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Comment by baz00 | Hacker News Reader

I cannot really express how much praise I have for Organic Maps. It has got me out of the mire a couple of times due to the complete offline capability and paper maps being completely wrong. The OSM base layer is better than a lot of native maps out there.

Not only that, you can search for a toilet almost anywhere, including in the middle of nowhere in central Asia, and it found one!

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As a cyclist, I use Organic Maps to add drinking water sources, shelters, repair stations, fix biking routes and lanes using just a mobile app to update OSM when I am out and about.

Thanks for that! Editing the map on a bike can be a hassle though. I tried many options and came to conclusion that a 360° camera on the helmet and a physical Bluetooth button to take audio notes is the easiest possible setup.

If you both don't know about StreetComplete yet, you should check it out: https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/#readme

Yeah I'm often using StreetComplete when walking in a city, but on a bike any operation with the phone involves stopping and switching the context. Besides, SC is intended to fill the missing or fix existing data, and sometimes I need more than that (adding/fixing paths and objects, for example). So I just record an audio note while passing by something, and later on I import the video/timelapse and edit it on my computer, which is much faster than doing that while cycling.

Worth looking at SCEE [1] for adding objects, unfortunatelly it doesn't do paths.

[1] https://f-droid.org/packages/de.westnordost.streetcomplete.e...

I also started using EveryDoor recently, which strikes a Nice middle ground betweek StreetComplete qnd Vespucci.

https://f-droid.org/packages/info.zverev.ilya.every_door/

https://every-door.app/

https://every-door.app/ is also good.

I collect info on the bike using a Garmin eTrex GPS. Because this has physical buttons, and not a touchscreen, you don’t have to take your eyes off the road so much. You rarely have to stop at all if you just make your own personal system of abbreviations.

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.

I’m interested in doing the same setup. Would you mind sharing what camera and button you use?

How do you fix the routes? I just checked out the suggested route from my work to home and it doesn't stick to the bike greenways or streets with bikelanes. It actually suggested I take a very dangerous road with no bike traffic at all. How can I help improve that?

A lot of the routing comes down to pressure around the tag `bicycle`. If there is a road illegal to bikes, tag it `bicycle=no`. But if it is unsafe, the best way to fix it is to better document designated routes, as well as cycleways.

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.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bicycle

> Instead the routing algorithm should improve

Where's the feedback to the routing algorithm? I thought graphhopper / OSM was sent to users without feedback.

Maybe I'm a little jaded by how the app economy works nowadays, but I find it almost suspicious how fast development seems and how well supported Organic Maps is. At least the high level of quality is explained by the fact that the lead developers seem to be the founders of the original maps.me.

We're not alone, our community and contributors are helping us!

Thanks for the work you and your community is doing! Quick question - why did you fork maps.me in the first place? And how do you make money?

New owners of Maps.Me ruined the offline UX in one of the updates in 2020. We could not allow our "baby" to die like this.

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.

Maps.me got forked because it was sold from the original company to a new one (IIRC more than once). The most recent company to purchase Maps.me is in crypto, so their focus has been on e.g. adding a crypto wallet – yes, a crypto wallet in a maps app – instead of actually developing the app further for maps users.

Was Maps.me open source before, or did they somehow manage to make it open source just before it got bought by the cryptobros? That would be a pretty great move IMO.

I believe that it was always open-source.

I remember them promising to open-source it early on and then waiting at least a few months for the code. At the time I was jaded and thought they'd go back on the promise, but I'm grateful they didn't. It's the most polished FLOSS map app.

It wasn't always. It started as MapsWithMe by a swiss company, which gave it away for free with a pro version (for which I paid), then mail.ru took it over and made it opensource (while all my build attempts failed) and then a new owner later added tons of ads and stuff into it and made it closed. Then some people forked the slightly older open source version.

Those people are the original founders who took it open source, which was a great move since otherwise it'd have become just another piece of shovelware getting enshittified into oblivion.

> And how do you make money?

From what I see, https://organicmaps.app/ is asking for donations ( https://organicmaps.app/donate/ )

I'm a volunteer working on an improvement to the spoken directions and I can say with firsthand experience that Organic Maps' development is not suspiciously fast. It is simply a fork of Maps.ME which has gone to crap, so when you look at features per year over the whole lifespan it's really not a lot. I think OSM is growing in popularity especially as more people realize that FAANG are awful and so we're seeing more activity lately, but let's just say that it's taken me a year to get around to working on this task again (is it just easier to accomplish things during Back to School week and Christmas-New Years' week?) and in that time I have not had many merge conflicts to deal with. It's getting better, and things are happening more quickly, but certainly not suspiciously-quickly. OM has been a thing since 2021 and I've been trying to ditch Google since 2015 so I've been around for awhile seeing the progress: much slower than I'd like, but still remarkable. Certainly not comparable in any way to a VC-funded startup that can churn out a product in months, this is funded by donations and volunteer work.

Organic Maps is great. I just wish OSM worked on search more. They are behind there.

We're actively improving our search in every release. Stay tuned!

The main issue with OSM search at least in America is a lack of addresses. Anyone can help with this by importing addresses from the National Address Database: https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/watmildon/diary/400812

Which should be an exciting project any person can work on, given the decent amount of metadata OSM provides.

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