Organic Maps
organicmaps.app
organicmaps.app
* Website, ethos: straightforward. “Old internet” vibes, love it. They seem very active, have a presence on every platform, very impressive
* The app seems very nice. Simple clear UI. Lots of features. I need to experiment for more than a few minutes but I get the impression it could replace Google Maps for me, especially because Google Maps has trouble doing things like showing road names or other key navigation tools
* On design and UI: the offline approach is very visible. I zoomed in to where I live and it starts downloading it. First, a great way to get a download (go there on the map, it downloads) but also compare how many steps it is to download offline for Google Maps compared to this (go to a special section of the app, download something in your screen’s aspect ratio, limited in size, give it a manual name, prompted to manually curate downloads, they expire when they could still be perfectly valid…) — this is significantly better design. It’s the same difference angainst other map apps. I have a hiking trail app (AllTrails) that advertises offline, but getting the data and keeping it is a complex series of steps and it’s impossible to know if it’s there until you’re in the wilderness and unable to download if it’s not. This is so much simpler… good simple design.
* It’s developed in Estonia! Estonia has a remarkable IT and software culture (I live there) and every so often you come across an absolute gem. This looks like one of them
Although now that I think about it, Google Maps lets me down on vacation because I'm in unfamiliar territory and I have no idea how to correct for the mistakes it makes. When I'm at home (in Amsterdam) it makes plenty of mistakes too, but I'm familiar with them and the are, so I can easily correct for it.
For example, Google really dislikes the Sarphatistraat for some reason. It's a bike street: basically a gigantic bike path that also allows cars, but bikes have right of way. It's one of the most important bike thoroughfares in Amsterdam, so of course you should always take it. But for some reason, Google always prefers to send me along the Stadhouderskade, which is part of the centrumring for cars, one of the major car thoroughfares, parallel to the Sarphatistraat, and it does have a separate bike path, but you're still in car fumes. Also, it's slightly longer.
There are plenty of other bike routes it doesn't know. I should really try to get used to using Organic Maps on my bike from now on. It's excellent on bike and pedestrian infrastructure, including hiking trails, things to see, etc. Many years ago when I first learned about OSM, I was amazed about the level of detail I got when I zoomed in on Artis, the Amsterdam Zoo. You don't get that kind of detail on Google Maps. I really should use it more.
Routing me through a park in the middle of the night, when it was closed, was one. Taking me on a detour to avoid a busy road, which turned to be on a farm track where the road surface was completely destroyed, was another.
My one wish was the OSM had a great app for discovering POI or reviews. Like something that can show me all the bookstores around but with a little extra human touch on if it's nice to sit at or mostly used books or something like this.
Note: it takes a little while to load all of Amsterdam.
Disclaimer: I'm the (main) dev of mapcomplete
I can't even describe the level of frustration this causes because I'm forced to use a non-existant street name for packages because otherwise no courier finds me.
The edit review system for Maps is really frustrating. Sometimes obscure things are approved instantly, and sometimes really important things are silently ignored.
I once attached a news article to my report, and they still denied it. I've also added street vendors like "coconut cakes lady" and had them approved.
This is a throwaway obviously since this basically 50% doxes me.
Would you be willing to elaborate a bit more on those privacy considerations?
(I guess what I'm struggling with is how cycling is different in this regard from other modalities.)
Edit: By the way, the massive difference in potential users compared to all other modes is also why it’s so hard to prioritise work on cycling inside Google.
In large part because cycling is fairly resistant to traffic jams
Whereas car drivers often use navigation all the time to see traffic and alternatives, which are non-issues for cyclists.
Thus even with many cyclists the information they collect is less.
There’s a labyrinth of explicit user agreements, all of which are strictly enforced, and then there are further layers of voluntary restrictions on top of that.
Yes, Google might collect location data even when you’re not using Maps (there are a lot of passionate, dedicated Timeline users), but you have to have that enabled, and even then the data can only be used in certain ways.
Maybe they fail to use it competently but it definitely collects a lot of data and attempting to stop it results in punitive reactions and disabling of features not needing it - and repeated badgering to permit Google to collect data again.
Google also collects data that I was initially unaware that it is collecting.
Of course that opt-in requirement was only the result of a hard-fought class action settlement.
Take this with a grain of salt as my recollection of the litigation is somewhat hazy. But I believe Google argued, even when a user opted out of location tracking, Google could still keep the data for its own uses. Ie opting out of location tracking simply meant the user didn't have access to their location history, it didn't show up on the phone (couldn't be searched by suspicious spouses) etc.
In a car you can charge your phone and battery usage for GPS isn't as much of a problem.
The Cowboy bike company have started using Google Maps for navigation in their app, which is a bummer: Before the change, the navigation would reliably take direct me to use roads that a bike friendly. Now it does just the opposite: it wants me to take big roads that are only friendly to cars.
Add that there’s no Android or Google Auto for bikes, you usually don’t charge while biking, etc. The people who do need to look up their cycling route typically do it beforehand, so in the end even in cycling-heavy regions there are very few using active navigation.
Delivery workers will in regions where that’s common, but they likely use company-provided or other local solutions.
hit is not how I use navigation apps when cycling. When I don't know the way, I start my navigation app (not gmaps) when I drive off, because
- I don't want to stop midway to check where I need to go, when I can do that when I get on the bike - I don't know where exactly to stop to check where to go - If I don't know where exactly I want to go, going roughly in the right direction probably means that I cycle longer than I need to
But at least it leaves room for other companies in some situations. What’s really sad is when there’s something that could only be done by Apple or Google, but it’s too small for either of them to actually do it.
As it is, offline routers such as Brouter and OSMAnd do a much better job, and it's pretty easy to convince other cyclists to use them.
Traffic jams are almost never an issue when biking - heavy car or bike traffic can slow you down, but by that point you have at least the same density as car traffic jams for data collection...
Lastly, is there anything stopping you from contributing potential innovations to open source alternatives?
OSM is much, much better but I guess Google refuses to pull OSM data because it would require them to open up their own maps.
For pedestrian, I’d disagree. At least in places I go, I find Google’s walking directions to be top notch.
The main thing I use Google Maps for is searching for stores etc in cities. I hope such information becomes easier to contribute to OSM.
Perhaps a Pokémon Go style game for map updates could work? StreetComplete[0] is good, but the rewards are kind of boring.
In large cities, the roads are the only routes, so pedestrians can go OK with GMaps. Anywhere else & Google is prone to send you waltzing down a main road instead of the paths marked for actual pedestrian use in my experience. Same for cycling.
Thanks for trying, at least: You weren’t able to shift leviathan, but there’s no shame in that.
(Unaffiliated happy user.)
I like that it allows you to choose between paved, gravel or any. Although gravel may still be too limited for some; mountainbikers like dirt tracks, and I've had Google Maps send me through loose sand that would probably require a BMX.
Oh, good spot. Fixed. OSM geocoding is better than it used to be - I used to just say "town" because streetnames were partial, but they're pretty good now.
If you have a start and endpoint that should use Sarphatistraat but don't, I'm all ears. (It's my site!)
Try "Feike de Boerlaan" to "Vondelpark". I would expect the trip to take the Czaar Peterstraat and then the Sarphatistraat, but instead it takes the Panamalaan, Zeeburgerdijk, Mauritskade, and only switches to the Sarphatistraat at the Weesperplein, which I think is also the point where the Sarphatistraat changes from a bike street to a regular street with a bike lane. Although it later switches back to bike street again yet the route stays on the bike street.
So I have no idea what's going on with that first part of the Sarphatistraat. It's a really nice route, yet all apps hate it.
cycle.travel's scoring for the two routes differs by 0.4% so it's very close. In OSM data terms, the challenge is that there's no particular special tagging for the Sarphatistraat - it just gets classed as a "cycleway", same as the route along Mauritskade. Plus there's a couple of very slight advantages for the Panamalaan (which is tagged as part of a designated longer-distance bike route) and the Zeeburgerdijk/Mauritskade (which are beside water so get a scenic uplift).
I might look at doing some Amsterdam-specific routing tweaks: I doubt the longer-distance bike route consideration should be relevant in this case, for example.
> I doubt the longer-distance bike route consideration should be relevant in this case
Or maybe it is, but then it's relevant for all routes involved, including the Sarphatistraat (which is short distance for cars, but long distance for bikes).
From my early tests, Organic Maps also sends you down dangerous routes, so I'll use cautiously.
If you bookmark streets that it's sending you down or avoiding inaccurately and check them out later on a computer, I bet you'll find that there's some OSM tagging issue. https://osm.org has a routing tool you can compare with as well. The OM Telegram channel is always willing to take reports on where OM routes are worse than OSM.org routes, and OSM channels are happy to help figure out what tagging issues there may be.
Cheers!
I wish there were a true flattest route app/website that prioritized quieter roads and more gentle slopes by default using existing terrain data instead of making users manually add a bunch of waypoints using their own knowledge in order to compare elevation profiles.
If you just want to try the routing, there's brouter-web too ;)
I tried a very basic task of getting driving directions to a specific address and that doesn't seem to be supported. For some streets, it will give me directions to the street as a whole, but that's not useful for long streets. Other streets don't seem to exist in the map.
Then I typed in a simple query: "ice cream", and the closest result listed was 4 miles away, but there are several ice cream shops within less than a mile. Other business listings are out of date or inaccurate.
The map is maintained by volunteers and in some areas there aren't any.
OM's only data source is OSM itself and their volunteer dev team is already overloaded so that's the only option there for now (basically the same as with OsmAnd) but if you really want an OpenStreetMaps based GPS app with full address support ASAP you can try Magic Earth in the meantime. It's not FOSS, but at least it's not Google.
As for ice cream, it's a matter of checking to see if those closer businesses are mapped correctly or not. If they're properly tagged as "ice cream" in OrganicMaps but not displaying in the correct order then that's an OM bug to report, but my guess is that they're not entered properly into OpenStreetMap to begin with. Both are free open source projects though so we can make things better ourselves without begging a big corporation to do it for us.
Cheers!
What sets Estonia's IT and software culture apart from other countries? What other Estonian software would you recommend?
It's actually developed by mostly Russian and Belorussian developers who live in Switzerland, New Zealand, Russia, and Belarus. Also, there are some significant contributions from residents of other countries, but none of them are from Estonia. Looks like the only Estonian thing is legal entity for doing business.
But nevertheless, I agree that Estonia is remarkable for its IT culture. I used to work with several Estonian colleagues, and they are great engineers whom I highly respect as professionals.
Downloaded the app because of this part of your comment.
It’s awesome!
At the moment I am in Cancún in Mexico, and one thing that was sad about Google maps is that it shows Playa Tortugas in the wrong part of the map, so when I booked our hotel thinking we were next to that beach it turned out that it was not correct.
Meanwhile, this app with the OSM data shows the correct location for Playa Tortugas.
Of course, there is probably a lot of other places in the world where OSM has something similarly wrong.
But I found it encouraging to see that OSM data is better than Google Maps in this case.
I just tell it what countries (or states / regions) to download, and it downloads them. Then, if cell coverage will be spotty, I tap the “work offline” slider, which disables traffic, but also means that search is on device and instant.
This is how literally every map program I used before MapQuest worked. I don’t understand why modern interfaces don’t support this.
For reference, California’s maps (including business listings) are 856 MB. The total map size for all the regions I have taken this phone to is under 3GB.
This is exactly how Organic Maps works. You don't _have_ to zoom in on every region you plan on visiting to download it, you can just go into the menu and select a whole country or parts of it.
I once met their lead designer (who had just changed to work at another FAANG) and… boy was that not a conversation I wanted to have. You know how designers like to say that users are always right? Well, not that guy. Literally 45 minutes of monologue, none of it about connectivity, being lost or unfamiliar languages. Just how people were wrong, wrong reviews wrong and how they couldn’t read information properly unless they had ‘a mission’. “What if the mission is finding their way in a new city where they don’t have connection?” Didn’t care. Not a real mission.
A little later, he was told that the company he was now working for throttled wifi every Wednesday to encourage empathy. That was not a conversation he wanted to have.
> throttled wifi every Wednesday to encourage empathy
As much as slow internet hampered my productivity, I used to have 15 mbit/s download speed until very recently (Germany is behind developing countries, of course, in terms of anything internet), it was good to experience.
Before that, when I was living in the countryside, I had 500 KB/s.
I know exactly how painful downloading 10, 100, 1000MB is, and I try to make everything I do load on GPRS with reasonable speed. My website, much like HN, loads on a 64 kbit/s mobile internet "connection".
Of course vodafone's website to recharge prepaid phones takes 20+ minutes (yes) to load on 64 kbit/s internet.
Developers should use old hardware and slow connections, they would make much better apps.
If the whole industry had been stuck on hardware and bandwidth from 10 years ago, that most likely wouldn't be a problem.
I do still notice upstream improvements though. Both those old 2mbit and 8mbit connections were 256kbit up, and I currently have "up to 17mbit" which is [quick check of router logs] ~11mbit ATM - that can be limiting for backups or when wanting to share video or HQ photos with a large group. So the FTTP upgrade _might_ be justifiable as more than pure luxury.
There are old people in my village complaining that the 200 Mbps connection is "horrific" because there is something wrong with their equipment/setup so it cuts out often and leads to buffering on their IPTV.
I once had a 100+ mbit comcast connection that couldn’t reliably do 2mbit in the evenings.
Or if you have Steam, and every game wants to push 10-60 GB (!) updates every few weeks - this becomes a "leave the pc on for a few nights" ordeal. With 100 mbit/s, you give it 50mbit/s and an hour and everything is updated - all while you can keep working because you still have 50 mbit/s left.
Or if you have to quickly set up a Windows VM or other VM - not only is the download the longest process of setting it up, it will also happily update forever and hog the network.
Now assume you have 2-3 devices in the network, all doing backups, downloads, auto updates, and your 10-15 mbit/s connection is gone.
Good luck doing a backup, because residential 15 mbit/s download means 1.5mbit/s upload - you cant back up anything. Or stream your desktop. Or upload images in any reasonable amount of time.
Our users in less digitally connected countries were insanely patient. The main problem was less the time than the cost, actually. The app required updates that were enormous. The cost to download them using the most common pay-as-you-go services in India represented a month of the local salary for day laborers… That information got hammered until developers learned to be more parsimonious.
I never heard anyone suggest that FAANG engineers had to forgo their monthly wage to download the test version of the app, but that probably would have triggered their empathy a little too much.
Apple Maps is even worse because it has no offline mode at all.
In any case, before traveling I try to download the offline maps in HERE wego too.
But the fact that I can download a map that has all of New York City, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Delaware, and sizable chunks of 4 other states in that area for 890 MB is pretty awesome. Especially when it comes with full driving directions, business information including hours and the search capabilities? And it'll keep it up to date periodically? I'll take that win.
All of that impossible if I didn’t have signal to start the walking route.
I definitely can not do this with Google Maps.
Too bad their navigation does not care about traffic outside of Czechia. You can still use them for directions in a car, but no traffic jam avoidance.
This is the first come I come across Organic Maps but I do use OSMAnd. I'm wondering how the two compare and would love to hear more about the use cases you have for each of them.
OSMand is slightly too powerful for everyday use, organic maps is the perfect good-enough, less-is-better example.
Those were a few differences I noticed.
Moving the map is much faster in OM than in OSMAnd. I hope that OSMAnd study the code of OM.
The visualization in OM is much nicer. Another thing to copy.
OM is extremely better at displaying POIs and their information. Again, copy it.
Despite the claims it seems that OM does not show walking and cycling routes. OSMAnd shows them with their name, that matches the one you see on signposts along the routes.
OM does not seem to have a way to record a route and save it as gpx. OSMAnd does that.
OM does not seem to have a way to place markers on the map. I use them to plan new routes for biking, then I follow the markers. Navigation would bring me where it wants to go through, not where I want to.
OM is less than half the size of OSMAnd but it's still 58 MB. I wonder why these mapping apps must be so large.
Having to dowload all the maps again is very bad. I wish there is a way to share them among apps but I think that Android makes it impossible, unless we want to use a folder on an external storage (SD card) or root the phone or whatever.
I'll keep using OSMAnd because of recording, markers and routes. However I might recommend OM to friends that only need a replacement for Google Maps.
My main issue is that there should be a way to say, “Keep this journey on screen until I explicitly delete it, with a confirmation model.” I’m assuming that’s what “Pin it” is meant to do, but in practice, I occasionally see the path I last searched when I reopen my phone and map; I never see a pinned journey again if anything happens: rotate the phone, a quick switch to another app, the screen goes dark…
Too many developers just assume their users are on this year's phones and supercomputer specced desktops with three 4K 27 inch monitors and write their software to perform well on those systems.
I think I need to change my ways
Very simple answer - they want to know everything you do online. As Google Maps is provided for free, you are the product. Convenience of the product (you) is not a priority whatsoever.
> designers like to say that users are always right?
It's just smoke and mirrors. Unfortunately IT breeds a number of people who have ignorant position they have the right to tell people how they should interact, conveniently forgetting the service will be used by all groups of people, not just IT geeks.
Do you honestly think Google is looking at the number of maps users that go offline and saying, “We absolutely need their data!” rather than “Eh, not worth rearchitecting everything for.”
Not to mention they have done a lot for it even if it’s not perfect. There’s a dedicated team doing their best with it. It’s just not worth giving a lot of attention and resources.
I’m actually not even sure what the complaint is actually about since I don’t use offline myself, but I know that Google Maps is a massive app with tons of teams all working on a myriad of features in parallel and a huge dependency tree. So I’m not surprised at all if there are a bunch of features with online assumptions baked in.
1. Offline maps don't actually download all the destinations in the mapped area
2. Google maps is bad at displaying densely packed businesses - this is an issue online as well
3. No offline bike or transit directions
These are the 3 I checked immediately in organic maps, and all work significantly better there.
I think your point is reasonable, but I'm also a very high income person who thinks nothing of buying data plans when traveling internationally and has an unlimited plan in the US. I routinely meet people while traveling who have the opposite set of financial priorities, organic maps is probably a great choice for them.
Anything can be done. But you can't do everything.
One real reason could be ads. Unless they are pre-loading ads for offline display than offline browsing will not produce revenue.
Eventually I found out why: There was some lead dev on Maps, who refused to allow new imports of UK post code data because he thought they were "wrong". They were seeing data with multiple post codes for the same building!
For the record: This is valid in the UK, as there's a maximum number of households per post code or something like that.
Not sure how that ended eventually, left a few years ago, but I just checked and those post codes now exist.
---
[1] For example even a not-very-long street I used to live on, Alma Terrace in York, has three postcodes: YO10 4DJ on one side of most of it, YO10 4DL on the other side of that, and YO10 4DQ for both sides of the part between that and Fulford Road. I suspect from the street layout that the third code is due to that part of the road being added later, or originally not having anything on it needing a postcode.
[0]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/St._Geor...
Further, as mentioned, there is a limited amount of "number" that can be associated with any one postcode (currently 100 for new codes, but some legacy postcodes may have more), so for a long enough street, the postcode will change at some point - for example Chepstow Road, Newport changes from NP182LU to NP182LX at some point. If you have more addresses in a single building than the 100 limit, then the postcode indeed changes within the building.
This is quite useful as the standard way of entering a shipping address is you type your postcode, and then select the exact address from a dropdown, and there's a natural limit on how long you have to scroll to find yours.
There are usually 10 to 30 — if you work in a large office it probably has a postcode just for that office, for houses you share with 20-30 or so others. (Very large businesses might have separate postcodes for individual departments, e.g. an electric utility probably has one for handling bills, and another for everything else.)
"What's the postcode please?"
"N1C 4DN"
"And the number?"
"12"
Now they have the whole address. Satnav can take "N1C 4DN" and be very close: https://goo.gl/maps/sGR5XXhmUsLmD2UBA (not the best polygon, should be Handyside Street.)
N1 is innermost, yes, but N2 onwards are sorted alphabetically, and N1C isn't really more "inner" than N1.
(8 if you scroll down)
The only issues are what OC mentioned: some people don’t know a large building (50+ flats) can have several codes, and they are weekly updates because… ::magic dust:: construction!
The worst? Dubai: three inconsistent systems of varying length without any sense, standard, or redeeming features. The city road network is apparently even worse, so I guess those things work hand in hand?
The funniest? One person once joked that people in Ireland were not using postcodes, just the name of the nearby pub, which can get confusing as they often have the same name, so you also have to say the name of the second nearest pub…
I thought was funny, but I wasn’t sure that was a joke. Apparently, that was still true at the time? I saw a lot of discussion about “Introducing PostCodes in Ireland” and avoided those meetings so as not to sound clueless. We used Google Maps for a while during the transition.
Theres a difference between a system and embodied knowledge. I did a lot of work with systems which used Irish addresses early in my career.
"An Post", pre-eircode operated off a traditional hierarchical address system. Where there were "Counties" a real political boundary, "Post towns" which were usually big market towns but the location of a major sorting office, "Localities" (sometimes more than one) which were geographically undefined (we tried) at worst areas and some combination of street and buildings. The hierarchy was not strictly defined, it was a bit hungover.
My own address can be a combination of: <House number> <Street>, <Post town> <House number> <Street>, <Locality>+, <Post town>
Most of these were optional. The "Pub" thing is a testament to how awesome the staff at An Post are at just getting a letter to a door. If you needed to send a letter to "Mary O'Shea" who you knew lived in Kerry and near "Paudie O'Sheas pub" you can bet that if you put "Mary O'Shea, Near Paudie O'Shea's Pub, Kerry" you can bet the letter would get to Kerry, someone in Kerry would know Paudie O'Sheas is in Ventry, Send it on to Dingle and he postie doing the rounds in Ventry would be like "Ah right, thats for Mary" and the only catch being: about 60% of the Female population of West Kerry are probably called some combination of "Mary" and "O'Shea".
I'd imagine logistics companies were dancing for joy with every house having a unique post-code.
So, with users being actively taught not to provide it, of course no (reasonable? :-D) person is going to know it and thus provide it to make it available for use
They are using a random street name that no one else uses and no matter how many times I report it, they don't change it. It also doesn't matter that I'm a local guide with many, many edits.
https://www.post.japanpost.jp/cgi-zip/zipcode.php?pref=13&ci...
Search for 170-0013 for the beginning of the madness. At least google accepted this one.
This is on my mind a lot when I see speculation about why google (or other large organizations) does various things. It's just a bunch of human beings with egos and biases and blind spots and imperfect information. Mistakes are made.
Malice requires intent to do wrong, either for some selfish benefit or just to be cruel. That's not what's going on in this story, it's "just" ignorance.
It's mindblowing how they don't set meaningful defaults with all that mountain of data they have.
"This store is busiest at 6pm". "This area is less busy than usual". "There's a 5 minute delay ahead, but you're still on the fastest route".
All of that comes from data generated by online users. An offline user isn't providing value to Google, so why would they invest in those users?
- Full searching and POI details including hours, etc. - Full routing (no traffic of course, but possibly expected traffic? I'm not sure) - Freeform region selection, overlapping regions, etc.
They gradually increased the radius to bring hood and well documented in most of California, then some of the US coastline. I’m not sure where they are now, but I’d be surprised if they had basic things like public transport information, Nike lanes where I am. It’s never been a priority for Apple to serve an international audience.
You'll be happy to know that the Louvre is now marked as closed on Tuesdays, has a 94% positive rating, and its own 3D model
In France, Apple Maps has
- country-wide bike routing (accounts for the size of road, elevation, and prefers bike lanes where present)
- trains and busses (I can't say with certainty that every local bus will be present but the trains are)
- Paris will have detailed bus and bike lane markings directly on the map
I've attached a screenshot of public transit navigation in the greater Paris region:
Apple Maps: https://i.imgur.com/9n61j0F.jpg
Google Maps: https://i.imgur.com/uHHkYVZ.jpg
Money. Same reason they won't show you your location on a map unless you turn on location tracking, even though there's a perfectly good GPS in the phone.
You know how designers like to say that users are always right? Well, not that guy.
I have had similar conversations with leads from Google News & Scholar. My impression is that when those people go to a conference or whatever they're they're to promote the company's outlook, not to listen. In the case of the news guy he when I pointed out some logical flaws in his argument (about why they didn't offer a way of sorting by date), he just switched to nodding while staring off into space and refusing to make eye contact, so he could give the appearance of listening without engaging further.
Perhaps Google's mapping business isn't so much showing maps but helping local businesses get found, rated, reviewed... (restaurants,shops etc).
Not only that, you can search for a toilet almost anywhere, including in the middle of nowhere in central Asia, and it found one!
From what I see, https://organicmaps.app/ is asking for donations ( https://organicmaps.app/donate/ )
The project runs on our own money and users' donations.
With enough support, we can replace Google Maps in most use-cases in the future. Because we are listening to our users, and are actively using Organic Maps ourselves.
[1] https://f-droid.org/packages/de.westnordost.streetcomplete.e...
For example, I will save a waypoint titled "RLPGW" or "RRPGW" to specify at intersections that the road to my left or right is paved and ends in a give-way sign. Or "DWL" or "DWR" for drinking water to my left or to my right, respectively, etc. Then, when I get home, I just connect the Garmin to my laptop and comfortably upload everything using the powerful JOSM editor.
OSM's philosophy on routing is you should not try to fix routing by trying to translate your opinion that it is unsafe to ride on the street into to tags. Instead the routing algorithm should improve or the data should improve to the point where an alternative route can be suggested based on data.
Where's the feedback to the routing algorithm? I thought graphhopper / OSM was sent to users without feedback.
Unfortunately that minimalism comes with some downsides. While OM has a great metro map, it doesn't show bus lines (which would probably blot the map size quite a bit), making it unfortunately unusable for my use case.
- Organic Maps is minimalistic, easy, great for what it does.
- OsmAnd does everything. Whenever I want to do something more advanced that is not in Organic Maps (typically I like the GPX stuff for hiking, or the ski maps, etc), I turn to OsmAnd.
I just need both.
But bus routes are a harder problem to integrate, especially in larger cities. In Paris, there are more than 200 bus routes (more than 1000 including the greater suburbs), map readability would take a probably big hit if they were displayed on the map, or at least it would require a lot of care to do it right. A some larger cities also have a night service for busses, with routes differing from the day busses, handling those properly is also an issue.
Here is the entry point to the current subways validator with wiki links at the bottom: https://cdn.organicmaps.app/subway/
But with Organic Maps, I find it has all the trails (at least on two separate one and a half month hiking trips in Andorra), and since they're all included with the base data, you can mix and match trails and do whatever you want.
Pain points: The search isn't so great, there's a lack of names for trails and no real way to tell the "grade" of a trail. It could be a super easy walking path or some barely marked scramble.
But overall I love it and it's way better than the commercial hiking offerings (WikiLoc, AllTrails, etc)
If trails have names in osm.org but names are not present in OM, please let us know, it's a bug.
If you're using imperial units, you can also quickly estimate difficulty by doing the following:
- take the total elevation change, in hundreds of feet, eg 900ft = 9 * 100ft
- take the total distance, in tenths of a mile, eg 2.1 mi = 21 * .1 mi
- divide the elevation by the length and convert to a percentage: 9/21 ~ 43%
- grades are like so:
0-40%: relatively easy
40-70%: moderately big elevation, may be hard to sustain
70-100%: steep terrain, may involve some scrambling
>100%: very steep, technical terrain. Sometimes involves ladders or a static line in particularly steep sections
For example, there's a pretty lengthy trail near me called Shining Creek, that's very sustained, but I wouldn't call it steep. It's got 2300ft of elevation change over 3.9mi, which corresponds to a 58% steepness, aka the upper end of a moderately difficulty hike if sustained.
Doing true exposure on a per-segment basis would mean a new key I think, not to mention how much additional data this would require for the maps. If you're worried about the terrain to the point of needing highly detailed topo maps, it's probably better to get one of the many such maps in AllTrails (though the app is rather clunky)
As with all things outdoors, technology will only ever get you so far. Situational awareness and emergency preparedness are skills you should have if you're going somewhere you've never been before. Always prepare for more than you expect, and if you're not sure that you're prepared once you get to somewhere sketchy, it's always best to turn back.
I used it extensively this year, mainly because it has hiking and bicycle paths that are not marked at all on Google Maps.
It works off-line. This is so valuable to me, especially when hiking.
One time I was lost deep in a mountain/forest, and the app found a GPS signal to show my location and direction, saving me from unexpectedly spending the night (for which I was not prepared). I suppose any map app is capable of this, but I was so glad.
It's also capable of giving directions.
And, unlike Google Maps, I can trust that the app is not collecting and misusing my location data.
Of course, as an open-source project, there are some rough edges. I have GMaps installed just in case, and on a few occasions I had to resort to using it. But I was pleasantly surprised by Organic Maps, so far it's my favorite mobile app for maps.
Such help is really welcome!
If you are on Android then I recommend StreetComplete which asks questions and edits OSM based on answers (disclaimer: I wrote parts of it)
(Organic Maps has some limited editing capability, but for example you will not change road geometry or add forest area with it)
See https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.westnordost...
(initially it was bundled in one app, later it turned out that Google was lying about license of arcore repository, see https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/4289 )
The UI is tremendous. Takes a while for it to make longer routes, but that could be my old phone's fault. One thing I don't like - it doesn't seem to be possible to save a route. You can save places, but not routes. Especially for hiking trips that have very particular manually-selected paths and/or lots of destinations, it would be nice to be able to save a route to a list, tap it, and have that route show up immediately instead of waiting for it to calculate.
Also, a warning about OSM in general: Do not blindly trust it. Map data can be very out of date in some places, especially on remote-ish hiking trails.
Also, for the love of everything that's holy, do the same with Apple/Google Maps. They can be horribly wrong to the point of being actively dangerous.
Especially when for example bridge was destroyed hours/days ago.
What's the right answer here?
Essentially, check before hand and if possible, use maps fit for purpose.
(E.g. Switzerland has nice public topo maps which are usually more accurate than Maps/OSM. They're available in SwissTopo app. The dedicated app also tends to show closed routes more accurately.)
And double check with local info boards about current state (many regions have websites or dedicated meterological organizations that will post recommendations and closed routes).
Do not ignore reality.
Do not drive around signs announcing that bridge is closed, for an example.
Why not? That seems like a weird stance. Is your desire to hurt Google so strong that you are not willing to help potentially thousands of people?
Not the same person: my time is limited, so I volunteer to fix data only when it is released on open license allowing me and others to use it.
Otherwise I expect to be paid.
In general, I need more than "it will help others" to spend time on something, I am already spending too much time on things like this.
OSM in particular doesn't use third party registries and surveys due to the licensing issues, relying on volunteer work instead, and has a participation-based culture (aka "if you want to have a map of something, make it yourself"). Armchair mappers are using satellite photos and publicly available info, while field volunteers map everything that cannot be seen from above. Both are important. Obviously your trails have to be visited by someone participating in the community for them to appear or be updated on the map. You could be the one, for example.
OSM is also highly chaotic like Wikipedia, and the quality heavily depends on the local community, so always research the situation in the area you intend to visit. For example there's a lot of unreliable poor quality machine work in Latin America in OSM, even in populated areas. No idea why Portuguese/Spanish-speaking communities are letting this fly.
Amazing work, loving this app
I’ll make sure to report it in the future!
[1]: https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/252814925 [2]: https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/276271393
At the moment I only really use Google Maps to check opening times of certain shops.
Also way better routing for cyclists than Google maps.
And by far the easiest way to do this, if you have an Android phone, is to use the beautiful StreetComplete app: https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/#readme
At that point I'd rather open up Google and give them the data point that someone is interested in this store at this time (to make these crowdedness plots) than provide Facebook with my data ._.
If they have an own website, sure, but a Facebook page? I'm not whitelisting those IP addresses for my browser to be able to visit that.
This is why I always add the website as the most important field for a POI btw: easy to click through, always up-to-date opening hours. They're very often out of date on OSM because the shop owners only supply that info to google and call it good.
> This is why I always add the website as the most important field for a POI
It has been over a decade now since most physical-retail businesses began giving up on maintaining their own websites, using only Facebook pages instead, unless they are part of large chains.
This was indeed a trend a few years ago, but it is not true anymore, in my personal experience. Even tiny shops, if they are only a bit more technologically knowledgable than average, tend to have their own web page.
Maybe a US thing? Where I live, less than 10% of the shops have a Facebook page, and I'd expect maybe 10% of those have up to date reliable information.
I love Organic Maps, but when I try to search, I think I find what I'm looking for about 1 out of 5 times.
Searching the schema works just fine, it's just hard to find typos and support natural language queries. Google set the standard for searching, we need to remember that we're literally comparing a volunteer project against the world leader in search who also has the money to employ a hundred distributed servers for every query versus the offline on-your-phone search of something like OsmAnd.
Borders is one of the few things that need to be different between countries (county, municipality, city group (Kreisstadt), city region (Städteregion), etc.: every country has a different hierarchy of subdivisions which OSM translates to numeric admin_level values). Some countries use the abbreviated street names like St. John St., others have the convention to expand Saint John Street. Different road types have different rules (is a tractor allowed on rural motorways? In Uganda maybe yes). These handful of things which you'll need to set per country are defined on the wiki, but 99% is the same. Particularly for searching where the name and POI tags like shop=x are the most relevant: after normalising the street name abbreviations, you're pretty much good.
The addresses in particular are heavily dependent on the country and region. And of course OSM is a subject for controversies and stupid edit wars as well, just like Wikipedia.
I'm not criticizing OSM, mind you - just explaining why it's hard to implement a good search in it; you have to constantly adapt your application to what people actually use in the map in different countries/language communities.
Also, in the same city, route planning (by bus) did not work. Which was a bit funny to me, when I lived there 10 years ago the city refused to make the bus data available to Google Maps, so back then it was Google Maps that also could not do route planning there.
I like Organic Maps, with its offline functionality it provides a layer of reliability that Google Maps is missing - and my phone has no Gapps anyway. But it's a pity neither search nor navigation is close to what Google can offer.
That is not huge problem. You can support just the most common schema. Except some rare cases it will not have real bad consequences (note: as OSM mapper I put quite significant effort into getting rid of some pointless duplicates, but I do not consider it a blocker for data use).
The problem is that making search working well with descriptive, incomplete, typoed, confused input is really, really, really hard. Google Maps search is the most amazing Google project for me.
Edit: also https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/5891
Acastus-Photon (An online address/POI search for navigation apps) https://f-droid.org/packages/name.gdr.acastus_photon/
OsmAnd is free-as-in-beer if you want it to be, though imo that's not fair to the developers unless you truly can't afford a few euros (which can be, no judgement, especially in countries with lower incomes or high income disparity).
On their github README.md.
"In November 2014, Maps.me was acquired by Mail.Ru Group for 542 million Russian rubles"
"On November 2, 2020, Daegu Limited bought Maps.me for 1.56 Billion Russian rubles. Daegu Limited is announced to be part of Parity.com Group"
"Parity.com Group is privately held and is headquartered in Zug, Switzerland. It was founded by Viktor Mangazeev and Alex Grebnev in 2018. "
https://markets.ft.com/data/announce/detail?dockey=1323-1473...
If you like Maps.me, you should move to Organic Maps. It's a fork, just strictly better.
I'll just add that for me OrganicMaps is much better than current Maps.me which is getting worse and worse after it was sold to some Korean (or Chinese, don't remember now) company.
The UI is much simpler and in recent months you can really start to see that OrganicMaps is becoming more detailed. I used to check from time to time the difference between Maps.me and OM and and it used to not be much of a difference, but now you have: more POIs (point of interests, like physiotherapist, specific kind of shops, etc.), better rendering of walls, fences, cliffs, embankments, hedges, better rendering of parking places (very recent update!), and more!
If anyone knows android dev maybe you can checkout one of these smaller issues they're having.
- OsmAnd's flags feel more ephemeral, whereas in Organic Maps I'm just adding them as regular bookmarks under "My places", which make them harder to distinguish from bookmarks I want to keep long-term.
- Bus lines and stops are pretty useful if you're taking the bus somewhere unfamiliar.
But those are pretty minor; I've still switched to Organic Maps just because it's so much easier to use (ironically, that probably is because it has fewer features).
Also, I just keep both installed just in case, so I can always fall back to OsmAnd :)
You can manually export it but it gives me a little stress that one day I'll just lose my phone after not having exported for a while.
At the very minimum it would be great to auto export the file every X days to a specified location so I can auto sync it with syncthing or something.
But a nice setup would also be supporting webdav (nextcloud) to just drop the file there automatically.
This is the related issue but doesn't have too much traction. https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/622
- Configurable POIs. In Organic Maps I can show POIs for a few common categories, but many are missing (for example EV charging stations). And I can only show one type of POI at once on the map. In OSMand, I can show POIs for "drinking water, EV charging stations and public bathrooms" at the same time.
- Track recording and especially live tracking (OSMand has a very nice plugin for that, which works with services like Traccar).
Which is fine. I love both, I just use the one that fits the use-case at hand :-)
https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/issues/15058
Organic Maps does not, and should be supported instead.
And even if it sounds harsh, their initial suggestion is always valid: use another software, or fork it and maintain your own version. It's GPLv3.
I agree with you 100%. The issue of client tracking is completely orthogonal, as a client-generated and client-reported identifier does nothing to avoid these abuses. All it does is allow them to track users of the software.
> It appears that this spyware tracking feature was added by @vshcherb (Victor Shcherb) back in 2015 and has been leaking users' data and travel history (via client IP geolocation) to the OSMAnd index server ever since.
but to be honest there was a hidden tracking feature for many years and he only called it by its name and didn't get aggressive in any form.
The original author didn't acknowledge a problem and all his messages were hidden (or are it at least now) to logged out users. This doesn't seem like a healthy discussion, but I disagree that not the reporter, but the other users/developers seem to be aggressive. They deny any problem and don't appear to understand or care to understand the "allegations" brought forward.
He insinuates that this is a feature to track users and acts in this respect in "bad faith", but assuming the worst (it saved a unique identifier and time of use and ips...) which is understandable in this situation.
For everyone reading my reply until now, but didn't read the github thread - the issue is fixed and you can now disable the identifier in the settings.
Thanks for reading, sorry for the rant, have a nice day :)
The alleged "calling by its name" is the whole point. You are already judging something as ill-intended from minute 0. That's pretty aggressive in my book.
I was too, at first, but then I saw that this person refused to acknowledge any misunderstanding on their part or engage with any of the clarifications provided, and continued to spout their one-dimensional rhetoric. There's no "misinformation" marker on Github afaik, so unfortunately the "abusive" marker seems to be the tool available to fade those out.
I'd absolutely find this excessive if this was about a proprietary product, but I'm in support of FOSS developers standing up for themselves and drawing a boundary on how much mental energy they're willing spend on people like this.
Apps like Waze have fallen for the "AI" meme where they take a limited data set of people driving and extrapolate it.
"It's 0.2 seconds quicker if you take a hard right across 4 lanes of traffic in rush hour" it thinks, so it takes you off the main road and onto a side street. You are then stuck there for 10 minutes because you can't turn right across 4 lanes of traffic in rush hour.
I've tested the import / export function, and it looks like we can transfer all her bookmarks over and preserve the colour information...
The only thing we're missing is an auto-backup function to store the bookmarks online. She's not a techie, so it has to be free from settings and automatically enabled.
As soon as that feature is added you'll have another user!
Feature Request: Add a Thrilling style mode for navigation so I can map fun drives without using a real computer. https://help.tomtom.com/hc/en-us/articles/10428741608466-Rou...
Here is more information about the variables they use to figure out the most thrilling route -- https://developer.tomtom.com/blog/build-different/thrills-an...
OsmAnd also has many different navigation profile options, you might try customizing that to get what you want. Organic Maps focuses on what the bulk of people need to navigate decently, so that the end result is simple and usable for everyone even if it's not the most feature-packed.
I wish they added warnings for speed limits though. They do this only when there is a speed camera, but not generally. The PR is here: https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/pull/5233
My city is comprised of several islands, and there's relatively large bodies of water between them (over 100 metres), but this map shows those large water bodies as narrow (1 or 2 metre) river-like things.
I understand this might be the problem of the underlying data source, and not the app itself.
(For what it's worth, both Google and Apple maps correctly displays the islands and water bodies).
And when I zoomed into my city, it downloaded the map information.
To be fair, the requesting of these permissions doesn't mean the other app highlighted is "spying on you." Some of those permissions are required for certain features. Not everyone will be comfortable with that, and that's ok. But I think it's unfair to suggest that the intention is spying.
The one thing that makes me pull up gmaps now is public transport routing in new cities where the information boards in bus/tram/metro stations doesnt help me figure out the routes.
Also, for driving OM offers less hand-holding than GM so it took a while to get used to that, but it made me a better driver. I now use OM to get an idea of which way to go and thn rely on public signs to drive. It's been really amazing.
OM also just wins hands down when I'm hiking and cycling. I've donatrd to the project each year but every once in a while I'm just so happy with itthat I feel bad for not being able to afford giving them more money.
With file access limitation with recent android versions, I can't just use foldersync or syncthing on the bookmarks.
We were hiking the Slovenian Mountain Trail. What a beauty!
The reason Mapy.cz has all the trails is because they also use open street maps.
Overall it has a nicer attention to detail, for example dashed lines stay in one place as you zoom in/out instead of swimming around and I like the selection of downloaded areas better on Mapy.cz (it has flags next to country names and downloading a new area takes one tap instead of two or three) though it still feels flimsy.
Being a non google user I have used Organic maps for years. I have tried all the open source others but they dont compete for me.
I install E/OS and lineage with Organic maps on all my phones and on all phones my family use.
Its because I am old that I continually get confused with (route to) and (route from) selection when working out my destination route. I always have to do it twice.
There is a selection of voices but I only like one voice. I generally dont need a voice to direct me, I only need to have a quick glimpse at the screen every now and then
I walk/ramble a lot and use .gpx files in organic maps for rambling routes. I also download .gpx files from rambling websites when looking for new rambling routes.
Started using it in Montenegro for driving as well since I didn’t want to pay a fortune for roaming and all other offline apps or even GPS device did not have the country available offline.
Automatic updates are planned https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/5679
Thanks for the link I'll keep an eye on that issue.
Google often takes longer than that to process edits...
It's less powerful, but not overloaded UI-wise.
(Where "powerful" means things like travel guides and bus lines, but also things like being able to set up different profiles with the ability to customise the icon indicating your position per profile.)
If I want to switch to another app, Android asks me to authenticate, I don't know why google maps doesn't work the same way.
The no ads bit is nice.
I don't think I properly understand the "no tracking" claim. I don't want to be tracked by miscellaneous third parties, but designers and engineers should absolutely be instrumenting the app so they can understand user behavior via empirical means.
I saw another comment mention they can update OSM via this app. That is def cool and I wish more apps supported that use case and educated users about it.
The topo map leaves something to be desired. Once you go Gaia Topo, it's hard to look at other companies' topo maps.
If you want to run UI/UX tests/experiments on users, just ask them (and maybe offer incentives to participate?).
IMO, brouter generates the best routes for bicycling with lots of options to customize for what kind of riding you want to do (road, trekking, gravel, recreational, commuting, safe and quiet vs. quick, etc.).
Right now I use brouter-web on my iPhone but it's really hard to use since the UI is really small and it's very simple to accidentally place a waypoint. After that, I send the GPX file to my bike computer.
To reach perfection for me, it would need:
- to allow storing my POIs in some sync-able location (e.g. Nextcloud folder)
- to improve rendering and reach same level of beauty as mapy.cz / Windy has...
It's always either super out of date, or missing details and nice features like reviews, photos and advanced integrations like gmaps integration with public transport.
That's without mentioning the clearly worse routing Algorithms.
These issues mostly stem from a lack of data, but there are many related to the way the OSM project sees itself, and concepts like point of interest.
Let's see what comes from the new big tech alliance against gmaps.
I hope a future update might add that functionality (bus, train, and light rail schedules, routes, and real time arrival data)
the good thing about OpenStreetMap is that if something is missing, you can add it in 1 minute :)
I checked out the map, works great even outside of the US/EU. I checked my favorite local food chain, routes are very good. I found one missing, followed the lead to OSM and updated the venue data. Things gets interesting when you can edit the data behind the scenes! Kudos to people behind both projects!
It's always picking interesting routes and has never led me astray.
Also, if you go in a different direction, it automatically remaps from where you are at the moment to where you told it you wanted to go, unlike Google maps and most others that I've used.
Finally someone thinks of the general population who doesn't buy the latest gadget just to keep up. A 3-4-5 year old smartphone should be perfectly adequate if devs actually thought of supporting the "normal phones".
OSM supports microsoft satellite maps as a layer - any way to add it to organic maps too? I do like the simpler interface.
One of my most used and loved apps is a hiking app that supports saving different types of maps offline, and I use the satellite views quite a bit.
OrganicMaps is Android and iOS offline maps for travel without trackers or ads - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27576882 - June 2021 (116 comments)
Edit: I was mistaken, the option is not available while maps are downloading. It is perfect!
I saw this while preparing for the return leg of an airplane trip, so I downloaded the offline maps and was able to follow my flight via GPS - made things much more interesting.
Tried to plan a route, couldn’t figure out how to see step by step directions in a list view which is supported by almost every map. Is that possible?
All the others have turned into commercials, weighed down my ad's.
(That said, anyone hiking in the wild should always consider a paper map in addition to a digital one. Especially in mountainous terrain.)
https://9to5mac.com/2023/06/07/ios-17-offline-maps-in-apple-...
I know this is a limit of the underlying OSM data it uses.
thanks to all those involved on making a wonderful application