task to consider using something like cartes.app as a web "version" of CoMaps. https://codeberg.org/comaps/url-processor/issues/16
Hi ! Yes, was freezed by gedankenstuecke's comment. But yes you're right, I'll write an update.
Would you consider using cache storage for enabling offline capabilities? Maybe I am in the minority but I usually go to organic maps for offline usage.
Yes it's planned. Should work in theory, but no one tried before.
Maps are so often done as native apps that to my knowledge no one tried to just use the PWA capabilities to cache tiles on the Web. Of course what's hard is cache invalidation. Does the user want to update the tiles ? Never ? Daily, weekly ? Only some regions ? Or manually ?
Here's an issue about that : https://codeberg.org/cartes/web/issues/1078
It's in French, unfortunately Codeberg has no auto-translate capabilities yet.
FWIW, I have an experimental open-source implementation of offline-capable PWA protomaps. Haven't advertised it much, because I haven't sorted out performance (particularly on mobile), and it's a bit buggy still. Also, don't have cache invalidation. But it does work. Usually. xD
app: https://maps.bpev.me
source: https://tangled.org/bpev.me/maps
Based on results from indexeddb pmtiles work:
https://github.com/jtbaker/pmtiles-offline
https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles/issues/395
Did you explore the solution of just caching the pmtiles requests responses as well, instead of IndexedDb ?
I didn't dig too deeply into it, because explicitly storing locally just gives a bit more control. Also, since I was kind of imitating the style of Organic Maps, I wanted to give the ability to download entire tiles. I view caching responses more like a performance enhancement, whereas I wanted explicit offline support.
That makes sens. Both features combined would be cool. In any case, a cache invalidation feature should be always visible to the user, so that he knows that clicking this button will switch to online mode.
Awesome, thanks for the links.
Funny : there's another Ben that did his "Ben maps". https://benmaps.fr
What can I say? Bens like maps I guess.
Wasn't aware of that one, neat! I'll leave another web app: https://osmapp.org
Yes, it's a similar project. We share the same stack.
Desktop could some attention as well because both Organic and CoMaps have a rather basic custom interface that feels imo off
There is also https://gitlab.com/tilelessmap/tilelessmap with some of the same focus areas.
> TilelessMap is an open, offline-first mapping engine designed for critical field use, such as forestry, emergency services, and humanitarian work. Built with C and optimized for mobile performance, TilelessMap enables full local map rendering without relying on cloud infrastructure — even in areas with poor or no internet connectivity.
They have an Android app with maps of Yellowstone, Sweden and Norway.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.tileless.m...
I am curious: is it called "tileless" because it uses tiles, but offline? Or does it somehow not use tiles?
There are no tiles. All geometry is loaded and rendered directly from an SQLite database on every render.
Geometry is stored as TWKB (Tiny Well-Known Binary) to reduce storage and transport size. During decoding, they do clever work using aggregate functions and reusing buffers across rows to reduce allocations.
There is real potential in the tech, but unfortunately little momentum behind it.
> There are no tiles. All geometry is loaded and rendered directly from an SQLite database on every render.
Which can be done with tiles. Or maybe I don't understand what you mean by "tiles"? What do you describe as "tiles"?
I would define a tile as a slice of geometries, not whole features.
The difference with Tileless' approach, is that they load whole features from the database and don't split them into tiles. So if a feature extends outside the current view, they would load the whole geometry rather than the intersection of the tile's extent and the geometry.
Vector tiles are optimized for concurrent downloads and browser / CDN caching and doing a good job of that.
That's interesting. So that makes it more efficient for offline maps? How much more efficient? I'm curious now!
Hi I am th author of TilelessMap (ResilientMaps). The idea is to not destroy data. In a tile the geometries are cut into smaller pieces. That is important to be able to do efficient caching. Vector tiles are also often simplified to fit each zoom level. This means that the data is quite worthless for anything byt rendering. So far tilelessmap is also just rendering. But it opens up the possibilities for any gis processing/analyses that you can do on desktop gis. Since it is difficult to cache without tiles it has to be a very efficient render path. So, all polygons are pre-triangulated from the server. If you are familiar with gpu rendering you know that the gpu only can render points, lines and triangels as primitives. Triangulation is a quite expensive step. In a tile-redenerer that is solved by very aggressive simplification. At each zoom level quite few geoemtries and vector points are actually shown. In tilelessmap a polygon is encoded in twkb as a list of vertices, and after that, indexes into the vertex list how the gpu builds triangels. The vertex list is decoded into VBO (vertex buffer object) and the triangle index list is decoded into EBO (element buffer object) This is very efficient, and even in a phone many geometries and vertices can be rendered. No cache needed, which reduces complexety and makes it possible to keep large geometries without cutting them in tiles. Also, the storage in the db is relational. This means that you can keep a full datamodel all the way out to the deveice. This opens a lot of possibilities. I hope that I will get time to furhter develop this. I think this is filling a gap in gis of today. More like a modern version of ArcPad (but so far without the functionality). It is all GPL v3 licensed. Hope this helps understanding the incitaments for the project.
This is a really interesting project and thanks for sharing these tech details! Are you guys working on an iOS app yet? Would love to give it a try.
Not yet. I hope, if the Android version gets some attention to do that. But App-store gives some issues with licensing with GPL. Dual licensing will be needed, but I would like to limit the more permissive license, but not contrain anyone from develop to iOS. I don't really know how to do it. I do not want a closed source fork for iOS by me or anyone else. I just want all ideas and work on this to be open to anyone. Apple don't really like that thinking. But most of this is written in C and many platform-differenties is handled by SDL3. So, I think it should be very possible to port it.
IIRC it usually means it stores the vectors and draws it clientside.
Also known as vector tiles.
Not necessarily. That's one way to do it, but e.g. OsmAnd just has big region-shaped files and not a load of tiny square tiles like a web viewer has that loads the data piecemeal
I used comaps on a hike. It really is good at not draining your battery.
I've wanted to run it on my wear OS watch, but while you can sideload the APK, wearOS does not have a file browser, so it's not possible to import a planned route or similar. Has anyone here any idea for how to solve this?
Send it in an attachment over Telegram or something and open that on your watch?
Using CoMaps gave me the "Oh shit!" moment for the first time that the convergence of enough high quality open map data and a reasonably designed maps app to consume it was finally happening. It's crazy to think about how much thankless work it took to the point where we have something that is in many ways at parity and even exceeding in some dimensions the user-hating map software.
There is still a super long way to go until it suits everyone's needs, but the end + even further is starting to come into sight.
In the old times, I bought a Nokia smartphone (5230) because it shipped with offline maps – Nokia had the license for satellite data before Google Maps existed. I also drive a VW with built-in GPS and map loaded from SD card.
Offline maps are an obligatory "survival" tool. Most people trust too much they'll have connectivity, but it'll be the first thing to go down when it's most needed (extreme weather, blackouts, conflicts, etc).
Thank you for the tip on the app!
Organic Maps finally made Hong Kong a region this year. Previously they required you to download the entire “China South” region, which was an extremely weird and wasteful choice.
Next it should standardize region naming.
For example, the new region is called “China Hong Kong” (every online ordering form out there does simply “Hong Kong”). Simultaneously, Taiwan is just “Taiwan”, so it’s clearly not about following a party line. Simultaneously, places like Falklands (not without its own disputes), South Georgia, Saint Helena have no mention of UK in their respective region titles, while Hawaii and Puerto Rico both lead with USA.
I think they should stick with toponyms, instead of trying to be some sort of political arbiter.
> I think they should stick with toponyms, instead of trying to be some sort of political arbiter.
This can mostly work for sub-national names, but doesn’t really address cases such as Taiwan, Cyprus, etc.
> the same people, who created MapsWithMe/Maps.Me app
Ah, the same people who I bought Maps.Me from in 2012 - that when I went to use it recently now bombards me with "sale ending in 4 hours!" pro subscription ad popovers in order to restore functionality (more than 10 offline map areas) that existed at the time I bought the app? No thanks.
Maps.me got sold to a series of subsequent owners. It was those subsequent owners who enshittified the app, not the original developers mentioned in your quotation. The original developers only later returned to the codebase, because it was freely licensed, and forked it in a different direction.
Why do people inflict this on themselves? OsmAnd has all the features of Organic Maps and CoMaps and MapsMe (in fact three times more features) and in 15 years of using it I have not any of these problems.
We’re on a nerd forum, so of course some of us love OSMAnd. But the general public finds that app too confusing. I know this firsthand because I’m in a travel subculture where OSMAnd provides a very useful tool that Maps.me/Organic Maps/CoMaps does not, but whenever I recommend OSMAnd people react very badly to the app and get angry at me for directing them to something so unpleasant.
You're right, of course. Whenever I evangelize for OsmAnd, what always surprises me is that nobody has even heard of it. Must be for a reason.
The developers seem a serious bunch, the issue tracker has been actively curated for years (although it's snowed under). They have a subscription business model, which is a bit opaque but seems to be functional. And yet everyone always has the same complaint about the app: terrible UX.
If only the Organic Maps people had contributed their undoubted skills to improving OsmAnd.
the original developers of MM then just started to do the same to OM by equally aggressively ask for money :p
>do the same to OM by equally aggressively ask for money
I use OM for a lot of years and never saw any aggressive money ask, could you point me what I am missing?
when opening the page for a place, the bottom for me regularly displays the "donation" ask which in good big tech fashion gives you the "ask again later" option.
Is that on iOS? Never saw such thing on android
nope, that's on Android, installed via Accrescent
I tried all of them (organic maps, OSMAnd, etc.) and eventually stuck with locus maps.
https://locusmap.app
The interface is a bit cumbersome, but it got way better over time and there are some really engaged developers behind it you can always contact. It's intended for biking and hiking, but you can also use it for cars. Meanwhile, they even support android auto.
It's the type of app that grew massively over decades and that offers basically every functionality that you can imagine.
I'm very pleased to see open source mapping/navigation systems. I have had the hypothesis for a while that many of the UI/UX designers on the google maps team do not actually drive a car.
People at Apple are not left-handed, they don't drive, they don't work out, and they don't seem to go out in the cold very much. Oh, and they definitely don't play video games.
IDK, my hypothesis is that they only go anywhere by car. The way they hide public transportation and pedestrian-only streets sucks.
Is there a nautical map equivalent of osm or organic maps? One that emphasizes waterways by drawing them thicker when zoomed out like regular maps draw roads thicker? Plan routes over the water? Even google maps lacks a nautical layer.
The OSS tool for nautical charts is OpenCPN.
it depends what type of waterways you’re after. for the sea, https://map.openseamap.org/ is very good (but no route planning sadly - for that you’d need opencpn and some charts obtained. For inland waterways i can only speak for the English canals, for which i recommend https://opencanalmap.uk/ which uses data from both OSM and the Canal and River Trust. Again, sadly no route planning but for that I use https://canalplan.org.uk/
CRT data is not open - it has an (entirely pointless) non commercial clause.
OsmAnd has a nautical map plugin you can enable.
The plugin is just part of why OsmAnd is good for nautical use, there is also an alternate view in the configure map menu for nautical use.
For some reason osmAnd was the only GPS map that would work on a flight for me.
OM and CoMaps should also work, though you might need to wait awhile for a GPS fix and be near a window. Google's main hiccup will be an internet connection for the maps.
I tried to use it while biking but it's extremely confusing for bike trails (colors and parallel routes display, not highlighting real bike trails). I vastly prefer mapy.com in just showing a simple red dashed line for any official bike trail. The elevation is also displayed in 50m increments which is too little for bikes.
This belongs to a class of thing I've been predicting for a while: as non-volatile storage (not RAM but flash etc.) gets cheaper and cheaper, offline snapshots of quantities of information that used to require an Internet connection to practically access become possible.
Example: a modern mid-high end phone can contain this, a complete copy of Wikipedia, and a small LLM capable of understanding natural language queries and using tools. All on board, no connection needed.
Plus it an also carry most peoples' complete music and book collections and a meaningful chunk of most peoples' movie collections.
A mid-high end laptop can carry all of it and then some. Laptop and desktop storage is gigantic by previous generation standards. Mine is a higher end laptop but has 8TB storage. 512GB to 1TB is mainstream.
Offline-first used to be the norm before everything started requiring an internet connection for some reason. I was using OSM data offline 15 years ago on smartphones.
The reason it moved to the internet was not that it wasn't possible to stay offline-first. If the app depends on your server, then the owner can monetise that (e.g. with subscriptions) or track the users. It is more interesting for companies than allowing the users to buy a snapshot of the maps once and never come back.
Offline-first nowadays comes from open source projects, not from companies.
This sounds like an optimistic comment from a decade ago. Cost of storage has gone up recently, as a glance at data-hoarder fora will show. Phones have less storage capacity nowadays inasmuch as many manufacturers are removing SD card slots. The idea is that normies keep stuff in the cloud; self-storage of very large amounts of data is an edge case.
In my country, the typical laptop purcase from a retail chain is still 512GB or so, and moreover, few and fewer people own a laptop since it is becoming normal for a smartphone to be one's only computing device outside the workplace (even uni students are foregoing "real computers" now). Anything more than such a basic laptop is a premium product, and premium products cost premium prices.
Related:
Organic Maps migrates to Forgejo due to GitHub account blocked by Microsoft - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43525395 - March 2025 (49 comments)
Organic Maps Turns 4: The Privacy-Focused Alternative to Google Maps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42470155 - Dec 2024 (6 comments)
Organic Maps: Offline Hike, Bike, Trails and Navigation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42343654 - Dec 2024 (1 comment)
Maps.me co-founder tries to close down Organic Maps open-source fork - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42343121 - Dec 2024 (72 comments)
Google removed Organic Maps from the Play Store - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41272925 - Aug 2024 (224 comments)
Organic maps: Experimental feed based public transport mapping - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41152559 - Aug 2024 (35 comments)
Organic Maps is a free Android and iOS offline maps app for travelers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39582797 - March 2024 (24 comments)
In 2023 Organic Maps got its first million users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38746187 - Dec 2023 (88 comments)
Organic Maps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37347447 - Sept 2023 (485 comments)
OrganicMaps is Android and iOS offline maps for travel without trackers or ads - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27576882 - June 2021 (116 comments)
Organicmaps: Android and iOS offline maps app for travelers, tourists, hikers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27543012 - June 2021 (113 comments)
For offline use I use pocket earth https://pocketearth.com/ I'm pleased with it, it's one of the best out there.
My favorite renderer of OSM (and possibly other data) https://mapy.com/en/turisticka?x=-3.1744145&y=55.9517954&z=1...
there's an app too, some features are paid, and there are some long-standing bugs, but is otherwise quite fine. I use it when I want a map, not just uniform gray void with roads that is google maps.
yeah, their app will make you pay even for offline maps
This is exciting!! I was not aware of organic maps until today. I use offline maps in google maps also. It's not fully private if it requires GPS connection though!! That's why I have been working on https://github.com/deepanwadhwa/anumaan for a while now. The focus is on navigating without internet and without GPS.
> It's not fully private if it requires GPS connection though!!
How so? GPS is like FM radio: you send nothing, you only receive.
Apps like organic maps or comaps let you use the maps fully offline and you can compute itineraries without GPS when your need this (from point A to point B, with as many stops as you wish).
I strongly recommend you to seriously look into comaps or organic maps if you don't know them.
Now, "GPS isn't working or depletes my battery, what do I do?" is an interesting topic worth looking into. It seems you are trying to automate what we all do when GPS doesn't work well. I find that relatively easy in a city, not so much in a road on the countryside.
With the important caveat though that a lot of devices use AGPS, I don’t understand in too much detail and I think on some devices it can be disabled but I think this reveals some info
They may be thinking of Google's coarse location feature where the handset checks SSIDs in the proximity against Googles database for fast lookup.
This is correct but if the phone's internet is off, there is no way for BSSID look up but maps might collect this in the background for telemetry and send it to the server once the internet is turned back on.
On android, that's false. Turning off wifi or internet does not disable bssid scanning. You can do it, but it's buried in the settings.
Oh yeah, makes sense didn't think about this especially since I don't have the google services.
That's not really GPS anymore so when discussing the topic it would be worth being exact on this.
You are largely correct about everyday location privacy but I was thinking more in the adversarial direction (read military/ GPS denied zones) when I started this work. There have been news about GPS being denied/spoofed over european region. When your phone can't get the GPS signal, it would try to retrieve alternative signals (A-GPS, cellular network etc) - this is where an adversary could be listening for leaks. So GPS denial could effectively be a trigger and the follow ups after that trigger could lead to leaks.
AGPS actually means two different things.
If by AGPS you are referring to the use of nearby WiFi and cellular networks and querying a service for that (there are ways to have that info purely offline, but I do believe such databases rely on many people leaking their positions to exist at all), I'm not convinced your approach helps much:
1) if you run stock iOS or Android with the Google services, I believe you are already screwed anyway: I wouldn't trust them not to constantly leak stuff about you in the background even if you don't actively use the GPS, at least to build their traffic info and to keep their access network-based location database updated. If you are concerned about the privacy aspect of this stuff, you should be getting rid of the Google services anyway. That leads to the next case:
2) If you are running a phone without the Google services, then you don't have that kind of AGPS. Unless you go the extra mile of explicitly configuring microG to enable network-based location. I used to do this, but on my current phone, getting the position purely from GPS has been so reliable and quick that I didn't bother setting this up (I suppose it could provide some battery saving, but there are privacy concerns indeed, and not relying on such databases that basically depend on people giving up bits of their privacy is always nice). Your main concern there would be the shady blobs most phones run that could be doing you don't know what behind your back, but that's regardless how you use your phone.
If by AGPS you mean the download of the data about the positions of the GPS satellites (MSA) then yes, indeed, I agree, you will leak to your service provider (but not more than if you are not already fully offline - so basically if you use your phone like a phone you already leak as much) and to the server providing the data (which is probably Qualcomm (XTRA) or Google, or possibly your service provider). Then the solution is fully offline, and your current options are non assisted GPS, which can take 10 minutes in good conditions to get a fix if you haven't used it in a while, and reading the map. From what I understand, your current strategy is to help with the latter, which needs to be better than eventually getting a GPS fix (which feels somewhat niche, but I can see some advantages).
(There's also AGPS MSB where you basically ask a remote server to compute your location from what your GPS receiver gets and nearby cellular networks, the leak here is obvious but from what I've read this is quite rare nowadays, it was more useful when GPS receivers didn't have enough compute power to do the compilations themselves, so that would be mostly irrelevant.)
All in all, if I'm not wrong (happy to be proven wrong): as far as privacy is a concern, depending on what you mean by AGPS, your approach only applies to, respectively, devices without the Google Play Services or similar stuff, or to fully offline devices. It needs to be better than, respectively, GPS assisted with the satelite positioning data (which can be good for up to 7 days and then updated through regular GPS if I'm not wrong), or regular GPS. I believe your angle of attack can be battery usage, or better than the time to get a GPS fix. That seems quite tough especially that your approach as I understand it is intrinsically scoped (works mostly in cities where it's easy to ask about what's around).
I believe a stronger angle of your approach is resilience: less dependency on the GPS system which can indeed be jammed or which can fail (although there's redundancy: we do have several constellations of satellites from different countries, so a general failure seems unlikely, and a GPS failure would be catastrophic because many critical things depend on it).
Now, there are devices or places (especially in dense cities with high buildings) where the GPS simply doesn't work well, so a convenient, privacy-preserving alternatives to the GPS would be great in those situations6!
>>if you run stock iOS or Android with the Google services, I believe you are already screwed anyway: I wouldn't trust them not to constantly leak stuff about you in the background even if you don't actively use the GPS, at least to build their traffic info and to keep their access network-based location database updated.
are you sure this is true? - i can still run the phone on airplane mode(with GPS off) after i have the maps downloaded and can go anywhere afterwards. i don't think there is any communication with the outside world after that.
I am not sure if you looked at the repo I linked. In the intro I clearly state that I am doing this work for my own curiosity and for a hypothetical scenario (where GPS is denied). Moreover, the tech I am relying on (TERCOM) has applications in other fields as well such as navigating under water (submarines use a version of this). Or missile systems such as tomahawks which use tercom extensively.
> are you sure this is true?
I'm sure I don't trust them.
> I am not sure if you looked at the repo I linked
I did skim it to get a grasp of your approach. But I'm answering statements made here too.
I think your project is worth pursuing. I'm genuinely curious what you come up with. This is actually why I spent quite some time writing my comments: I hope they helped you in some way. I do believe your project could use clearer presentation of the motivation (here or in the readme). In particular, the "GPS is not private" statement and the fact you didn't know about the existing private open source offline mapping solution also rang an alarm in me (a comparison with the "state of the art" would be nice). "Imagine GPS is jammed / is not available at this time at your place with your hardware" is actually sufficient as far as I am concerned. Relying on a privacy-preserving solution out of principles even on a spy phone comes with caveats that need to be exposed but I believe in this approach.
I'm not pushing back. If you have something like a blog that I could follow, I would subscribe to its RSS feed because I'm quite interested actually. If not, well it's already quite nice you share your curiosity work with the world.
>>the fact you didn't know about the existing private open source offline mapping solution also rang an alarm in me
why? that's a bit of an overreaction from your alarm bells honestly. i didn't know about organic maps because i never looked up for this solution and never came across this specific app in my readings. what i am working on (and want to figure out) has less to do with commercial angle of privacy (which organic maps solve) and more to do with navigating without relying on any external signal. i truly think we should be able to navigate earth (land/sea/air/subs) without any external human controlled signal (GPS/Internet/radio etc); that in my mind is true offline navigation. but you can argue that organic maps is also an offline navigation app and i think for an everyday user that's true.
your comments are helpful. thanks for being so thorough with your thought process. i am trying to write on https://trulytyped.com/user/4f448758/deepan-wadhwa - but i have not written anything technical yet and there is no RSS button there yet. let me add it today haha. thank you.
>> the fact you didn't know about the existing private open source offline mapping solution also rang an alarm in me
> why? that's a bit of an overreaction from your alarm bells honestly.
Maybe. Let me explain myself. In a former life, I worked in academia and you kinda triggered my research mode (which is, believe it or not, quite positive for you). There, your work is easily more solid and convincing if you reaserched a bit the state of the art. By working on an alternative to GPS navigation, in such a setting, I would expect you to know the field well.
Now, I understand that you didn't particularly look into apps pretty much focused on GPS positioning since they are not supposed to do what you want, and I'm aware that you aren't doing academic research nor pretending to.
> let me add it today haha. thank you.
No pressure, I'll try to think of coming back to check once in a while. Thank you as well.
Migrated all of my pins to Organic Maps from Maps.me when it started to aggressively monetize. Smooth process. Been a happy user for years!
I bought Maps.me Pro in 2012, used it while traveling then and was happy. Fired it back up for a similar trip this year and in spite of having paid for it already, I don't have Pro features and I get aggressive "Sale ending in 4 hours!" popovers every time I launch the app.
Love this app. Simple, useful, works offline, and doesn’t feel like it’s trying to track everything I do. Really appreciate that.
Organic Maps a great app in many ways, but I still don't get how people can actually use it every day and say it replaces Google Maps when its search feature totally stinks. I know it's a hard problem, but this is the number one thing that needs to somehow be fixed. I can't tell if I'm just too dumb or if FOSS/degoogle fanboys are just pretending. I just know I've tried to use it exclusively many times and always had to give in to Google Maps because the search totally failed.
I actually think the search feature rocks, because you have high fidelity OSM maps to query. Can't search for drinkable wells in Google Maps!
But then, it of course isn't Google Maps. It is likely to be more out of date and will not understand "natural" search queries as Google does. I believe it just takes some getting used to. There is overlap between the two, each service has its strengths and weaknesses, but also unique features.
+1 That, and it works in mountainous areas like the Alps or Pyrenees, where you're lucky to have GPS and most definitely can't rely on 4G for Google Maps
Sorta. It’s still worse than proprietary solutions: in reality when on wilderness backroads (US and CA) I find myself juggling four apps at a time. CoMaps for course tracking, offline apple or google maps for navigation and satellite, Gia or All Trails for accurate topo and trails (even though I hate having to use it), and an ArcGIS app for information like additional land ownership or historic data. It’s frustrating juggling apps, but the lack of accurate (or sometime any) topo or additional map layers in CoMaps is the most galling. I’ve tried finding springs with OSM but I find i still have to verify on findaspring.org. Would be great to have am OSM based app that did it all, but that seems unrealistic given a) the horrible data accuracy and OSM’s (entirely understandable) unwillingness to pirate and consolidate large proprietary data sets from multiple competitors b) unpaid developer hours needed to create and maintain an accessible user friendly and modern UX that can compete with premier apps.
We the FOSS world just have 100 to 10000 less budget to implement this feature. It's a hard problem, and you can't ignore that lots of other features are missing. E.g. street view or place comments.
I'm working on https://cartes.app and we're well aware that search is not on par, far from it. But we have hundreds of other features and bugs to fix. https://codeberg.org/cartes/web
I guess it depends on how you use Google Maps, but I mainly navigate to addresses, and Comaps works fine for that.
This is more about OSM than Organic Maps, and I agree that looking for businesses it's not great. But looking for mapped features such as toilets, water taps, benches, fountains, etc. is far superior.
80% of OM/CM search issues are just lacking data in OSM
search greatly improved in the past couple years. try it again?
I thought I updated the app before my recent backpacking trip in Europe, but I will give it a try again.
E.g., in the CoMaps fork test builds there is now a change to prioritize nearby places more
https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/pulls/4604
Another CoMaps Search issue:
https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/issues/4449
How does Organic Maps differ from Maps.Me (which it also mentions), or PocketEarth mentiond in comments here? Or CoMaps for that matter?
I've had Maps.Me on my phone for some years; it's often not as accurate or polished as the commercial offerings (Google, Here Technologies), but it's pretty nice. What might make me switch?
In terms of forks, I believe it was Maps.Me -> Organic Maps -> CoMaps.
So all forks of the same project. Maps.Me is not open source anymore (I think?), and CoMaps was started by a subset of the Organic Maps community that wasn't happy with the Organic Maps governance.
> What might make me switch?
Different reasons for different people, but OpenStreetMap is a great community project, for one. What I really like with those apps (I am now using CoMaps) is that they are open source, offline first and the UI is quite minimal and clean.
Organic Maps was founded by two of the Maps.Me authors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_Maps#History).
With CoMaps I don't think, there are any original authors involved (?). In any case I prefer organic, the original. Donated and very grateful that this app works so well (except for search where I sometimes use another app).
I didn't say "founders", I said "community". The community is more than just the founders. If anything, the part of the community that left did it because of their disagreeing with the founders.
What was the nature of the disagreement?
I think mostly transparency about how the donations are being used by the project.
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> What might make me switch?
Google Maps will always have better POI data because they have a larger userbase and they've gamified adding POIs with the "Local Guides" badge.
The main reason to switch is to have an offline-first experience. Google Maps does not provide offline maps everywhere, e.g. South Korea. And if you've ever tried using the Google Maps app on a weak connection, it's frustrating because it still tries to download remote tiles instead of using the ones you've downloaded.
Lastly any contributions you make in OpenStreetMap will show up in Organic Maps / CoMaps for everyone.
Personally, I use Google Maps on a daily basis, but have Organic Maps and regions downloaded for travel and just switch between the two. It's good to have a reliable fallback.
CoMaps is a fork/spin-off of Organic Maps, which in turn is a fork of Maps.ME
Ok, but - how is Organic Maps better than Maps.ME (and is Comaps better than Organic Maps in some way other than the transparency issues)?
Feature-wise projects grow more and more different. Ultimately it'd depend what exact features are important to you.
The following overview might help a bit: https://www.comaps.app/support/how-do-the-features-differ-fr... https://www.comaps.app/support/how-does-the-comaps-project-d...
Didn't use Maps.me for years, but does it have colored hiking trails for instance? OM does, CM doesn't.
I remember over 15 years ago my wife and I were honeymooning in Europe (rom the US). While we had iOS devices that could use maps, the data services then were terrible, and GPS was effectively useless
We ended up taking screen shots of Google Maps where we zoomed in on local streets, on an ad hoc type atlas. I wish we had this app back then
I believe MapsWithMe (now Maps.me) was released about that time, but I personally didn't get an iOS device until 2013.
At that time I think I was using CityMaps2Go. Not sure if it still exists though.
As a active OSM contibutor with 7k+ changesets, Organic is my favorite map app I use for years traveling around the world, also donated to them. Only use GMaps for finding businesses.
Tried CoMaps, saw no reason to migrate to it at all - why migrate to basically no-name app (in terms of popularity) which is developed by who knows who (not even a Maps Me or OM devs) if Organic is totally good, has updates, stable, works well and has no ads? Have no idea what is this ad talk to be honest.
OSMAnd is nice, but too cluttered, OM is much easier to use. Only cool thing is being able to get live updates to a map if you changed something in OSM, but never actually used it for real.
I'm also a regular OSM contributor and I cycle between various apps/layers. I'm in the alpine region, regular hiker, and osm is the only map source I use (frankly, I find gmaps to be garbage for anything except looking up businesses).
I regularly try comaps, but while it's pretty smooth at rendering, the detail is visibly lacking at anything except maximum zoom level. When enabling contour lines, it's cluttered and hard to read. I tried to use it a few times on hikes, and while it's still much better than gmaps, if you're looking for something to use on a hike as an actual readable map and not just something to follow directions on, I'd say bite the bullet and get osmand.
osmand has indeed confusing interface, but the map rendering itself is excellent and can be heavily customized as needed.
On the web front, tracestack and mapy are both excellent presentations.
I use OrganicMaps a lot for long walks and it's great. Works perfectly offline if you have downloaded the map of the region beforehand, which is helpful if you are in an area with poor reception or just want to conserve phone battery by turning off data. And being OSM, it is great for showing less prominent paths/trails and other useful info like drinking water sources, picnic benches etc. And supports importing GPX trails. So IMO it's way better than Google Maps for this use case.
It's also very easy to edit some basic data through the app so if you notice an error in the map it's usually possible to fix it right there and then.
How is it different from OSMAnd?
It's a fork from Maps.me, the streamlined map app popular with normies. I myself use and love OSMAnd, but in the travel communities I am active in, most people react badly to OSMAnd as something arcane and nerdy.
Arcane and nerdy is a good description of OSMAnd. That's why I love it and would never switch to anything else.
Much better performance and much less cluttered UI, at the cost of having fewer features.
The performance advantage is small to nil, IME. The UI is admittedly cleaner, though partly (as you say) that's simply because it has a ton less features.
Interesting. When I switched from OsmAnd to Organic, the map loaded much faster as I panned it.
The difference mostly comes from the default detail levels and shape optimization. You can make it as fast in OsmAnd as both are GPU-accelerated, but OsmAnd renders the map more detailed by default.
And at the cost of map fidelity. Complex curves look terrible at certain zoom levels in CoMaps/Organic Maps.
Same in OsmAnd though. Someone recently posted a screenshot of an area they thought was badly mapped (with AI or at least not using the "make square corners" tool). Turns out to be Osmand's coordinate rounding as part of the map data compression
Comparing a building in my city between the two maps by flipping between the apps, it looks identical to me. Not a scientific test though
Better and easier to understand and use UX.
much better UI, does osmand has now colored hiking trails without downloading some extra maps?
Yes, you can toggle a setting to use the network colors. I use it mostly for hiking. The UI is a learning curve, 100%, I am curious to check another tool
This is my regular hiking and cycling map, fantastic for offline use as well!
Edit: didn’t know about the ads / proprietary server issues. I guess this is the only sort of place to find out unless users are browsing the GitHub repo.
The Telegram/Matrix channel had the info... for minutes at a time before the owners deleted it :X
How does this compare to AllTrails for discovery, tracking and accuracy?
A.T. is extremely trail oriented including user-submitted routes and reviews, but it may miss some less popular raw OSM-based paths. OSM based apps like OsmAnd and CoMaps just display all the data neutrally, such might be better for people who want to see raw reality and make their own route.
I had bad experience tracking my bike ride with it on iOS - seems like app offloaded and didn't record half of the track. Strava and OutRun don't have this problem.
I love organic maps. It’s great for hiking especially coverage through cities is really good too with small landmarks such as water fountains.
The killer feature of Organic Maps and OSM is the POI markers for small things. If you are cycling, knowing where the nearest bike rack is to your location is crucial.
Google Maps is very good at showing car parking spaces, which is the requirement if you live in a suburb in California like its developers.
I had my first hiking in a route without network connection one month ago, that was the first time I used the GPS without network by Organic Maps even I knew I could do it in the past. It showed me the possibility that some feature work well without network. It's a really good experience.
Excellent open-source mapping alternative. The fact that it's fully offline-capable and privacy-respecting makes it invaluable. The community-driven OSM data model is powerful. Great to see projects like this thriving.
I'll repeat a question asked in an earlier thread on OM:
Do there exist apps that share their offline map data? As in: install app A, dowload offline map data for country xyz, use in app A, install app B, use same map data in app B (or C, D etc) without re-downloading the map data?
As I understood, that was not the case as each app uses its own format which is some underlying public geo info (presumably too big to have on device), filtered / processed in per-app fashion.
The sillyness & waste of this is obvious. So: any progress in resolving this situation?
> The sillyness & waste of this is obvious
Until you realise that there is not one true way to show a map, and that different apps may actually have different needs. Suddenly it becomes obvious that not all apps can use the same shared offline data.
To further back this up, just because OSM might be a map's data source, it doesn't mean they use the same rendered vectors or images for the tiles.
I make changes to OSM so they can be propagated to a cycling-specific mapping tool I use (it's a commercial tool with their own custom map layers) - it takes about 3-4 weeks from when a change is made on OSM for it to be incorporated into their data set.
So yeah, it's not as simple as "we all use OSM so we'll just share all our rendered mapping values".
There's no fundamental reason that underlying map data used by a good % of mapping apps, couldn't be stored 1x on-device, in some standard format and shared across apps.
Users could pick & choose what subset(s) of map data they want to store locally. Different apps could pick & choose what features to offer, how to use available data & how to render it.
Sad to see that such a conceptually simple problem hasn't been addressed yet. We're talking a good # of apps here, many millions of users, and enormous amounts of storage & bandwidth wasted.
Edit: I'm assuming that last bit is a problem for the app developers themselves, too.
There are a few fundamental reasons: 1. at least iOs app privacy/sandboxing model makes sharing any data files pretty difficult, if impossible. I suspect Android has similar issue. 2. there is no such thing as "just map data" - every app has to do opinionated decision what they need in their maps data (e.g. aerials, elevation, choice of POIs, languages etc), how it gets styled (it makes requirements to actual data). And this is for just simple base map data, you have also routing, address search databases etc on top. So there is not much to share really, and not easy to share. Not even talking about huge challenge to standardize it. (I'm founder of Nutiteq, we also did FOSS SDKs for offline maps)
Every version of Organic Maps and CoMaps (and probably to some extent OsmAnd) use slightly different formats of maps; consider a new feature to support park bench backrests/colors/materials. That info likely wouldn't have been in the map files before for efficiency, and now it needs to be. But any given other app may not have that feature at all, and instead decides to save space and bandwidth by compressing the files instead. And a third app might improve performance on old devices by preprocessing routes and storing them in a new format in the map data.
So you can see the work of keeping map files cross-compatible would either hamper the release of new features, or take a bunch of work, all to save a few hundred MB on people's phones
Again, I don't think you understand how it works in detail, and you just assume from a high level that "it all looks the same, therefore it must be simple to make it all work together".
Some apps show raster tiles. Which means that if you want a different style, you just cannot share them. If you want the same style but you don't want to show exactly the same data, you can't share them. "Ok, you say, I personally don't care about raster tiles, I believe that everybody should be happy with vector tiles". That is wrong, but let's assume it.
Vector tiles are much more compact, but at the cost of the rendering engine: it has to read the information stored in some format and render the map according to different things like the style. How do you load the data to access it and rendering rapidly? Maybe you want to remove data so that it's more efficient and doesn't lag, or maybe you really want all that detail and more phones will lag when loading. Maybe you want to optimise the storage, so you remove the information you don't want to show, etc. Those requirements are incompatible, it's a tradeoff. Different apps choose different tradeoffs and therefore don't share resources.
Don't get me wrong: some apps could decide to share resources, and that would be fine. But it's not like all apps have the exact same needs and should obviously be sharing all that.
If you think that maps are "obvious" and a "conceptually simple problem", then you surely don't know much about what goes under the hood when you load a map in your phone. It's is actually quite complex.
This used to be a thing on Windows Phone, you could download maps in the settings and they would be available in the default Maps app, but also in HERE Maps, Transit, etc.
Storage constraints haven't been on developers' radar last 20 years.
I just wished Organic Map had a better way to download many countries/regions at once.
I frequently use it in the airplane without WiFi and wish to have high definition, but downloading country by country is too cumbersome.
Will this take down Big Maps?
There are two things keeping me using "Big Map".
1. Address lookups. Many of the buildings in OSM have yet to get street addresses added, so navigating to an address is a bit hit or miss. This gets fixed with time as people update the maps and wouldn't be a show stopper.
2. Real time traffic and detour navigation. This is really needed when navigating around busy cities where a wreck on a major highway can result in significant delays. This needs a combination of an external service (separate from OSM) but also one that has enough adoption to have usable data.
1. This is largely country-dependent with some governments being quite adamant that address data should be in the public domain, and some governments doing the opposite and selling address databases to private companies for some quick cash, where private companies then sell address lookups for some absurd per-lookup price for the next few decades. Most of the world though is probably just not rich enough to compile, publish and accurately maintain a national address database.
OpenAddresses is perhaps the gold standard for open source address data compilation from government datasets. Note for the future that alltheplaces.xyz (project I contribute to) is looking like it may eventually perform the automatic address data download/extraction/compilation that OpenAddresses currently performs. This has the benefit that in backwards countries, alltheplaces.xyz also obtains some addresses through other means--such as advertised location of international restaurant chains. And quite often, being within +/- 100 address numbers on a road is good enough for navigation. Google Maps obviously crawls addresses from all over the Internet AND has quite a high tolerance for errors, hence will perhaps always seem more complete than OSM.
2. Some further ideas for open source mapping applications trying to determine real time traffic situations:
2a. Use GTFS/GTFS-RT feeds for bus networks to detect real time delays but also to compare planned bus route schedules for different times of the day (different traffic conditions) where buses share the road with the public. There's already a few maps out there that overlay nearby GTFS-RT feeds for the city of interest and usefully provide a visual indication of how well public transport vehicles are currently moving.
2b. alltheplaces.xyz extracts public traffic camera feeds which could be presented to users when they plan/commence a journey as an indication of what lies ahead on the route.
Agree!
CoMaps fork is adding OpenAddresses integration and traffic (linked above)!
https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/pulls/4162
While default osm data is great, I've been very impressed with the partnership/collective of Overture Maps data. It's osm + esri/tomtom + corporate processing/funding.
https://overturemaps.org/
While not updated as frequently, their releases have a pretty high quality and coverage.
Unfortunately they don't support opening hours in the schema, it's a deliberate choice as it's high value data the contributors would rather license to you
Did some digging: yeah, looks like they are keeping some things for themselves.
https://github.com/orgs/OvertureMaps/discussions/298
That being said, it's hard to fault them for trying to monetize some dimensions that are not well supplied by the public, and that companies work to acquire. Still, I agree, it's disappointing.
Also current place names. You can sometimes find a business on OSM that has correct metadata, but in many areas the majority are missing or stale (like, closed 10+ years ago.) Solving this is an "interesting" problem to say the least when many businesses these days have nothing more than an Instagram/Whatsapp handle.
There's one more for me: reliable store hours.
See alltheplaces.xyz for continuously updated straight-from-the-primary-source opening hours of chains of shops and restaurants, public facilities such as libraries, etc. This is probably as accurate as it gets AND you have the confidence of knowing exactly where the data came from (down to the URL) and when it was last checked.
Some OSM contributors go brand-by-brand/operator-by-operator in making sure OSM features have the most up-to-date opening hours added to them from matched ATP features. As such, OSM may be fairly accurate for chains too.
For a standalone shop or restaurant the opening hours situation is usually still better with Google Maps rather than OSM. There aren't enough OSM contributors who care enough to check and maintain opening hours for every shop, restaurant, fuel station, etc.
Both this and addresses is something that's really easy to survey with StreetComplete.
Google has the benefit of having their own street-level imagery for house numbers and street names, Android devices for real-time traffic info, and the ability to simply scrape web pages for shop data including opening hours. but in places with a reasonable number of active mappers, OSM is so much richer and more up to date.
Google doesn't just scrape websites for store hours, they actually call to confirm them: https://support.google.com/business/answer/7690269?hl=en
At least in my experience for large retail chains or restaurant chains, hours on their websites are very accurate. I think where Google might benefit from calling to verify hours is, for example, where they've scraped https://schema.org/openingHours from the web page for an independent store, but the website has used an invalid/incorrect format, and some manual human check or clean-up is necessary, but this work would be too time consuming for each of 100,000's of independent stores which exist.
There are cases where a brand might have broken opening hours information such as "Mo- Tu - We 09 00 -4 p m". For alltheplaces.xyz scrapers, a human is often able to make sense of the situation and fix the problem through a few lines of extra code. Contacting the business to get the hours confirmed would only be necessary in very rare cases.
Where it would perhaps make the _most_ sense to contact a business to confirm opening hours is:
1. Ahead of public holidays to confirm planned temporary changes to opening hours. Many brands don't bother to update hours on their websites for such temporary changes, or at least don't list those hours until the week prior, which is usually too late for OSM, ATP, offline maps, etc which would ideally want to know these changes to hours up to a year in advance.
2. To confirm actual dates of permanent store/restaurant closures. Many brands in liquidation tend to fire the website developers (or can't pay them to work) and leave an outdated website online until the final shop or restaurant is closed. Commonly it's only some "CLOSING DOWN SALE LAST DAYS EXTENDED TO FRIDAY" post on social media that informs visitors accurately.
Agree, which is why I added support for displaying when the hours were last updated in CoMaps
Organic Maps didn’t accept my PR with it…
https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/issues/688
> This is now out in the August 31 release!
Almost a year ago, that is SO COOL! I'll be trying CoMaps for store hours now.
IME there is no reliable source: Stores' (including restaurants') own websites are inaccurate enough that I need to call them if I need to be sure. Yelp, etc. are at least equally inaccurate.
I'm sure it annoys the stores that keep their website and Yelp etc. updated but there is no way to know who is reliable.
Yeah (2) is the killer feature especially in totalitarian shitholes (pretty much every country nowadays) full of money grab ops disguised as police checkpoints and cameras.
I wonder if we can build a decentralized version of such a reporting service.
You mean this one: https://www.comaps.app/download/
Is it feasible for something like this to have heatmaps?
Maybe the data could be shared/distributed via hypercore or similar.
I find heatmaps are my primary way of finding new mountain biking trails and routes.
Don't think anyone other than Strava and Komoot have sufficient user-generated trail database to be useful for your use-case.
OSM has a heatmap feature. Users can contribute tracks and feed into it:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Heat_maps
Awesome! Thanks. I'll look into it.
Edit: hmmm I don't think I understand that wiki. Most of those are not the type of heatmap I was thinking of. I'll keep looking into it though.
In fact they are called "Public GPS Traces" and can be enabled in the OSM layer inspector. I am not sure if anyone started distilling track recommendations from them yet though.
Here's a link that has traces enabled (aka layer "G"): https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/52.47166/13.40590&laye...
There's also a list of recent uploaded traces: https://www.openstreetmap.org/traces
That's possible. I use RideWithGPS, maybe a lot of people use it around here. Or maybe only two other people have ridden the route, it doesn't say, but it's still super useful for finding routes.
AllTrails has a heat map feature as well. I think this feature is now paywalled.
Always loved this. There are still parts of the UK where you’ll have no data offline navigation is great, and the walking paths are better than you can get elsewhere.
If there any chance for supporting AppImage for linux? Are there any plans for that?
There is a desktop client but it’s kind of immature it seems to me compared to the iOS and android frontends
Is this support all countries? Specially Indian region
Yup! It is worldwide since it uses OSM data
https://www.openstreetmap.org/
I love organic maps
is there any current benefit over comaps?
comaps is a fork of organic maps
correct
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so helpful
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Tried it for while, works with GrapheneOS and Android Auto well enough.
What I absolutely can’t stand is the routing. It once tried to send me through residential Oakland on some Manhattan-grade staircase labyrinth instead of just taking normal streets.
One of the routing options in CoMaps is "avoid stairs". Not enabled by default. See ≡ → Settings → Routing Options.
(CoMaps is the open-source, non-profit community fork of Organic Maps.)
Honestly I've seen google maps suggest some absurd routes, especially to avoid 1 minute of traffic on the motorway.
Always best to double check the routing suggestion.
Organic Maps has quietly become my default for anything offline. Downloaded a whole region before a trip with no signal and it just worked, search and turn-by-turn included, no account, no tracking. The OSM data is genuinely better for walking and trails in a lot of places too. Good to see it on the front page.
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> Btw they (respectively, only one guy, Konstantin!) copy code / changesets from Organic Maps, while this is not happening the other way around.
Is anyone breaking any licence here? If not, then I don't understand this complaint.
>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
>Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
>When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
That comment is against the guidelines. You should make a new comment that avoids breaking the guidelines if you want people to see your criticism.
amazing
This is amazing
The offline-first approach is underrated. Most mapping apps assume connectivity as a given — Organic Maps treating it as a luxury is the right call for global users.