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Comment by OGWhales | Hacker News Reader

An open-source alternative is Organic Maps: https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps

I ended up in the winding mountain roads near Saratoga without cell service, and though I had SF downloaded on Google Maps, I hadn't added the rest of the Bay. We decided we wanted to change our destination and realized we wouldn't have any further navigation only after canceling our current trip.

But then I remembered I had Organic Maps tucked away, ready to go, with a highly detailed map of California for offline navigation use.

Big thanks to Organic Maps for making me seem prepared and allowing me to recover gracefully from what could otherwise have been a somewhat annoying situation.

I had the same thing happen to me once while driving in very rural West Virginia on some mountain highway. Google Maps crashed or something and cleared out my route. This place was so desolate that I was concerned I wasn't going to find any gas station nearby to even ask for directions. I had just enough EDGE cell service to make a phone call but couldn't get any app to download data. I called up my friend, gave her my GPS position from a GPS Status app I had recently installed (Google maps wasn't giving me a lat and long), and wrote down the route. I downloaded a map covering the entire route home when I got to my destination and have been doing that ever since for long drives.

I almost miss the days of printing out MapQuest directions

I just have the entire US downloaded on OsmAnd+ now. I feel so much more relaxed knowing that I've got directions pretty much anywhere, always.

I always keep Organic Maps in reserve. Waze and Google Maps provide better navigation when they're working, but I've had them fail in places lacking mobile data even when I had offline maps downloaded to Google Maps.

I've never seen Organic Maps fail.

Here We Go’s (previously, Nokia Maps) offline support is as good as Organic Maps, and the routing is as good as Google/Apple. It runs on iOS and Android. CarPlay support is good. Haven’t tried android’s car ui.

I use it on my iPhone, but I’m rooting for OSM, long term.

I’d happily pay a bit to a company that put the money towards an open source, privacy preserving OSM app, and towards improving the upstream map data.

How is address lookup? That's the only bad thing about OSM based apps vs Google Maps in my region (rural Kentucky)

It worked well when I used it. It was bought by Microsoft and is suffering the usual degradation that comes with that, but it's still a good app.

I tend to agree with admaiora. And Organic Maps is a cool project. However I shared this post because it's the first OSM based map/routing project I've seen that actually has traffic data. I thought that was interesting. It is disappointing that the traffic info isn't open as well.

Does it have live traffic information? It looks quite polished but for an offline feature set OsmAnd~ has a lot more and is more established. OsmAnd does not (to my knowledge) have any live traffic info.

> It looks quite polished but for an offline feature set OsmAnd~ has a lot more and is more established

OrganicMaps is a fork of Maps.me, which is very well known among the general public: 55k ratings on the Apple Store and 50M downloads on the Play Store for Maps.me vs. 1.8k and 10M for OsmAnd.

Unfortunately a lot of people who use Maps.me/OrganicMaps don’t know that maps come from OSM, whereas with OsmAnd it’s clear right from the name.

> Unfortunately a lot of people who use Maps.me/OrganicMaps don’t know that maps come from OSM

OM has quite clear attribution, as required by ODBL license of OpenStreetMap data.

OsmAnd feels like an app for a map nerd, and I like it.

Compared to OsmAnd, Organic Maps is quite basic.

The advantage is that it does have a very streamlined UI, so if you just want to get to a map and navigate it's far more straightforward. You really need to spend some time to understand the "quirks" of how to use OsmAnd (a downside of its long feature list).

Unfortunately it does not have live traffic data like the app it is forked from, maps.me.

Hopefully they add it, but there aren’t many good open traffic projects that exist, so they’d need to rely on crowd sourced data like Magic Earth is doing and I’m not sure how well that would work.

> Receiving objects: 100% (556180/556180), 5.88 GiB | 3.33 MiB/s, done.

What the holy hell is going on with that repo? do they `git add local.osm.dump` or something? I mean, I was kidding but evidently not that crazy far off: https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/blob/master/data/...

I was expecting to find `git add release/organicmaps-1.0.apk` which is a super common "I've never used git before" antipattern

---

since I already paid the price, some `git archive HEAD | tar -tvf - | sort -k3 -n` coughed up

    -rw-rw-r-- root/root   1854526 2023-08-07 05:45 android/src/fdroid/play/listings/en-US/graphics/phone-screenshots/1.jpg
    -rw-rw-r-- root/root   1863096 2023-08-07 05:45 tools/shaders_compiler/linux/mali_compiler_es3/openglessl/libMali-T600_r11p0-00rel0.so
    -rw-rw-r-- root/root   2583640 2023-08-07 05:45 tools/shaders_compiler/linux/mali_compiler_es3/openglessl/libMali-T600_r12p0-00rel0.so
    -rw-rw-r-- root/root   3017640 2023-08-07 05:45 tools/shaders_compiler/linux/mali_compiler_es3/openglessl/libMali-T600_r13p0-00rel0.so
    -rw-rw-r-- root/root   3155104 2023-08-07 05:45 data/06_code2000.ttf
    -rw-rw-r-- root/root   3451900 2023-08-07 05:45 data/02_droidsans-fallback.ttf
    -rw-rw-r-- root/root   3676527 2023-08-07 05:45 data/packed_polygons.bin
    -rw-rw-r-- root/root   4696613 2023-08-07 05:45 software_renderer/default_font.cpp
    -rwxrwxr-x root/root   6131664 2023-08-07 05:45 tools/shaders_compiler/linux/glslangValidator
    -rwxrwxr-x root/root   6498904 2023-08-07 05:45 tools/shaders_compiler/macos/glslangValidator
    -rw-rw-r-- root/root   7315682 2023-08-07 05:45 3party/opening_hours/opening_hours_integration_tests/opening-count.lst
    -rw-rw-r-- root/root   8384030 2023-08-07 05:45 data/kml_test_data/test.kmz
    -rw-rw-r-- root/root   8757104 2023-08-07 05:45 data/WorldCoasts.mwm
    -rw-rw-r-- root/root 20,461,104 2023-08-07 05:45 tools/shaders_compiler/linux/mali_compiler_es3/openglessl/libMali-Gxx_r3p0-00rel0.so
    -rw-rw-r-- root/root 43,812,962 2023-08-07 05:45 data/World.mwm
    -rw-rw-r-- root/root 50,994,390 2023-08-07 05:45 data/dictionary.slf

and then, as I feared

    $ git log --format='%cs %s' -- data/World.mwm
    2023-07-13 [planet] New data from 230710.
    2023-06-05 [planet] New data from 230602.
    2023-05-08 [planet] New data from 230503.
    2023-04-02 [planet] New data from 230329.
    2023-03-01 [planet] New data from 230227.
    2023-02-13 [planet] New data from 230210.
    2023-01-24 [planet] New data from 230121.

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