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Comment by shellfishgene | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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