Maps.me is gone, and we must bring it back
telegra.ph
telegra.ph
A few examples of why it was so great:
Simple, non social bookmarks. As in: place a bookmark so you don't get lost while hiking, or when you find a nice spot you want to come back to later. Yep, a utility feature that doesn't somehow map to some stoopid business OKR in advertising. I am sure this is possible with Google maps or Apple maps somehow, but only after you've created an account, logged in, and made sure you have the equivalent of a South Korean inner city internet connection.
Also, easily downloadable maps that just stay on your phone. I am hiking, I don't have internet and need the map on my phone. I know Google Maps allows you to do that but it is tedious unlike maps.me, which is instant.
I have no idea what the point of the "international" version is, as this one has English translation as well.
I wonder if there are other high-profile cases of a national map provider successfully competing with Google or Apple maps.
I used it throughout whole Europe, and found it superior to even local apps (map content) and OSMAnd (map rendering).
Had tried to find similar apps for hiking recently and ended up with free versions of paid apps that were deliberately crippled, this looks perfect for what I need. Shame it’s not easier to find in App Store.
It even has a feature to find a trail looping a fixed distance from a point - I haven’t seen this on other apps and it’s really fast.
Ahoj!
2. It has its own (high quality) map data only for Czechoslovakia, outside it uses "just" OSM, although you'll get arguably superior rendering there.
Mapy.cz uses OSM data worldwide except Czechia, where they have their own dataset.
Source is hosted here:
I love OsmAnd and have paid for the premium version. It's great for hiking or in cities when you can't guarantee an internet connection.
This. OsmAnd is packed with advanced feautures but search is unusable which is unfortunate because that's how I'd usually use a map.
It might be because I don't need a map often or maybe I'm just an idiot :)
I think the main issue is that the app is not intuitive, so you have to sit down and take the time to memorize how to do stuff with it before you need to do it live on the road. And I've never done that, my bad, I really should take the time.
Download links for app are here: https://en.mapy.cz/zakladni?x=15.5833000&y=49.4000000&z=11&m...
But still much better than Google maps, which seems very much for cars (at least outside of cities).
Yes I know, and not just Europe. But my comment there was specifically about contours, i.e. height data from SRTM. I'm not aware of any project to crowd-source stereo-pair contour drawing, but if you know of one, I'd be interested to have a link.
You do need a subscription for offline maps...but you get very good map layers for outdoor use (some based on OSM data, some based on "official" sources like USGS or Ordnance Survey), you can create routes and tracks, set waypoints etc.
They are great for cycling and hiking. Setup is a bit more involved compared to maps.me, because you need a separate maps viewer app. Overall nothing too complicated for a somewhat tech savvy audience though.
My mapping app of choice is locus maps. There are alternatives such as OruxMaps available too.
the thing I love about offline maps is that there is no nagging to update the map like there is with google. I also don't think that google downloads everything so you still need an internet connection if you want to search for some things
Was it? The only time I tried to use it to find my way with a car in a forest, it guided me towards a road that simply wasn't there. It was on the map, and in real life it was just trees. My friend, who was driving, wasn't too happy. I switched to Google Maps and it worked.
Every National Park I've been to in the last three years has had a sign, a flyer, a notice, or a line in the brochure pleading with people not to rely on Google Maps and to use paper maps.
You're correct - no offline mapping, though it's pretty parsimonious with data
Maps.me offline functionality was great.
I'm looking forward to you helping solve this problem then as I have the Android app, but can't use due to lack of downloadable maps.
I have a couple of places in the offline storage, which still works, but if I go to a new place I can't use the app, downloads never start.
MapTiler and Mapbox are expensive.
The maintenance of which is non-trivial.
The fork has maintained their own tiles, so I don't think there's any question of not knowing how to. It's just been inconsistently maintained over time.
With tileserver, it is more interesting. The full one (capable of generating raster tiles on demand) still needs ancient node.js (v10, soon to be eol), which can be a problem. The light one runs OK on the current stack.
[1]: https://github.com/matkoniecz/illegal-use-of-OpenStreetMap/b...
They were trying to use servers paid by maps.me in version of app that removed all revenue generators.
This part was perfectly understandable, removing ads/tracking/etc is fine - but use your own servers then.
But lack of a proper attribution was not acceptable (yes, I am the same matkoniecz).
[0] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Draft_Attribution_Guidel...
ODBL ( https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1-0/ ) that is a license of OSM data - https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright ) has requirement to include attribution reasonably calculated to make any Person that views the map aware that Content was obtained from the OpenStreetMap and that it is available under the ODBL License.
Hidden attribution does not fullfill it.
"include a notice associated with the Produced Work reasonably calculated to make any Person that uses, views, accesses, interacts with, or is otherwise exposed to the Produced Work aware that Content was obtained from the Database, Derivative Database, or the Database as part of a Collective Database, and that it is available under this License."
No link to the source code?
> If you like MAPS.ME, then please sign up. I will post updates on how it's going and will send instructions on how to get back the original app.
No, how about you give the instructions in the article?
The reason there are no instructions in the article yet is that the app is not published yet. I wanted to quickly inform people like me who woke up to an updated app about what happened and get a way to contact them once it's back up.
If the author had already reached out to @axet to offer to help / become a maintainer I'd imagine it would've been mentioned up top.
I'm all for people creating multiple divergent open-source forks of things (diversity is great) but this doesn't seem to be divergent at all. The stated intent is to repeat @axet's work exactly...
But that's kinda the price you pay there.
[0]: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store...
[1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/no-gpl-apps-for-apples-app-sto...
> take it from the FSF themselves
Is that supposed to be a trump card? I've read that FSF document. I read it when it was published in 2010, and because I'm not careless I read it again this morning before and after I posted my comment. I've also looked at it more than once in the intervening years.
> Or the VLC devs
VLC is on the App Store right now.
The FSF post was true in 2010, but unlike GPLv2, v3, etc, the Apple terms are not static documents. They've been revised multiple times in the last 10 years, and the FSF post hasn't been updated. The last time I spent an afternoon doing an analysis, I found that the terms at the time didn't conflict with GPL. At this point, if a person is going to claim that there's a conflict, the onus is on them to show that it's true—just like the FSF did at the time they published that blog post. It doesn't suffice to show that it was true in 2010. But again none of this matters here, because Maps.me isn't GPL software, so this entire diversion has been a waste of time.
On top of that there's the cost of Apple hardware; you can get away with not having an iPhone and using xcode's emulation for many cases but with custom graphics heavy things like omim had, this approach would be limiting. And you still need a Mac either way.
And all this is to create an app that's competing directly with an almost identical app on the same store with only marginal benefits (the Android one in contrast has the benefit of being available outside the Google ecosystem, as well as having some exclusivity within F-Droid itself).
It would be a not insurmountable but still significant extra amount of maintenance effort. Given the maintenance effort was already seemingly unmanageable supporting Android alone it's understandable.
This knowledge is second hand from a friend of mine, whom I had the pleasure of listening to when he was ranting about the process a few years ago.
Maybe things have changed since then..?
̶G̶i̶v̶e̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶,̶ ̶I̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶s̶e̶e̶ ̶w̶h̶y̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶a̶u̶t̶h̶o̶r̶ ̶w̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶s̶i̶d̶e̶r̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶a̶ ̶d̶e̶a̶d̶/̶a̶b̶a̶n̶d̶o̶n̶e̶d̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶j̶e̶c̶t̶,̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶s̶e̶e̶ ̶n̶o̶ ̶r̶e̶a̶s̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶p̶i̶c̶k̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶u̶p̶ ̶i̶n̶s̶t̶e̶a̶d̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶r̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶f̶r̶o̶m̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶o̶s̶t̶ ̶r̶e̶c̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶M̶a̶p̶s̶.̶m̶e̶ ̶p̶u̶b̶l̶i̶c̶ ̶r̶e̶l̶e̶a̶s̶e̶.̶
EDIT: Disregard, I was confusing the actual F-Droid fork with an older re-upload on the same store. The former is called "Maps" while the re-upload is "Maps.me".
> It looks like the F-Droid fork was last updated five years ago
The latest release is August 2020 [0] and the latest update to the repo happened at the same time [1].
> and the 'website' link just points to maps.me, rather than a public repository or anything specific to the fork.
There's a "Source Code" link [0] which points to the Gitlab repo [1]. I don't even see a "website" link.
I was, thanks! There's a "Maps.me" app on F-Droid that's the one I described (presumably the same APK as the Play Store?). Whereas the fork you guys are talking about is just "Maps". Editing my comment.
The author of that fork has also been actively engaged with the maps.me devs throughout its development, you can see a lot of these discussions in the issues on the original github mapsme omim project.
It looks like there are more of us than there are, possibly.
I'm aware that one fork already exists, but it hasn't seen any updates for a year and the app doesn't seem to work at this time. The plan is to eventually integrate axel's work back into the app.
F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/
2. Disable map features like areas, buildings and such
3. If still unhappy, delete the full blown map data and download the road only map data (about ⅓ size of full blown map)
4. eMMC/microSD speed matters a lot, if you put it on an external SD card, make sure to get a high speed IOPS card labeled "A1" (1500) or better "A2" (4000 guaranteed read IOPs).
Reason: The map is rendered locally on demand from the map data(base), there's no tiles in the default map view. You basically get almost all of Openstreetmap's data (POIs, buildings, areas, ways and relations), not every poi type is indexed and searchable though. It even have has a working public transport map with routing based on timetables (if present) and ferry ways, etc. If you put the data on a slow external sd card, you'll notice.
Edit: I realised after posting this that you were actually referring to releases not performance.
A usable alternative to gmaps for me.
OSM maps will include store and venue locations, but Google Maps will show me their opening hours and give me their phone number, website, and (for restaurants) menu and food pictures.
Looking up that kind of info is, [i]by far[/i], the most common reason for me to open the maps app in the first place, before I actually decide that I want to go there and start navigation.
Obviously this is all information that Google has and OSM doesn't. But I would be OK with a plugin that lets me click on a store on OSM to open it in a Google Maps page in a webview.
I'd be letting Google know that I am interested in that place - no way around it - but I could keep the information of whether I actually went there and how long I stayed within OSM, without sharing my location with Google.
Another, probably easier plugin would be one that lets OSMAnd recognize the location provided by Google Maps when I use the share button. Then I could look up places I want to go on GMaps and send them to OSMAnd+ for navigation.
Entered data will be added as a note to OSM and experienced editors will then correct/add the business on the map.
Google invests a lot into tagging google map POIs. On standard Android installations Google maps activates the maps timeline recording for you and it's creepily good at guessing to which shops you've been and by what means, etc. You then get frequent notifications that push and nudge you to review and answer questions about places (wheelchair access, confirm opening hours, business type, inventory, add photos, reviews, etc). The whole ordeal is quite gamified with contributor level and stars earned on your profile badge. It's designed to have GMaps' data as much as possible enriched by users.
Quite sad, since it was a nice and slick tool, where I trusted privacy and faster than osmand or alternatives.
https://f-droid.org/de/packages/com.github.axet.maps/
Note: This is not new. F-Droid maintains this open source version since serveral years.
The fork is/was very popular so I can envisage this new effort having similar issues if it starts to get traffic.
I'm always confused why nobody know about it.
I underand if you can't live with the limitations of IRC. But it's 2020 and we have Matrix. Protocols, not platforms.
Suddenly the recurring removal of more and more details from the Google Maps visual style makes sense. Earlier I thought it was just a case of overzealous minimalism.
I use Maps.me all the time. It has detailed offline maps, with bike paths mapped (where I am, at least).
Then "all" we have to do is fork the front end and keep it steady (with the assumption that the API is open and it will allow 'foreign' apps accessing their data - for free), or stay on the same non-updating app forever. As a principle I don't update apps, unless I absolutely need to (app nags to update 'or else').
I'm not a dev, but without having to rebuild the universe, I don't see any other solution that does not take massive effort.
Also, Ondřej Sojka speaks on the interface. How about the many GB/TB required? Is the new company willing to freely hand out an API that will provide thousands of hits, for free? Are they that generous to pay for the storage, network for someone else's charity?
ADDITION: just because I know this area (of the map used) pretty well, if you are ever there, try the "Honest Burger". I hope they survived the COVID shutdown.. they make what I call honest burger (I use this term for everything of a fair price/value)(way before I discovered that place). I especially liked the fries with rosemary. You don't get that often in a burger palce.
It had more off-road trails than I had ever seen on Google Maps, along with altitude information, lodge reviews, checkpoints, etc.
I vividly remember turning my phone on a couple of times a day to look at MAPS.ME before immediately turning it off to save battery (you can't easily charge your phone up there). Except for the camera, I basically haven't used any other app for a whole 16 days. I haven't experienced such digital minimalism in adulthood until and since this trip.
https://efiling.drcor.mcit.gov.cy/DrcorPublic/SearchResults.... https://www.londonstockexchange.com/news-article/MAIL/mail-r...
I think being able to download is a nice feature but I don't often need it and would like to use an OSM-based alternative to Google Maps and zoom into any city without having to download it first.
Like: "Where was that place in Lisbon?" - "Lemme check... oh I have to download the city, one sec..." [Adding another few hundred megabytes that I will not need for a long time]
There's also the option to enable tile based online maps from a number of predefined providers, if you know the url scheme you can also define a new satellite or traffic tile source from certain known providers (and set opacity) to show those tiles on top of another base map
On MapOut at least, you zoom in too far & then click the tile you don't have. On a good network there's a little more friction than on (say) google maps, but not so bad. A few MB, never hundreds of MB.
(And on a bad to nonexistent network, it's golden to be absolutely sure that it still has what you looked at yesterday.)
I haven’t used maps.me much, but generally it’s been a good experience. Other than being told multiple times to make a right turn to keep going straight on a highway, it’s been nice having directions and search that is entirely client-side and blazing fast.
Using it has made me want to contribute to OSM to improve the quality. To hear that it’s changing owners and becoming more of a product is unfortunate.
I really wish there were more OpenStreetMaps based iOS apps as competition against Google maps.
Apple maps is mostly pretty decent in Australia these days (I actually find it better than Google Maps in Melbourne now) but would love to see more competition - especially open source or at least community driven mapping clients.
1: https://mapsme.substack.com/ 2: https://mapsme.substack.com/feed
Edit: realised the developers open sourced it.
Agree with author, existing map design in Maps.me is by far superior to any other app I've seen and biggest reason I keep using it.
Where do the data for these come from to begin with? I assume these can't be user generated.
For different more complex buildings there are different sources of data. For isntance the city of Berlin published 3D models as part of their OpenData initiative. https://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/planen/stadtmodelle/d...
In other regions there are data sets from universities or others available.
Some limited info also on https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/3D
that’s where I imagine Google’s commercial incentives to be hard to build, but I’m not really versed in the topic, so maybe that’s just an uneducated guess.
The bigger issues are likely going to the infrastructure for converting from the OSM format to the maps.me vector format, and hosting the download servers.
Right now it assumes a straight line be it on a road or up and down a mountain.
The most commonly used routers for bicycle touring – Brouter and Cycle.travel – certainly take elevation into account and helped me personally out all over the world. Brouter has a hiking mode, though it is still in beta, and perhaps there are hiking-specific elevation-aware routers out there.
Huh? On the OSM.org website you can use Graphhopper or OSRM routing engines. Both are not "tech demos", but proper real routing engines for real world use. They are hosted by volunteers, so you shouldn't rely on them to be free for everyone for ever. If you want to build a business on them, both OSRM & Graphhopper are open source & self hostable
For tracks with steepness up to 30°, the straight line distance will be off by max 15%. If it's steeper then that, the actual terrain is the thing that determines how fast you can move.
https://graphhopper.com/maps/ (click the dots near the bike icon for more profiles)
And the best is: everything is open source and you can easily tweak it according to your needs.
(I use it, but I see drawbacks)