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!
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.)
> 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 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 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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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?”.
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 :)
> 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.
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?
> 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.
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/
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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'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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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 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.
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.
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/
Do you mean tracking your workout? If so there's Fitotrack on Android.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Thank you for contributing! The task of mapping every street and business in the world sounds impossible, but openstreetmap.org does really well.
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.
In Europe you could use NUNAV, which does collaborative routing to avoid this scenario (I work for the company that develops it).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Please no. This is why I left Maps.me, every time I opened maps.me I'd have to click through ads.
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.)
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.
So yeah, if you donate money to Apple, Inc., Organic Maps makes sense for you. For everyone else, it seems like a scam.
> 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/
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.
So sad. I imagine 99.9% of organic maps users will never know.
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 :-)
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.
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.
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.
Desktop could some attention as well because both Organic and CoMaps have a rather basic custom interface that feels imo off
https://www.openstreetmap.org/ has a good web client :)
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
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.
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!
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
I wonder if that one lets you add flock cameras. I can't find the option in Streetcomplete.
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.
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?”.
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.
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!
IIRC it usually means it stores the vectors and draws it clientside.
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?
> 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.
the original developers of MM then just started to do the same to OM by equally aggressively ask for money :p
I love organic maps. It’s great for hiking especially coverage through cities is really good too with small landmarks such as water fountains.
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/
The OSS tool for nautical charts is OpenCPN.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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)
Love this app. Simple, useful, works offline, and doesn’t feel like it’s trying to track everything I do. Really appreciate that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For offline use I use pocket earth https://pocketearth.com/ I'm pleased with it, it's one of the best out there.
How does this compare to AllTrails for discovery, tracking and accuracy?
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.
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.
And at the cost of map fidelity. Complex curves look terrible at certain zoom levels in CoMaps/Organic Maps.
Better and easier to understand and use UX.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
Storage constraints haven't been on developers' radar last 20 years.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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)?
Is this support all countries? Specially Indian region
Yup! It is worldwide since it uses OSM data
https://www.openstreetmap.org/
is there any current benefit over comaps?
comaps is a fork of organic maps
correct
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.
I love organic maps
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.
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.
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.
so helpful
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.
amazing
This is amazing