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Comment by xNeil | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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/ )

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