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Comment by donquichotte | Hacker News Reader

When I was traveling overland in central Asia, everybody I met was using maps.me with OSM. The maps were of surprisingly good quality and maps.me is superb, allowing the maps for whole countries to be downloaded (ideal if you don't have a data plan) and the route calculation is quick as long as the road grid isn't too dense.

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For those who may have missed, maps.me is also gone open-source recently: https://github.com/mapsme/omim

I was amazed recently. About 3 years ago, my town in Japan had no maps on OSM at all. I set about adding in the routes that I rode on my bicycle, but it was pretty pathetic. I went to the UK for two years and when I came back somebody had finished everything. All the public paths and everything are clearly marked. I think the only thing left is to tag the stores.

The really nice thing about OSM is how easy it is to contribute. There is a famous bicycle route that goes through my town, but it is also famous because it is non-contiguous and completely unmarked on any map. The only way to find it is to ride on the roads and follow the signs (some of which are hand written by residents who live in the area). With OSM it was easy to mark the part of the route that I knew about and now I see a lot of touring cyclists coming through. It's incredibly empowering.

Tht old wiki magic :)

Ha, it's like ant-swarm optimisation! :)

Used osmand from f-droid in Indonesia few weeks ago. Google maps was basically useless. OSM map in southern Lombok did send me down a crazy dirt path that was mapped as main road. That was fine for me, I was just exploring the country on a scooter not relying on it for anything important (uploaded fixes when I got back to the home stay).

Similarly experience in Philippines in January, Google maps had basically nothing in Palawan but OSM had great coverage.

I used OSMand in Greece last Summer and it was fine as long as you applied common sense on some turns :)

I have been using it in Chile for over a year now and it has been working great. When I arrived, multiple people told me that Google Maps was terrible here, but I have had good luck with OSM.

Yeah, the quality of google maps quickly deteriorates once you leave the highly developed countries. It would be nice to have tighter integration of maps.me with OSM, e.g. to be able to make changes to the maps from the maps.me app. I wanted to remove several abandoned hotels/fuel stations, but in the end just didn't do it because editing OSM is quite tedious.

A somewhat hacky thing you can do is tweet to @OSMthis with the location embedded in the tweet, and it will add a note to OSM: https://twitter.com/osmthis/with_replies

Other editors can then see the note and might resolve it

If you use Android, I suggest OsmAnd~. https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=net.osmand.plus

OsmAnd is an open source project, however the free OsmAnd version in the Play Store has limitations. You can get the full version (OsmAnd+) if you have money and want to support the developer, but OsmAnd~ has all the features of OsmAnd+.

In my place (and I live in a highly developed country, Germany) Google maps is missing a whole district of my city! Which leads to lots of people ending up in a dead end in a residential street, locking for the highway.

Well, it’s always funny, but with Google’s data not updated since 2005, they’re pretty useless.

It’s like Google only cares about the US.

FWIW Google Maps also has an editor which is useful when you need to help other people find you.

Google Maps and editors and other Google maps-related collaboration tools are awful, if you need human interaction.

I entered a location for the company I worked with. The company moved to another location, so I set about to change the address on Google Maps. To verify I was really the owner of the business, they decided to send mail... to the company's old address (which was occupied by a squatter at the point).

End result, now you have two locations for the company, a correct one and an incorrect one.

I also had a dispute when I edited a location on Antarctica (the Uruguayan base)... editors kept reverting the change.

I've been looking for something like this for eternity. Thank you!

That looks pretty good, but I don't understand why I can't restrict location services to when the app is in the foreground.

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