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.
And for 99.9% it will not make any difference, but I'm sure for some percentage of users missing hiking trails in CoMaps will make difference for sure.
Why use fork of a fork which lacks features of the previous one?
Users don't care about dev drama, if it doesn't affect them.
Some parts of the server were closed source for a bit. No longer the case. Also people got upset that the developers used the product funding to pay for their personal expenses. The idea is folks want the developers to isolate all the money they make from this project and use it to only pay expenses directly related to this project. If they need to eat or something they should get a job, presumably.
> If they need to eat or something they should get a job, presumably.
The tone of this comment is quite different from the text of the open letter to which you refer. Specifically this section. I don't have any personal knowledge either way, but this stood out to me.
> As it was revealed by Roman @rtsisyk it wasn't unusual for the Shareholders to use project's donations as their own money e.g. Alexander @biodranik paid for his personal holiday trip expenses this way. At the same time all other contributors were consistently denied any access to any financial information (even to the totals of money donated/spent). (It's fine for developers to be reimbursed for their hard work, but it should be done in a fair, transparent and accountable way.)
>(even to the totals of money donated/spent). (It's fine for developers to be reimbursed for their hard work, but it should be done in a fair, transparent and accountable way.)
Hardly disagree with this claim. Donation is something you give without any expected usage - otherwise it is a fundraising, payment, investment, etc.
> 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 don't think there was an opt-in, at least at first. The Kayak links were there and they had a generic OM referral code attached so they got the credit
> Despite being advertised as a community-driven project, key decisions, including financial management, partnerships (with Kayak, for instance), and the inclusion of proprietary components in the code were made by a small group of shareholders, often without input from the broader contributor community.
This is sketchy. The entity at the bottom of the page is Organic Maps OÜ, which is an Estonian private limited company. Estonia has non-profits (MTÜs). The fact that this isn't organised as one makes it a commercial venture, except one that asks for donations.
Indeed and this is one of the key reasons we have started CoMaps. The main OM shareholder made it clear to us that interests of the company and the shareholders are at the forefront.
The original authors are from Russia, and their first product maps.me was sold to a Russian company with ties with Kremlin. I wouldn’t touch anything they do, so Organic was a no-go for me. Since it’s a new thing now, I can give it a go.
This assumes that OP would make a different app choice if OP knew this context. And it also assumes OP does not know this context. Neither are supported by the evidence, since HN links are posted without OP commentary. Not everybody cares so much about this sort of thing and perhaps OP was drawn to the app for other reasons. HN is not a monoculture.
Are you suggesting a Google/Apple Maps alternative with the differentiators being privacy-focused, "No ads. No tracking. Developed with love by the open-source community"hits #1 on HN and somehow the OP or HN polyculture doesn't care about being forked aver governance concerns, the inclusion of proprietary components in the code, using project’s donation funds for personal expenses, and running ads because of "other reasons"? Please say more.
The differentiator is that Organic Maps works offline, and is better than Google and Apple for hiking trails. I guarantee you that 100% of the install base does not care about FOSS swamp discourse. Those people are an irrelevant rounding error.
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
Unfortunately I have yet to find an OSM app that offers a properly usable modern interface. Most are passable if you are a nerd who doesn’t mind being inconvenienced and can work around the quirks; my non techy friends open the app once and immediately delete it. We really need an Apple or Google maps clone.
And the online mapping ecosystem is completely fragmented. Half the apps out there demand a $25/month subscription, creating these hermetic, proprietary silos. They are gating and monetizing trails, hikes, and routes that were crowdsourced by the community in the first place. I’m not paying $300 a year to buy back data that I personally contribute to. There are gazillion similar apps, with slight variations, and the more powerful ones look like something straight from 2000s.
Instead of a pay-to-access model, a sustainable consumer map ecosystem could look like Wikipedia, or better yet, a peer-to-peer network like IPFS where you trade compute (route calculation) and storage. It could be a barter: you get to use the collective resources of the network because you are actively hosting tiles, routing data, or contributing metadata back into it. But that requires a critical mass to take off (like bitcoin did).
OpenStreetMap is great, but what we actually need is a modern consumer frontend built on top of an open, distributed layer: decentralized public registry for user-generated content, keeping your routes and trip itineraries discoverable by any client app rather than locked inside VC-backed silos.
Furthermore, current open-source projects miss a lot of quality-of-life features that commercial apps have—things like crowd-sourced opinions and reviews about places, public transit schedules, real-time traffic alerting and reporting, location sharing, street-view, and dependable speed limits during navigation. Without these active, live-data layers, the map looks stale and lagging behind the real world.
The user interface also needs to shift from a passive viewport to a high-contribution editor. Right now, if you want to make serious geometry edits, you’re forced into JOSM. It’s hard to boot, clunky, and quite clearly has never seen a proper UI/UX designer, scaring away everyone but the most hardcore power users. I'm a person who doesn't give up easily, but when I tried adding parking zone regions for the city I gave up after 2 days of trying to make some sense of this software. A modern mobile UI should let you freehand draw a route that snaps to paths, edit regions on the fly, or drop advanced metadata — like parking restrictions — in just three obvious taps, without a steep technical learning curve.
Finally, the client app itself should be a pluggable core. Instead of building every feature from scratch, it should allow users to plug in open modules for whatever they need, whether that's live public transit routing, traffic estimates, location sharing, or advanced 3D metro overlays. The data is there, and the rendering tech is there; we just need a shared, distributed network structure so companies can't charge us a premium to gate the social and metadata layers. I wish there was an EU initiative to have a fully featured app like that, unifying all the existing ones in place of N abhorrent, barely functional implementations in all of the different local public transport apps (looking at you italian AMT genova or you, french IDF mobilites).
When I downloaded it via F-Droid earlier today it did what wanted. Unfortunately Android Auto is only enabled in the Play Store Version, so I downloaded that and there it went the same as for you. At least it immediately prompted me to download my local tile set when I tapped the geolocation button to zoom in.
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!
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.
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.
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!
Put this in another comment, but social conventions for driving vary a lot by region... in the US at least. Can't speak for anywhere else. In Chicago, if you're driving the speed limit on an interstate, people just assume you're geriatric or stoned. The flow of traffic is consistently 10-15 over on all Chicago area interstates. Cops do 20 over. But, in the Bay, unimpeded flow tends to rest at 0-5 over.
As someone who isn't a speed demon, I still like the police warnings because it's a timely reminder to check myself. Am I matching the flow of traffic?
This is a nice feature, I'll give you that, especially when you're in a new place. Social conventions of driving vary a lot, and "hey there's a cop ahead" is a good reminder to check yourself.
I'm no speed demon (it's just not worth it IMO). But, in Chicago you can do 10-15 over on an interstate and nobody cares. The cops are doing 20 over. If I saw someone actually doing 55 on the Dan Ryan I just assumed they were stoned, and I'm only half-joking. Elsewhere around the Great Lakes, it was more like 5-10 over. Meanwhile, in the Bay Area the flow of unimpeded traffic is usually only 0-5 over.
> I've found that Organic Maps' lack of traffic data isn't a big deal for me. It doesn't always give you an accurate ETA, sure, but it isn't any worse at actually getting you to your destination.
Some places live traffic information gives you a choice between a 10 minute way and 40 minute way though, if you get stuck in the wrong spots it really truly sucks, and for us who live in these places, being able to easily route around those spots saves us a bunch of time and energy.
I want to use any client app that uses OSM for car navigation, as I contribute both money and map fixes, but currently nothing seems to come close to either Wave or Google Maps when it comes to traffic information, which ends up being pretty important (for some), so I end up using Organic Maps only for when I walk on foot.
> Some places live traffic information gives you a choice between a 10 minute way and 40 minute way though
I lived in one of those alleged places (Chicago) and didn't observe this in practice. When Google sees that 10-minute route, it quickly starts routing drivers that way, and eventually both routes equalize around, say, 30 minutes. When two routes are that disparate, by the time you actually get midway through the faster one, it's just as congested as the slower route.
I think there's a weird psychology to these apps. When Google gives you a wack route through a residential area, it feels like you're getting an advantage. It feels like you're beating traffic. But you never beat traffic in a car, because you are traffic. And Google never sends only one car on a faster detour. It was always half a dozen of them or more. I saw this a million times in Chicago.
Getting pretty local here, but I remember one of Google's favorite alternate routes vividly. Instead of taking the Edens south into the Kennedy junction, it would have you exit onto Foster and then take some rando residential street south to Montrose or Irving Park. Every single time it did this, I'd see a parade of cars in front of me and behind me. The white glow of GMaps on a new car's infotainment screen is unmistakable. I could see what was going on, all of us could see what was going on. Meanwhile, you're driving past a bunch of kids waiting for their bus, or a ride home from school, and those are all delayed because me and a hundred others are using a side street as a commuter artery. This saved, on a good day, five minutes on a 35 minute commute. It was more antisocial than it was efficient.
That would be interesting to try, but unfortunately, at least on iOS, it’s region-locked by account region, so as someone who goes back and forth between the US and Europe often, despite being in Europe, I’m entirely unable to install it at all without making significant changes to my Apple account.
> The thing with GMaps is that everyone has traffic data, so nobody has an advantage.
It's not necessarily about "advantage", especially on longer journeys. What if there is a crash on the Autobahn 1 hour in front of me? Even if I don't reroute, I at least have a choice of planning my toilet and lunch stop _before_ the crash site.
It is also possible to plan a different route if the crash is visible so far ahead. There are usually multiple routes I could take, and I decide based on the traffic and other factors, where I go. It can depend on the time of day, the time of year, etc. Maybe usually I don't take the one which is 100kms longer, but in the case of a crash, or even just heavy traffic it could be quicker still.
So for any non-trivial journey, I always use navigation, even if I could drive to the other place blindly. It's not really about navigation, it is about the current situation on the roads.
Have they tried/are there any plans of upstreaming that somehow? While I rely on proprietary services for car navigation today, if I move to a OSM-based services next, I'd want it to be similarly structured to actual OSM, not some proprietary bolted-on-top-of-OSM startup that will disappear/enshittificate within years.
Magic Earth is 10+ years old by now. Only recently they've introduced a (very reasonable, I think) Premium subscription to cover their costs. I guess the live traffic data is bound to some licenses so they can't just "upstream" that.
Always the rows about some kind of BS that fragments, fractures, and defuses the efforts into pet projects instead of ever actually being a viable alternative for the majority of people to corporate offerings.
The hardest thing about any effort that is two or more people is the interpersonal, coordination, consensus, and organization aspects. Everything else is easy in comparison.
How hard a sell that is depends heavily on how much that person values their time. I know people who are experts in their field, who have had their with-source Wikipedia edits reverted to incorrect or misleading information by people who have more time to argue online than they do.
> CoMaps forked out of OrganicMaps after a row about money
Organic Maps is organized as a for-profit entity. CoMaps is not. This is a real difference, and the former asking for donations makes it look like a scam.
Looking at the OrganicMaps app on iOS and it seems to be free, with an option for donations in the menu . What does OrganicMap specifically do in order to make profit?
They can’t do so automatically. Osm Editors must approve. Apparantly OSM fears legislation when people copy info from google maps. They like to see evidence, like street sign photos. In my limited experience anyway.
I occasionally contribute to OSM. You just send your edit and they are directly live. I don't think there's prior moderation. On these apps you log in to OSM using an OSM account IIRC (though I mostly use EveryDoor or directly osm.org for this, occasionally StreetComplete, I don't contribute using Comaps)
Some apps don't edit OSM directly, but rather add a note on the map for others to edit. Maybe that's what they meant.
E.g., OrganicMaps often creates these kinds of notes: https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/5377887 which for certain kinds of edits is safer than trying to directly edit. StreetComplete does the same in many cases when something no longer exists. I think, shops and other places can often be added directly, though since that has little to no ties to existing data.
But yeah, I'm using mostly StreetComplete (SCEE) when outside, sometimes Every Door and Vespucci. For offline map apps like Organic Maps it's likely not easy resolving potential conflicts with live OSM data that might be weeks or months newer than the map data in the app.
I've been editing OSM since 2015 and contributing to FOSS OSM apps for about half that, there have been conflicts or special cases in the past but edits on StreetComplete, OsmAnd, Organic Maps, and CoMaps all go live without any mandatory review. There's a "request review" checkbox on OSM changesets, but it's somewhat rare to actually get a review and the edit is live in the meantime
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.
Do you have the slightest idea what OpenStreetMap is and how it works? It sounds like you have absolutely no clue, and it still doesn't prevent you from using that kind of language.
Nota bene: those end up as notes on the map which another mapper has to input manually. There's a lot of spam and dubious entries so I often no longer bother entering them, especially in places I don't know or where I cannot verify the information.
I was using Street Complete for some time and was always wondering if using these apps is considered helpful or if it only creates churn/noise. Is there a general consensus on that in the community?
Would it be more accepted to just do a few small, potentially not metadata-complete edits myself or is the review structure (if there is any) geared more towards fewer, more steady contributors?
Did one direct edit once and iirc it took ages to land in the map and I wasn't able to grasp if came from new editors' edits being scrutinized more carefully by too few reviewers, from the nature of the edits (deleting a bunch of buildings after demolition and probably not replacing it with the right area type) or if the release cycle for new edits to be included is just way longer than I would have expected.
The review does not block the data being added, it's more of a request for feedback.
Different maps have different update cycles. The slippy map on osm.org is meant to update as quickly as possible, usually a few minutes, but sometimes there are hiccups. Zoom levels that show larger areas also update a little slower.
As long as what you are adding is up to date/accurate, I wouldn't worry about whether you've captured everything about the features. "This thing is here" is a lot better for the map than no information.
As a frequent contributor myself I love StreetComplete and I wouldn't worry about it perhaps generating a few changesets more than strictly necessary (it tends to make one changeset per quest (with multiple amendments for individual answers) and also only during a certain time frame. Sure, that means that adding information to a staircase creates multiple changesets (incline, step_count, surface, handrail), but that doesn't really matter.
What StreetComplete is very good at, in my opinion, is simply QA on the ground. SC asks about features existing on the map (benches, bus stops, shops, roads, barriers, etc.) and some of them might go stale. So asking about opening hours of a shop might cause someone to look and notice that the shop is closed now, or replaced by another one, so in many cases the quests that add detail to objects have the nice side-effect that those are being looked at and reviewed whether they still exist, which otherwise does not happen often. The barrier to adding new data is often lower than fixing or removing outdated information.
And it's such a low barrier to entry, especially for people not familiar with OSM's tagging, since the UX is very well designed for beginners in my eyes (while still being useful for advanced mappers), that you can easily recommend it to people who like those kind of hobbies (e.g. geocaching, Pokémon Go). For me it was an excuse to go outside more, also to places I haven't been, during COVID-19, just to tick off another quest.
I'm working on something that is best described as Komoot meets Mastodon. Self hostable and federated. It's pretty early, and the UX is pretty bare bones still.
If you're keen on checking it out you should be able to find it in my recent Github contributions, following the link in my profile.
The difference is the planning, I'm building my tool around a collaborative use case. I'm often doing multi day bikepacking trips with my close friends. The planner supports real time collaboration, so multiple people can plan on the same route together.
Also for me it's an experiment in AI driven development (which I hope won't alienate people to much).
There is a federated application called Endurain [0] that can be self-hosted, and is compatible with Strava and Garmin Connect. Not a phone app, but a web front-end. I don't know how well that works on mobile.
You can record tracks with (I think) both Organic Maps and CoMaps. If you are interested in the social aspects of sharing tracks https://wanderer.to/ and a few others offer imports of GPX and other track formats.
Track recording in comaps is super finicky, at least for me. I’ve lost multiple recordings while checking the map mid hike.
I can’t say what the exact cause is. Should probably work that out. But I’ve taken to recording using it and all trails at the at the same time with plans to bring the missing data over to comaps at some point.
I just go on Wikiloc to find tracks, then export the GPX file into CoMaps. I know that Wikiloc is not OSS, but at least I can do navigation with custom routes that way.
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.
Not sure where in the Nordics you are, but just want to plug ut.no and norgeskart.no for really fantastic Norway navigation.
Both have free apps (norgeskart has a 50kr / year subscription to support and add more features), and both are incredible for navigating trails, marked and otherwise, anywhere Norway.
I've been making some custom maps for both Osmand and Comaps. The main big positive for Comaps I've seen is Android Auto being available freely (but you have osmand+ so moot point). But having used both, the tooling for osmand is far more mature. Creating an obf file (osmand file type) is a lot easier than the process for an mwm file (comaps file type). Far more routing or ui customization options in osmand and routing.xml files for even more advanced custom time penalties/weighting profiles.
OsmAnd~ is great for hiking, when you need topographic contour info, 3D relief shading, etc.
CoMaps is a much simpler and faster interface, that I use for driving navigation. (I use a 7 year old S10e, though, so it's possible that on a modern phone you'd not notice the difference?)
YMMV, but they're both free, so it's easy to try and see for yourself :)
In my experience from years ago, OsmAnd was always very slow when searching and also didn't find much, as if it required a 100 percent match for anything one searches. Really annoying. Then I discovered Organic Maps, which behaved better, and more recently switched CoMaps, due to ideological reasons.
I also use OsmAnd~ for hiking, and even more for cycling. I tried CoMaps after a friend recommended it. In my experience, OsmAnd is much more powerful, and if you can tolerate its complexity and battery-drain, it's worth it.
- CoMaps is much simpler, but lacks features. OsmAnd has (too many) features and requires heavy configuration, e.g. to disable some features I never use and optimize battery life.
- Loading a track (GPX) in CoMaps is cumbersome (you have to "Open with..." from a file navigator). OsmAnd can load tracks from within the app, and just display them or turn one into a route. With CoMaps, I couldn't load more than one on a map. My GPX routes are prepared with BRouter on my desktop computer, since both apps are unable to build routes of 150 kms
- CoMaps is better at energy saving. OsmAnd drains my battery in 5-6 hours when the screen is on (the screen roughly accounts for half of the drain). YMMV. For long rides, I switch the phone off as soon as I don't absolutely require its help for navigation.
- OsmAnd has features that I would never give up. Notably, displaying markers on "drinking water" POI, so that I know when I'll be able to refill, or decide if I must deviate my route toward a drinking tap.
- There are more maps and data in OsmAnd than in CoMaps, and more visualisation options.
- Last time I tried CoMaps (from F-Droid), at some point the screen went blinking, alternating between home and CoMaps. The only way out was to shutdown the phone.
> Notably, displaying markers on "drinking water" POI
In CoMaps, they are shown under: search > categories > water (then you can press "show on map"). Not straightforward, but it is there. Fairly enough, don't know if "water" includes drinkable ones only.
I never had to fix wrong things, but I felt the need to change a segment from "this is a trail" to "this trail actually exists but it's not maintained and it's overrun with vegetation". I should look up how to do so.
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.
OM and CoMaps should also work, though you might need to wait awhile for a GPS fix and be near a window. Google's main hiccup will be an internet connection for the maps.
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 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?
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)?
Organic Maps a great app in many ways, but I still don't get how people can actually use it every day and say it replaces Google Maps when its search feature totally stinks. I know it's a hard problem, but this is the number one thing that needs to somehow be fixed. I can't tell if I'm just too dumb or if FOSS/degoogle fanboys are just pretending. I just know I've tried to use it exclusively many times and always had to give in to Google Maps because the search totally failed.
I actually think the search feature rocks, because you have high fidelity OSM maps to query. Can't search for drinkable wells in Google Maps!
But then, it of course isn't Google Maps. It is likely to be more out of date and will not understand "natural" search queries as Google does. I believe it just takes some getting used to. There is overlap between the two, each service has its strengths and weaknesses, but also unique features.
+1 That, and it works in mountainous areas like the Alps or Pyrenees, where you're lucky to have GPS and most definitely can't rely on 4G for Google Maps
Sorta. It’s still worse than proprietary solutions: in reality when on wilderness backroads (US and CA) I find myself juggling four apps at a time.
CoMaps for course tracking, offline apple or google maps for navigation and satellite, Gia or All Trails for accurate topo and trails (even though I hate having to use it), and an ArcGIS app for information like additional land ownership or historic data.
It’s frustrating juggling apps, but the lack of accurate (or sometime any) topo or additional map layers in CoMaps is the most galling.
I’ve tried finding springs with OSM but I find i still have to verify on findaspring.org.
Would be great to have am OSM based app that did it all, but that seems unrealistic given a) the horrible data accuracy and OSM’s (entirely understandable) unwillingness to pirate and consolidate large proprietary data sets from multiple competitors b) unpaid developer hours needed to create and maintain an accessible user friendly and modern UX that can compete with premier apps.
We the FOSS world just have 100 to 10000 less budget to implement this feature. It's a hard problem, and you can't ignore that lots of other features are missing. E.g. street view or place comments.
This is more about OSM than Organic Maps, and I agree that looking for businesses it's not great. But looking for mapped features such as toilets, water taps, benches, fountains, etc. is far superior.
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.
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.
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.
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
FUCK COMAPS, they are the prototypical OSS project where everyone can "go down on Lisa and do what they like". No direction! But let's reinvent / alter the UI oh so often! No one besides dorks care about governance!
Btw they (respectively, only one guy, Konstantin!) copy code / changesets from Organic Maps, while this is not happening the other way around.
> 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.
I would define a tile as a slice of geometries, not whole features.
The difference with Tileless' approach, is that they load whole features from the database and don't split them into tiles. So if a feature extends outside the current view, they would load the whole geometry rather than the intersection of the tile's extent and the geometry.
Vector tiles are optimized for concurrent downloads and browser / CDN caching and doing a good job of that.
Hi
I am th author of TilelessMap (ResilientMaps).
The idea is to not destroy data. In a tile the geometries are cut into smaller pieces. That is important to be able to do efficient caching. Vector tiles are also often simplified to fit each zoom level. This means that the data is quite worthless for anything byt rendering.
So far tilelessmap is also just rendering. But it opens up the possibilities for any gis processing/analyses that you can do on desktop gis.
Since it is difficult to cache without tiles it has to be a very efficient render path. So, all polygons are pre-triangulated from the server. If you are familiar with gpu rendering you know that the gpu only can render points, lines and triangels as primitives. Triangulation is a quite expensive step. In a tile-redenerer that is solved by very aggressive simplification. At each zoom level quite few geoemtries and vector points are actually shown. In tilelessmap a polygon is encoded in twkb as a list of vertices, and after that, indexes into the vertex list how the gpu builds triangels. The vertex list is decoded into VBO (vertex buffer object) and the triangle index list is decoded into EBO (element buffer object) This is very efficient, and even in a phone many geometries and vertices can be rendered. No cache needed, which reduces complexety and makes it possible to keep large geometries without cutting them in tiles.
Also, the storage in the db is relational. This means that you can keep a full datamodel all the way out to the deveice. This opens a lot of possibilities.
I hope that I will get time to furhter develop this. I think this is filling a gap in gis of today. More like a modern version of ArcPad (but so far without the functionality). It is all GPL v3 licensed.
Hope this helps understanding the incitaments for the project.
Not yet. I hope, if the Android version gets some attention to do that. But App-store gives some issues with licensing with GPL. Dual licensing will be needed, but I would like to limit the more permissive license, but not contrain anyone from develop to iOS. I don't really know how to do it. I do not want a closed source fork for iOS by me or anyone else. I just want all ideas and work on this to be open to anyone. Apple don't really like that thinking.
But most of this is written in C and many platform-differenties is handled by SDL3. So, I think it should be very possible to port it.
Not necessarily. That's one way to do it, but e.g. OsmAnd just has big region-shaped files and not a load of tiny square tiles like a web viewer has that loads the data piecemeal
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).
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.
Same in OsmAnd though. Someone recently posted a screenshot of an area they thought was badly mapped. Turns out to be Osmand's coordinate rounding as part of the map data compression
Comparing a building in my city between the two maps by flipping between the apps, it looks identical to me. Not a scientific test though
The performance advantage is small to nil, IME. The UI is admittedly cleaner, though partly (as you say) that's simply because it has a ton less features.
The difference mostly comes from the default detail levels and shape optimization. You can make it as fast in OsmAnd as both are GPU-accelerated, but OsmAnd renders the map more detailed by default.
Yes, you can toggle a setting to use the network colors. I use it mostly for hiking. The UI is a learning curve, 100%, I am curious to check another tool
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.
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.
No. You cannot even click on a bakery to open its page. It's a bad Web client for the general public, and the vector style is hidden all below.
Osm.org is the reference website, the one where all data is always up to date and above all, where you edit the map.
But it's not a good OSM client.
Cool; but this is one of those instances where I wish the wonderful and benevolent FOSS developers of the world would consolidate efforts behind existing projects to make fewer better things instead of many never-finished forks. Especially since there is not yet a single open source map ui that is polished enough to compete with enterprise maps.
Agree. In terms of features Organic Maps has never been more than a pale imitation of OsmAnd, only "more ergonomic". The developers admit this themselves. So why couldn't they have just invested their time and energy into making OsmAnd more ergonomic! Ego-fueled duplication of efforts is a real problem in FOSS.
Last I checked, Osmand uses an unconventional map rendered. I would want to contribute to it, it's lagging on so many devices, I can barely use it. Comaps is perfectly smooth.
I'm not saying ego problems don't exist of course. But taking Osmand and making a simple general public app out of this is a huge effort (human and tech), probably more than building a side app.
We at cartes.app have discussed with some people Comaps. We've made links from cartes.app to Comaps, e.g. for navigation, a feature that we don't have.
We've not seen anything from their side. We don't really understand why they wouldn't want a proper Web version.
It's even worse in the non-open source world : Kagi's maps are bad. Qwant dropped their cool map project, too expensive. Ecosia has none, redirects to Google, its main competitor.
They could "just" clone cartes.app and run `bun i && bun start` and `ansible-playbook` to launch their instance of cartes.app, but we can't reach them. Or fund the project.
What's important though is that we collaborate on the tools we all use. OSM, MapLibre, Photon, Pelias, Protomaps, Motis, Brouter, etc. are all tools that we somehow share, each end-user app having their own combination of them.
We also thought like you do when outside of this world. But now, its a human problem. How to reach people and how to gain the time that it would take to collaborate ? We don't have the keys.
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.
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 situatio...
>>if you run stock iOS or Android with the Google services, I believe you are already screwed anyway: I wouldn't trust them not to constantly leak stuff about you in the background even if you don't actively use the GPS, at least to build their traffic info and to keep their access network-based location database updated.
are you sure this is true? - i can still run the phone on airplane mode(with GPS off) after i have the maps downloaded and can go anywhere afterwards. i don't think there is any communication with the outside world after that.
I am not sure if you looked at the repo I linked. In the intro I clearly state that I am doing this work for my own curiosity and for a hypothetical scenario (where GPS is denied). Moreover, the tech I am relying on (TERCOM) has applications in other fields as well such as navigating under water (submarines use a version of this). Or missile systems such as tomahawks which use tercom extensively.
> I am not sure if you looked at the repo I linked
I did skim it to get a grasp of your approach. But I'm answering statements made here too.
I think your project is worth pursuing. I'm genuinely curious what you come up with. This is actually why I spent quite some time writing my comments: I hope they helped you in some way. I do believe your project could use clearer presentation of the motivation (here or in the readme). In particular, the "GPS is not private" statement and the fact you didn't know about the existing private open source offline mapping solution also rang an alarm in me (a comparison with the "state of the art" would be nice). "Imagine GPS is jammed / is not available at this time at your place with your hardware" is actually sufficient as far as I am concerned. Relying on a privacy-preserving solution out of principles even on a spy phone comes with caveats that need to be exposed but I believe in this approach.
I'm not pushing back. If you have something like a blog that I could follow, I would subscribe to its RSS feed because I'm quite interested actually. If not, well it's already quite nice you share your curiosity work with the world.
>>the fact you didn't know about the existing private open source offline mapping solution also rang an alarm in me
why? that's a bit of an overreaction from your alarm bells honestly. i didn't know about organic maps because i never looked up for this solution and never came across this specific app in my readings. what i am working on (and want to figure out) has less to do with commercial angle of privacy (which organic maps solve) and more to do with navigating without relying on any external signal. i truly think we should be able to navigate earth (land/sea/air/subs) without any external human controlled signal (GPS/Internet/radio etc); that in my mind is true offline navigation. but you can argue that organic maps is also an offline navigation app and i think for an everyday user that's true.
your comments are helpful. thanks for being so thorough with your thought process. i am trying to write on https://trulytyped.com/user/4f448758/deepan-wadhwa - but i have not written anything technical yet and there is no RSS button there yet. let me add it today haha. thank you.
>> the fact you didn't know about the existing private open source offline mapping solution also rang an alarm in me
> why? that's a bit of an overreaction from your alarm bells honestly.
Maybe. Let me explain myself. In a former life, I worked in academia and you kinda triggered my research mode (which is, believe it or not, quite positive for you). There, your work is easily more solid and convincing if you reaserched a bit the state of the art. By working on an alternative to GPS navigation, in such a setting, I would expect you to know the field well.
Now, I understand that you didn't particularly look into apps pretty much focused on GPS positioning since they are not supposed to do what you want, and I'm aware that you aren't doing academic research nor pretending to.
> let me add it today haha. thank you.
No pressure, I'll try to think of coming back to check once in a while. Thank you as well.
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
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadWhy use fork of a fork which lacks features of the previous one?
Users don't care about dev drama, if it doesn't affect them.
https://www.comaps.app/news/2025-04-16/1/?ref=itsfoss.com
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.)
Hardly disagree with this claim. Donation is something you give without any expected usage - otherwise it is a fundraising, payment, investment, etc.
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/
Others in the thread highlighted other issues, like Organic Maps' proprietary "data license" for some parts of the service.
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.
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.
This app has had quite a history.
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
Instead of a pay-to-access model, a sustainable consumer map ecosystem could look like Wikipedia, or better yet, a peer-to-peer network like IPFS where you trade compute (route calculation) and storage. It could be a barter: you get to use the collective resources of the network because you are actively hosting tiles, routing data, or contributing metadata back into it. But that requires a critical mass to take off (like bitcoin did).
OpenStreetMap is great, but what we actually need is a modern consumer frontend built on top of an open, distributed layer: decentralized public registry for user-generated content, keeping your routes and trip itineraries discoverable by any client app rather than locked inside VC-backed silos.
Furthermore, current open-source projects miss a lot of quality-of-life features that commercial apps have—things like crowd-sourced opinions and reviews about places, public transit schedules, real-time traffic alerting and reporting, location sharing, street-view, and dependable speed limits during navigation. Without these active, live-data layers, the map looks stale and lagging behind the real world.
The user interface also needs to shift from a passive viewport to a high-contribution editor. Right now, if you want to make serious geometry edits, you’re forced into JOSM. It’s hard to boot, clunky, and quite clearly has never seen a proper UI/UX designer, scaring away everyone but the most hardcore power users. I'm a person who doesn't give up easily, but when I tried adding parking zone regions for the city I gave up after 2 days of trying to make some sense of this software. A modern mobile UI should let you freehand draw a route that snaps to paths, edit regions on the fly, or drop advanced metadata — like parking restrictions — in just three obvious taps, without a steep technical learning curve.
Finally, the client app itself should be a pluggable core. Instead of building every feature from scratch, it should allow users to plug in open modules for whatever they need, whether that's live public transit routing, traffic estimates, location sharing, or advanced 3D metro overlays. The data is there, and the rendering tech is there; we just need a shared, distributed network structure so companies can't charge us a premium to gate the social and metadata layers. I wish there was an EU initiative to have a fully featured app like that, unifying all the existing ones in place of N abhorrent, barely functional implementations in all of the different local public transport apps (looking at you italian AMT genova or you, french IDF mobilites).
Nope. I do not want any app to start downloading hundreds of megabytes without my permission.
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
https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/projects/21877
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
Saved me a lot of speeding tickets on the interstate.
As someone who isn't a speed demon, I still like the police warnings because it's a timely reminder to check myself. Am I matching the flow of traffic?
I'm no speed demon (it's just not worth it IMO). But, in Chicago you can do 10-15 over on an interstate and nobody cares. The cops are doing 20 over. If I saw someone actually doing 55 on the Dan Ryan I just assumed they were stoned, and I'm only half-joking. Elsewhere around the Great Lakes, it was more like 5-10 over. Meanwhile, in the Bay Area the flow of unimpeded traffic is usually only 0-5 over.
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.
I lived in one of those alleged places (Chicago) and didn't observe this in practice. When Google sees that 10-minute route, it quickly starts routing drivers that way, and eventually both routes equalize around, say, 30 minutes. When two routes are that disparate, by the time you actually get midway through the faster one, it's just as congested as the slower route.
I think there's a weird psychology to these apps. When Google gives you a wack route through a residential area, it feels like you're getting an advantage. It feels like you're beating traffic. But you never beat traffic in a car, because you are traffic. And Google never sends only one car on a faster detour. It was always half a dozen of them or more. I saw this a million times in Chicago.
Getting pretty local here, but I remember one of Google's favorite alternate routes vividly. Instead of taking the Edens south into the Kennedy junction, it would have you exit onto Foster and then take some rando residential street south to Montrose or Irving Park. Every single time it did this, I'd see a parade of cars in front of me and behind me. The white glow of GMaps on a new car's infotainment screen is unmistakable. I could see what was going on, all of us could see what was going on. Meanwhile, you're driving past a bunch of kids waiting for their bus, or a ride home from school, and those are all delayed because me and a hundred others are using a side street as a commuter artery. This saved, on a good day, five minutes on a 35 minute commute. It was more antisocial than it was efficient.
It's not necessarily about "advantage", especially on longer journeys. What if there is a crash on the Autobahn 1 hour in front of me? Even if I don't reroute, I at least have a choice of planning my toilet and lunch stop _before_ the crash site.
It is also possible to plan a different route if the crash is visible so far ahead. There are usually multiple routes I could take, and I decide based on the traffic and other factors, where I go. It can depend on the time of day, the time of year, etc. Maybe usually I don't take the one which is 100kms longer, but in the case of a crash, or even just heavy traffic it could be quicker still.
So for any non-trivial journey, I always use navigation, even if I could drive to the other place blindly. It's not really about navigation, it is about the current situation on the roads.
https://www.magicearth.com/
https://www.openstreetmap.org/
CoMaps forked out of OrganicMaps after a row about money
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.
If they have to negotiate, constantly settle, and get no money, that's a hard sell.
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.
insanely shameful if not
E.g., OrganicMaps often creates these kinds of notes: https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/5377887 which for certain kinds of edits is safer than trying to directly edit. StreetComplete does the same in many cases when something no longer exists. I think, shops and other places can often be added directly, though since that has little to no ties to existing data.
But yeah, I'm using mostly StreetComplete (SCEE) when outside, sometimes Every Door and Vespucci. For offline map apps like Organic Maps it's likely not easy resolving potential conflicts with live OSM data that might be weeks or months newer than the map data in the app.
In batches, to be exact. Multiple edits in relatively short intervals (a few minutes) are commited as one.
Do you have the slightest idea what OpenStreetMap is and how it works? It sounds like you have absolutely no clue, and it still doesn't prevent you from using that kind of language.
Would it be more accepted to just do a few small, potentially not metadata-complete edits myself or is the review structure (if there is any) geared more towards fewer, more steady contributors?
Did one direct edit once and iirc it took ages to land in the map and I wasn't able to grasp if came from new editors' edits being scrutinized more carefully by too few reviewers, from the nature of the edits (deleting a bunch of buildings after demolition and probably not replacing it with the right area type) or if the release cycle for new edits to be included is just way longer than I would have expected.
Different maps have different update cycles. The slippy map on osm.org is meant to update as quickly as possible, usually a few minutes, but sometimes there are hiccups. Zoom levels that show larger areas also update a little slower.
As long as what you are adding is up to date/accurate, I wouldn't worry about whether you've captured everything about the features. "This thing is here" is a lot better for the map than no information.
What StreetComplete is very good at, in my opinion, is simply QA on the ground. SC asks about features existing on the map (benches, bus stops, shops, roads, barriers, etc.) and some of them might go stale. So asking about opening hours of a shop might cause someone to look and notice that the shop is closed now, or replaced by another one, so in many cases the quests that add detail to objects have the nice side-effect that those are being looked at and reviewed whether they still exist, which otherwise does not happen often. The barrier to adding new data is often lower than fixing or removing outdated information.
And it's such a low barrier to entry, especially for people not familiar with OSM's tagging, since the UX is very well designed for beginners in my eyes (while still being useful for advanced mappers), that you can easily recommend it to people who like those kind of hobbies (e.g. geocaching, Pokémon Go). For me it was an excuse to go outside more, also to places I haven't been, during COVID-19, just to tick off another quest.
If you're keen on checking it out you should be able to find it in my recent Github contributions, following the link in my profile.
The difference is the planning, I'm building my tool around a collaborative use case. I'm often doing multi day bikepacking trips with my close friends. The planner supports real time collaboration, so multiple people can plan on the same route together.
Also for me it's an experiment in AI driven development (which I hope won't alienate people to much).
[0] https://docs.endurain.com/gallery/
I can’t say what the exact cause is. Should probably work that out. But I’ve taken to recording using it and all trails at the at the same time with plans to bring the missing data over to comaps at some point.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/UIKit/transitionin...
Regarding testers we had a TestFlight build with non-functioning CarPlay, and it was only discovered by me (and I don't even own a car..)
If you're interested in taking a look, the easiest way to get involved would be to join our Zulip instance (Slack clone): https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/src/branch/main/docs/CONT...
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.
OSMand is a cartographer's friend - it does everything and more... With all the drawbacks of doing that.
CoMaps is better targeted to the needs of most people.
Both have free apps (norgeskart has a 50kr / year subscription to support and add more features), and both are incredible for navigating trails, marked and otherwise, anywhere Norway.
But from this and sibling comments it seems that CoMaps have nothing to offer me (except possibly better search).
CoMaps is a much simpler and faster interface, that I use for driving navigation. (I use a 7 year old S10e, though, so it's possible that on a modern phone you'd not notice the difference?)
YMMV, but they're both free, so it's easy to try and see for yourself :)
- CoMaps is much simpler, but lacks features. OsmAnd has (too many) features and requires heavy configuration, e.g. to disable some features I never use and optimize battery life.
- Loading a track (GPX) in CoMaps is cumbersome (you have to "Open with..." from a file navigator). OsmAnd can load tracks from within the app, and just display them or turn one into a route. With CoMaps, I couldn't load more than one on a map. My GPX routes are prepared with BRouter on my desktop computer, since both apps are unable to build routes of 150 kms
- CoMaps is better at energy saving. OsmAnd drains my battery in 5-6 hours when the screen is on (the screen roughly accounts for half of the drain). YMMV. For long rides, I switch the phone off as soon as I don't absolutely require its help for navigation.
- OsmAnd has features that I would never give up. Notably, displaying markers on "drinking water" POI, so that I know when I'll be able to refill, or decide if I must deviate my route toward a drinking tap.
- There are more maps and data in OsmAnd than in CoMaps, and more visualisation options.
- Last time I tried CoMaps (from F-Droid), at some point the screen went blinking, alternating between home and CoMaps. The only way out was to shutdown the phone.
[edit: BRouter for routing]
Have you considered a dynamo hub with a headlight with USB output?
In CoMaps, they are shown under: search > categories > water (then you can press "show on map"). Not straightforward, but it is there. Fairly enough, don't know if "water" includes drinkable ones only.
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.
I never had to fix wrong things, but I felt the need to change a segment from "this is a trail" to "this trail actually exists but it's not maintained and it's overrun with vegetation". I should look up how to do so.
This seems like an interesting project to contribute a little bit to, but I can't deal with Java anymore...
It's probably easiest to discuss in the project's Zulip: https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/src/branch/main/docs/CONT...
Switch to Kotlin: https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/issues/1984 Migrate to Compose: https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/issues/4298
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?
Anyone has context on the following not hidden over Git-* issues (I was left thoroughly confused trying to understand it)?
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.
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
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
Btw they (respectively, only one guy, Konstantin!) copy code / changesets from Organic Maps, while this is not happening the other way around.
Is anyone breaking any licence here? If not, then I don't understand this complaint.
> 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...
There is some 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.
Which can be done with tiles. Or maybe I don't understand what you mean by "tiles"? What do you describe as "tiles"?
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.
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.
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).
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.
Always best to double check the routing suggestion.
(CoMaps is the open-source, non-profit community fork of Organic Maps.)
Comparing a building in my city between the two maps by flipping between the apps, it looks identical to me. Not a scientific test though
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.
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.
I'm not saying ego problems don't exist of course. But taking Osmand and making a simple general public app out of this is a huge effort (human and tech), probably more than building a side app.
We've not seen anything from their side. We don't really understand why they wouldn't want a proper Web version.
It's even worse in the non-open source world : Kagi's maps are bad. Qwant dropped their cool map project, too expensive. Ecosia has none, redirects to Google, its main competitor.
They could "just" clone cartes.app and run `bun i && bun start` and `ansible-playbook` to launch their instance of cartes.app, but we can't reach them. Or fund the project.
What's important though is that we collaborate on the tools we all use. OSM, MapLibre, Photon, Pelias, Protomaps, Motis, Brouter, etc. are all tools that we somehow share, each end-user app having their own combination of them.
We also thought like you do when outside of this world. But now, its a human problem. How to reach people and how to gain the time that it would take to collaborate ? We don't have the keys.
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.
That's not really GPS anymore so when discussing the topic it would be worth being exact on this.
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 situatio...
are you sure this is true? - i can still run the phone on airplane mode(with GPS off) after i have the maps downloaded and can go anywhere afterwards. i don't think there is any communication with the outside world after that.
I am not sure if you looked at the repo I linked. In the intro I clearly state that I am doing this work for my own curiosity and for a hypothetical scenario (where GPS is denied). Moreover, the tech I am relying on (TERCOM) has applications in other fields as well such as navigating under water (submarines use a version of this). Or missile systems such as tomahawks which use tercom extensively.
I'm sure I don't trust them.
> I am not sure if you looked at the repo I linked
I did skim it to get a grasp of your approach. But I'm answering statements made here too.
I think your project is worth pursuing. I'm genuinely curious what you come up with. This is actually why I spent quite some time writing my comments: I hope they helped you in some way. I do believe your project could use clearer presentation of the motivation (here or in the readme). In particular, the "GPS is not private" statement and the fact you didn't know about the existing private open source offline mapping solution also rang an alarm in me (a comparison with the "state of the art" would be nice). "Imagine GPS is jammed / is not available at this time at your place with your hardware" is actually sufficient as far as I am concerned. Relying on a privacy-preserving solution out of principles even on a spy phone comes with caveats that need to be exposed but I believe in this approach.
I'm not pushing back. If you have something like a blog that I could follow, I would subscribe to its RSS feed because I'm quite interested actually. If not, well it's already quite nice you share your curiosity work with the world.
why? that's a bit of an overreaction from your alarm bells honestly. i didn't know about organic maps because i never looked up for this solution and never came across this specific app in my readings. what i am working on (and want to figure out) has less to do with commercial angle of privacy (which organic maps solve) and more to do with navigating without relying on any external signal. i truly think we should be able to navigate earth (land/sea/air/subs) without any external human controlled signal (GPS/Internet/radio etc); that in my mind is true offline navigation. but you can argue that organic maps is also an offline navigation app and i think for an everyday user that's true.
your comments are helpful. thanks for being so thorough with your thought process. i am trying to write on https://trulytyped.com/user/4f448758/deepan-wadhwa - but i have not written anything technical yet and there is no RSS button there yet. let me add it today haha. thank you.
> why? that's a bit of an overreaction from your alarm bells honestly.
Maybe. Let me explain myself. In a former life, I worked in academia and you kinda triggered my research mode (which is, believe it or not, quite positive for you). There, your work is easily more solid and convincing if you reaserched a bit the state of the art. By working on an alternative to GPS navigation, in such a setting, I would expect you to know the field well.
Now, I understand that you didn't particularly look into apps pretty much focused on GPS positioning since they are not supposed to do what you want, and I'm aware that you aren't doing academic research nor pretending to.
> let me add it today haha. thank you.
No pressure, I'll try to think of coming back to check once in a while. Thank you as well.