Organic Maps: An open-source maps app that doesn't suck | Hacker News Reader

Organic Maps: An open-source maps app that doesn't suck

hardfault.life

340 pointsryukoposting128 comments

Organic Maps is the OSS fork of Maps.me, which was basically the best maps app ever made, but was sold. Both use OSM but also can load other map sources (iirc). I used to use Maps.me extensively when traveling abroad as it provided way better maps than Google, and all offline.

This is a tried and tested platform that works great, led by people who know their stuff and care deeply about the user. Please donate if you like it: https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps

I love OSS products, especially OpenStreetMap, but I have a hard time believing it could be better than the big players. Apple and Google both use OSM data as well, but supplement it with massive internal mapping efforts. What makes Organic Maps better? If it’s interface and features, sure I can buy that. I’m not sure I would believe that base map correctness or POIs could ever be better though. It’s such a hard and ever changing problem, those with the superset of information will always have more the capability to build a better map.

> What makes Organic Maps better? > I’m not sure I would believe that base map correctness or POIs could ever be better though.

You'll be surprised. I cannot speak for Organic Maps, but I can speak for OSMand tested for years in Germany and Japan. Same OSM data at the end of the day. Even today, OSMand distinguishes better between building blocks. I see subdivisions of address numbers, which Google Maps hides with it's minimalist grey for the whole apartment block design.

Further more, I often see small walkways and paths simply not represented in Google Maps, whereas they are in Google Maps. And for some reason, here in Japan Google Maps often suggests too-clever for its own good detours, which end up being way slower, whereas OSMand with it's simpler(?) navigation algorithm sticks to more consistent routes along bigger roads.

If address and POI search could be further improved, I wouldn't see a reason to use Google Maps ever again.

I concur. OSMand may not be super user friendly, but the quality of OSM maps is way above Google in terms of details.

Google (and Apple) maps are very car-centric, so they are on the same level as OSM in that regard, but OSM knows about every foot/cycle path and even has different levels of "quality" for them.

What I miss in Organic Maps compared to OSMAnd is being able to choose a category of POIs which are then shown even when zoomed further out - useful if you are looking for e.g. restaurants nearby.

Either this doesn't do what you want, or you just haven't discovered it yet, but in case it's the latter: I can e.g. search for "restaurant" in Organic Maps, then tap the Floating Action Button with the map icon, and then it will show all search results on the map, even when zoomed out.

Actually that's exactly what I wanted, thanks for the hint! I just wasn't expecting to find it under the "search" function - I have mostly used OSMAnd until now, and I only learned of Organic Maps through HN and installed it a few weeks ago, same as the author of the blog post. Even better, the search function also has a "categories" tab where you can select "places to eat", "sights", "transport", "petrol", "parking", "ATM" etc. Looks like they put a lot of thought into "streamlining" the UI, and the individual functions are more versatile than you might expect...

but the quality of OSM maps is way above Google in terms of details.

For some data in some part parts of the world. In rural (and even suburban) Sweden for example half the buildings are missing, many roads aren't named and search is straight up broken. What it will give you over Google is that every hiking trail and bike path is included.

For what it’s worth, mapping addresses to locations is a completely different problem to mapping itself.

True, but it is also one of the most commonly used functions for mobile map apps, and without that feature working reliably your app can never become someones primary map app. At best you can become a backup app for those times Google/Apple Maps doesn't work.

I experience the same in Bulgaria - many street names or street numbers are missing or even wrong (e.g. I search for a street and Maps.ME finds a feet track inside a park 2-3km away of the real street)

> If address and POI search could be further improved, I wouldn't see a reason to use Google Maps ever again.

For my part this works well enough on OSMand/Organic maps but what they lack is traffic information.

On my main route there can be anywhere from 0 to 1h of traffic, and Google maps seems to be very accurate at estimating it.

Anytime I don't need traffic info, I use another map application because Google maps had all kinds of errors and missing information, but no other app has reliable traffic information (I realise Google has it because people use Google maps, but I wish it was different).

Well, I can speak about just single european capital, but when it comes to maps, visual presentation is everything. Google maps are gray-on-gray unlabelled mess of equally wide smoothed out streets, no building numbers, almost no detail except on largest zoom — it is impossible to orient by that map. (apple maps are no better)

Organic maps has large labels, building numbers, a lot of relevant details visible, I can immedeately find the area I am interested in, see all possible routes, find addresses by sight etc.

It does not matter how much information google has, if it does not show you anything at all.

There is no real competition going on with the big players anynore - Google Maps for example constantly jumps around to show ads, randomly zooms in and out when searching, has extremely low contrast, doesn't show all POIs it knows of when searching, and limits what one can search by (e.g. there's no selection of cuisine anymore for restaurants), and so on.

I fully believe that OSM apps already beat it for specific use cases (e.g. Organic Maps for tourism, OSMAnd for cycling & hiking, etc.), and I don't think that being small & open source is a real limit even for an all-purpose maps app, as long as the big players like easy money more than providing features & value to the user, and don't feal threatened by any of the alternatives.

TL;DR: it's good for competition and Google Maps isn't really that good, as long as it's enough to still make loads of money.

Tbf you can filter by cuisine - just not on iOS, for some reason. They only have 10K geo engineers so I guess we should cut them slack - that’s what, only $3,000,000,000 a year in salaries alone?

Do the big players provide you simple downloads of entire countries in under 1GB, offline search and routing?

It's not the most complete data but it's by far the fastest mapping app when using offline data. Most intuitive point and click routing. Elevation data. Ability to load GPX/KML if you hike. And it will blow your mind how much is contained in the offline data: wikipedia articles, open/close times, etc

I mean, you could give it a try first, but cool...cool....

> Apple and Google both use OSM data as well, ...

Apple does, Google doesn't!

And even Apple don’t use it everywhere. I don’t see any OSM data in Apple Maps for Australia, at least.

> I love OSS products, especially OpenStreetMap, but I have a hard time believing it could be better than the big players. Apple and Google both use OSM data as well, but supplement it with massive internal mapping efforts.

Apple Maps doesn't even support bike directions. I live in Copenhagen, therefore making Apple Maps pretty useless. It's a classic Silicon Valley app made for the tech boomers in charge at Apple who presumably drive everywhere in electric cars.

Google Maps is better at bike directions, but when I use it for public transportation it's now trying to sell me on routes where I need to rent an e-scooter instead. I only use public transportation (as opposed to riding a bike) when I need to bring our baby somewhere with me. Since there is no way to turn this "feature" off, the directions are often useless to me. I now use a Danish app for all public transportation directions.

Just about the only thing Google Maps is clearly better at is satellite images and open/close times for shops.

As an aside, which Danish app do you use for public transport ? Rejseplanen ?

Yes

Do they really use OSM data? A few years ago we travelled in the Puna de Atacama region in Argentina, where most roads are just dirt tracks in the desert. Despite the zone being very sparely populated, most of the tracks are properly mapped on OSM. We used maps.me to have offline OSM maps (don't even dream of mobile Internet there, unless you use a satellite connection), and they proved to be very accurate. In most places, Google Maps wasn't even showing the presence of a road...

About ten years back, a friend of mine devoted his spare time to mapping on OSM. Once every single local bike path was added, he started adding roads to North Korea based on satellite imagery. Folks just like making maps, even in places Google can’t make a buck.

No, Google Maps doesn't use OSM data at all.

at all is a bit too far

See image at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Google

(but it uses approximately no OSM data)

Depending on country the OSM data might be better than the Apple/Google. And they dont integrate everything. For example there is Mapy.cz which is Czech map app that uses OSM plus their data and specifically for hiking or cycling around europe its way better than anything apple/google. Apple maps are really bad in mosts part of europe.

Dont forget that most european state mapping projects get integrated into OSM and the data is often better than what Google has. Their only upside is all the tracking data so they know where people currently dont drive. Something open source apps (and most likely even commercial european ones) wouldnt dare to gather.

> those with the superset of information will always have more the capability to build a better map.

Technical capabilities. But not incentives, and not even capabilities without the qualifier "technical", for the simple reason that they as companies can't decide to not do the evil or stupid thing for the sake of not doing an evil or stupid thing, only ever for other reasons. The bright people at Google or Apple can't decide "fuck it, let's just do something that's actually good instead of what middle management and fucking marketing thinks is software". They do not have that option, any rando is more free (though not necessarily capable) to make something great than anyone at any of these large "players". OSS can turn bad and be run into the ground too, of course, but not necessarily, while these giants pump out crap because there is no way they couldn't.

From my experience, Google is better for "I''m in a big western city and need to find a supermarket and check its up-to-date opening hours".

OSM-based apps are much better for "I'm in a middle of nowhere and want to understand the detailed topography of the place, and see what's available in the village".

In big Western cities, supermarket chains often have a corporate website with a store locator that shows opening hours. And then you can add that info to OSM so that other people in the future can get it from their map app.

> check its up-to-date opening hours

Since COVID, these hours could have been hallucinated up by ChatGPT and be more accurate, at least in Europe.

> it could be better than the big players.. What makes Organic Maps better?

For hiking, OSM data and by that OsmAnd and Organic Maps are just massively better and have more paths, with an better interface and visualization, which also works perfect offline.

For cars and routing, and finding special shops sure google is bettwr - on the other hand here I am on a tourist island and Google marking certain roads blocked though they are not (and by that, making more cars turn early, so this is a positive feedback loop? Thought by just driving the road multiple times I could fix that, but not that easily :D)

For me the problem is not the mapping, but all the other data. At least on Spain OSM mapping data is great, specially outside the main streets and roads. But all the community (and other places) extra data is quite useful:

All the business and places (so you don't have to remember the exact address for a place, just enter the name), schedules, traffic, temporary route changes (like road workers, accidents or the like...). That conveniences are great.

OTOH, in OSM you have all the metadata accessible and free. Trash bin locations, type of roads, traffic lights, tactile floor for blind people, number of steps on a stair, type of buildings...

But where I use OSM the most (almost always) is out of the city. For hiking, bicycle routes, out in the field...

It depends on the region. In Lithuania address data is automatically updated in OSM from official sources while Google Maps may not show current addresses which were added or changed for years. Overall, we should look why every country on earth does not provide constantly updated map data publicly for free. I doubt that fees collected from sale of map data come near the cost of missed deliveries, burned energy and time to wander around in order to find locate desired destination.

> “and Google both use OSM data as well”

Pretty sure Google doesn't use OSM

> What makes Organic Maps better?

Priorities.

Google Maps exists as a place to show ads.

Organic Maps exists to be a map app.

OSM data is way, way better than Google Maps. The difference in detail is staggering. We've been to 21 states over the last couple of years by RV and Google is wrong about speed limits nearly every day. It had us driving on small, rutted dirt roads that were clearly marked as dirt roads in OSM (that's what actually led me to use OSM more).

Campgrounds were even worse... In Jasper about 90% of the camp trails were on OSM, Google had none. And I took the opportunity to add the rest because OSM is editable by anyone. Google's "ground truth" effort is an abject failure.

I believe this is where crowdsourcing could come in. Gamify the apps like Waze did. Collect traffic data anonymously. I think it can be done. I think a big barrier would be server resources but there are surely people with means who could help.

I've been using Organic Maps more lately and quite like it!

However, one thing I don't understand is why they don't make the history show the things you actually routed to alongside the things you searched for? Sometimes you search and have to scroll a bit to see the actual result or you searched multiple times and it's a little confusing which one to click if you don't remember what worked.

I guess I'll dig around github and see if I can find an answer.

Author here, I'm going to bed now but it's exciting to see this level of interest in the blog post. I apologize in advance if the site crashes and burns while I'm asleep - this is my own made-from-scratch blogging platform and I'm not sure if it's really "front page of HN-scale" yet.

loads blazing fast and has good design.

seems well done

Thank you for the great app! Feature request: integration with BRouter for navigation (like OSMAnd does). Currently bicycle navigation is not very good in Organic Maps.

barking up the wrong tree

op is author of the linked blog post, not the app

Sorry to disappoint, but I made the blog, not the map!

This kind of testing and feedback is important for Organic Maps. Good on the author for taking the time to evaluate, investigate, and file an issue on GitHub. It takes so much time, but is invaluable.

Still, as someone who has contributed tens of thousands of edits to OpenStreetMap, uploaded hundreds of GPS traces, donates to Organic Maps, and compiles the Organic Maps Android application from git master a few times a week, I constantly find myself wondering when it will finally be good enough that I won't second guess it.

OSM surprises me with its accuracy, so long as you are trying to navigate the world and not find a business.

Ha, additionally I wonder if that will happen before Google Maps will be good enough that I won't second-guess it.

If you are this deeply involved with Organic Maps, you might never trust it fully. You know too much!

This is true of any software developer. Something that looks great from the outside can be really nasty under the hood. It's easy to bias your view of your work based on the tiny flaws you see in it, but the average user wouldn't see those faults.

Since this article mentions driving navigation: My absolute dream feature for that would be a navigation text to speech voice which can be set to English, but pronounces location names in other languages correctly and not like an English person trying to pronounce an odd English word. As someone who has their phone set to English but usually drives in Germany, sometimes France, Italy or Switzerland it’s funny at first to hear the strange attempts to pronounce street names but it really does get old.

Since it appears like none of the big maps apps seem to be interested in this feature I’ve sometimes wondered if it could be done by contributing to something like organic maps. I’ve found some academic projects about doing code-switching tts like that, but nothing built into an actual product. If anyone has any thoughts on that it would be interesting to hear.

It's not quite the same, but in Google Maps you can switch the language of the app itself. I use this to get navigation not butchering street names into unrecognisability while the rest of my phone is English. It does do the whole navigation in that language though, so you do need to be able to understand it to a reasonable degree, and it won't switch based on places (so it'll then mess up when I'm somewhere with English names.)

Not all languages are created equal though. When driving in the UK, I use the American English voice which gives more precise directions, like street names. The British English voice doesn't (just "turn left, turn right").

This would already be an improvement for me, since I am a native German speaker who usually prefers device language be set to English. I wasn't aware it was possible to set language on a per-app basis on iOS, thank you!

Doesn't work for Apple Maps unfortunately, which has a nice voice but is dependent on the Siri voice setting, which I prefer to be in English.

Osmand even allows one to use a different interface- and TTS language. I have my interface set to english and TTS to german.

FWIW cycle.travel on iOS (my app!) does this for cycling directions. It's not that difficult - there's a built-in "guess the language" API in iOS, and doing a quick country polygon lookup adds a bit more context. (Not on Android yet - I've only just released the first version of the Android app and haven't had a chance to add that in yet.)

Oh that’s very interesting! Do you use the built-in iOS speech synthesis API as well?

Don’t the voices for different languages sound quite different so it’s a more jarring transition when a location is being spoken? Or is it not that noticeable?

It's a little jarring at first and, most annoyingly, iOS inserts a pause during the transition which appears to be unremovable. But on balance I greatly prefer it to "Turn left onto Playce dee lar Ree-pub-lee-queue".

Doesn't work with addresses in Vietnam, so my vote is "still sucks for 100 million people".

I tried putting in "46/8B/29 Xô Viết Nghệ Tĩnh" and it directs me to some place 132km away even though it is actually a few hundred meters from my current location.

Search sometimes isn't ordered by distance even in the US. The "obvious" answer I'm looking for can be the 3rd or 4th.

I scrolled through the entire list of 20 or whatever results and none of them were close to correct.

Half the results were in different cities.

The results for my city (Ho Chi Minh City) are for totally different roads. For instance "Hem 46 Vo Van Tan" is listed as a result, as is "Hẻm 46 Trần Quang Diệu". Also notice that one has correct diacritics and one doesn't, which gives the whole thing a weird amateurish vibe.

I know this is probably the fault on OSM data and not the app itself. But OSM sucks and anything built on it will suck.

OSM data in my area is much higher quality than any of the commercial competitors. But, I guess that's because I and a community of local contributors improve them. I'm sorry to hear the quality is substandard in your area, and the amateurish vibe likely comes from the fact that most OSM data is contributed by amateur volunteers.

I tried getting directions to the next stop on my rail line. When I searched for the station name it didn’t come up, but it did find a road under construction and two fences. I’m not sure why I would ever search for a fence. When I cancelled the search and selected the Transport category before searching, it found it but there was seemingly no way to view the route details beyond which line to get on and how long it would take.

With Google Maps, it will let you see the specific walking directions to the origin train station and how long it takes, it will tell you the line and direction to take, how long that train journey will take, which stops are between the two stations you are travelling between, which exit to leave the destination train station at, and walking directions to my destination once I leave the train station. It will also let me put in what time I want to arrive and work backwards to figure out what time I need to leave, taking the train schedules into account.

It’s great that there is an open source option available, but it has a long, long way to go before it’s a good choice.

Why did you expect it to work for every single place on the world? It's a free OSS project.

Because the title of the article is "An open-source maps app that doesn't suck" when it should have been "An open-source maps app that doesn't suck in the US".

There are people on here that don't live in the US, and it's sometimes exhausting to have to add these suffixes in your head by default. You always have to assume that, if the author doesn't specify, they're talking about the US, whereas most of the world doesn't actually live in the US.

I think there’s a difference between doesn’t suck and rarely makes mistakes. Maps.me works well in Europe. I haven’t tried it in Asia, but I will.

In the meantime, OSM is open source. If you are particularly concerned about non-US performance, perhaps the problem is not with blog authors but with OSS contributions to OSM outside the US?

The person in the comments merely noted that it doesn't work well in Vietnam. Given that this is the internet, and given that the author said it works well without giving a clear location as to where it works well, I think it's safe to say that in this specific instance, "Why did you expect it to work for every single place on the world?" has a simple answer: Because OP said so, in the article.

Nobody here demands that an OSS project works well in every part of the world. What is being criticized here is the US-centric view of the article author, and the original comment merely noted that you can't make a general assumption of suckiness based on one location.

Again, the problem isn't with the app. It's with the way the article assumes everyone reading this lives somewhere where the app doesn't suck.

I agree 100% with your second paragraph, and understand the frustration, but this isn't an instance of that. From what I've seen online, the most praise for OSM comes from European countries, where it seems to have better data than even the Google/Apple offerings. It has pretty good data here in India too, surprisingly good in some parts, pretty weak in others. But the main hypothesis holds - out of the many open source maps apps I've tried, Organic Maps is the one that sucks the least, in terms of usability, performance, robustness, etc.

Except OSM data is consistently better in Europe than in the US.

I use this app regularly and it doesn’t work in the US either. But I love the offline map feature. I just avoid searching for anything.

Searching is hard: OpenStreetMaps' Nominatim is not very good, but some products built around it like Mapbox's search is very good. Don't know what they add exactly, but there is a big gap.

Mapbox is a big company. They can run their geocoder ("Carmen", at least during the time it was open source) with 10x hardware requirements, have a full-time team of engineers and testers, and they add commercial licensed (paid) data sources. For Germany for example they use official government data, not OpenStreetMap or other open data.

Nominatim is very good. It's just tightly scoped (it doesn't claim to offer anything but rudimentary POI search, it's just focused on placenames), and limited by OSM data which doesn't have house-level addressing for most of the world.

apple maps tends to do this to me as well (in germany).

i guess fuzzy-matching locations and sorting by distance is hard

To be fair, Google Maps gets it wrong pretty often in VN, too. Maybe not off by 132km, but it a few km in the wrong direction. It’s especially bad about assuming that odd number addresses should be across the street from even numbered addresses.

In the last few years, Apple Maps was just as good/bad in VN, so I switched to it.

I am assuming this is talking about Android, but for Mobile Linux, Pure Maps has been awesome: https://rinigus.github.io/pure-maps/

I have been successfully using it for over four months now for both car an bike navigation.

Now if only I could actually install it under Arch Linux. The AUR package pure-maps is broken (possibly other failures, but mapbox-gl-native fails to build, tries to download https://dev.alpinelinux.org/archive/mapbox-gl-native/mapbox-... but gets a 404).

It’s on flatpak. No reason not to use that tbh.

Bleh, Flatpak. No thanks, I want a proper distribution, and I don’t have gigabytes of spare disk space anyway.

(I’ve never installed Flatpak before, but installed it just briefly to see what it would say, and it seems to want to download one gigabyte to install this—mostly KDE stuff—which is presumably compressed so that it’ll take even more disk space afterwards. Note that I think I might be overestimating its figure by up to about 350MB, as org.kde.Platform.Locale is “< 355.1 MB (partial)”, so maybe it only downloads the locale you’re using. Either way, my disk is close enough to full at present that I can’t really afford this stuff, even if I didn’t find things like Flatpak and Snap distasteful.)

It basically is a static distribution of an application.

The benefits are that, you don’t need to be on a specific version of anything to make this work properly.

For what it’s worth, flatpaks do share dependencies as much as possible. So that inflated size isn’t going to be replicated for each application.

Also, flatpak _is_ a proper distribution. It doesn’t really do anything fancy other than isolate the dependencies from other tools on your system.

I have over 4000 packages installed on my Arch Linux system. The only hiccups I have with dependencies are Python, Node, and a few Java projects.

Flatpak doesn't solve the dependency problem, it just kicks the can down the road.

We need better tools to package and deploy apps that's language and system agnostic, and an easy to use extension system to accommodate this.

My gripe is that it doesn’t solve the problem, just pushes it a layer away.

Nix is the first package manager that actually gives a proper solution, and it is just much much better and has no space overhead either.

Why this over OSMAnd, which I've been happily using for years?

I haven't used OSMAnd, but I'd give it a shot. What's up with the $30 premium version on the Play store?

That's OSMAnd plus, with unlimited maps. Install it from F-Droid and you won't pay. For some reason they upload the plus version for free there.

A lot fewer features, a lot more streamlined UI. OSMAnd has too many features for my needs, it takes longer to figure out how to do something. I think a lot of people agree. But maybe OSMAnd works better for you.

In my opinion OSMAnd interface is slow, that of Organic is very responsive

Have you checked recently? I think I recall there being some sort of significant performance improvement at some point in the last few years. Could be wrong.

OsmAnd: tons of customization options, "prefer unpaved roads" routing option (great for adv motorcycling), can follow GPX tracks, battery hog.

Organic Maps: quick, minimalistic UI, can display but not navigate along GPX tracks. Lighter on battery. I use it like I would use paper map when hiking.

Anecdotally, I've found OSMand's search functionality to vary between OK and completely unusable. Especially when entering addresses, OSMand really struggles to interpret what should be quite straightforward entries.

While I haven't extensively used OrganicMaps, I found its search functionality to behave much better.

I use OSMAnd on my phone, where the extra features are useful for hiking and biking. I use Organic Maps on my iPad where I want a simple offline map.

Note that if some data is missing or wrong - you can fix it by editing on https://www.openstreetmap.org/ as they use OpenStreetMap data

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)

As someone who built advanced turn by turn routing based on openstreetmap, problems like the u-turn in the article are hard. Giving good turn instructions for the last 2% is also hard, because so often it requires an appreciation of what the turn looks like from the driver's perspective, not just the curves and angles of the vertices.

As an avid OSMand user, it's a shame that he doesn't compare the two. They're the big players in this space.

I wish OsmAnd had the rendering engine of OrganicMaps. That would be a killer app.

Right now, osmand on my phone is virtually unusable.

I slow down, and as if I were stepping on egg shells, I still try to use osmand because of its wikivoyage and Wikipedia integration. But seriously, not caching off-screen rendered vector tiles make it feel like an app from the 90s. It's feature-full, but redraws on each user interaction. :-(

Organic maps is super fast, in comparison. Their open communication on Telegram makes the project look even more sexy.

Same. I used OSMAnd for years, both out of a sense of civic duty, and because I thought vectors would be superior.

Loading and rendering those vectors on a 6 year old phone though, woof. I still miss the OSMAnd features though: tracking my rides, altitude/speed/gravel metrics.

Have you enabled the new renderer? It's still worse than Organic's, but much faster than the old one.

I have been using the new renderer since it was available as a hidden beta feature. Parts of rendering feel smoother but it's painful to watch how streets are redrawn.

I also live in a very densely mapped area, which definitely affects rendering performance. Very remote places / not well mapped areas (South America, Laos, Eastern-Europe) render somewhat better, but nothing comparable to Organic maps or StreetComplete

OSMand crashed regularly for me (my guess is out of memory). Organic Maps doesn't do that, so that's good.

I hope one day Organic Maps will make it easy to automatically sync bookmarks. That's really one of the biggest features missing for me.

https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/622

I love Organic Maps! I don't use it for driving, but I do use it regularly for hiking. It is reassuring to know that even if I don't have service I can open the app and can check to see if I'm still on the trail. Highly recommended! I'll have to try navigation sometime.

Recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37347447

I've been trying to like it, but it doesn't have named places results like I'd really want, and it even fails to locate straight up addresses sometimes. I'm keeping it installed for now and will keep checking back.

I had the issue of Organic Maps not recognizing addresses until I realized they were located in areas I hadn't downloaded yet.

That makes sense, but my problems are in my own area, already downloaded.

The U-Turn on Indiana Toll Road is an interesting one! It looks like Organic Maps' router is making use of a road that's tagged as an emergency service road in OSM:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1186446719

The road was added three months - apparently based on "updated satellite imagery" - but poorly tagged. It was then edited 9 days ago to improve the tagging.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1186446719/history

Perhaps the more recent edit was from Organic Maps so that their router handles the tags appropriately?

Looking at this area on Google streetview (from June 2023), I can't see anything that looks like a service road:

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.5920007,-87.2303049,3a,90y,3...

I wonder why Organic Maps would take the U-turn rather than the more obvious ramp. Perhaps it is to avoid the toll gate?

Also, regarding this:

> it can take a few weeks for an OpenStreetMap update to get pushed out

OpenStreetMap updates within a day or two, but Organic Maps' own ingest process might have a lower frequency.

OSM updates instantly; every edit is an immediate operation on its database. Tile refresh on the official website (which is little more than a tech demo) may take a little while, though it could be you just need to refresh your browser cache. The OSMAnd app updates map data once a month, unless you enable OSMAnd Live where map updates come hourly.

Just tried it with bike routing and it is pretty terrible. Suggested following two massive roads instead of the obvious bike paths nearby.

So not useful for that purpose.

For the bike use-case OsmAnd might be better, as other replies in this HN entry suggest.

That's what I mostly use. I was just curious to see whether organic maps had improved since the last time I tried it. No.

For me ideal bike routing is like car routing (main road uses shortest distances and has fever intersections - which is safer) but uses bike paths when it is shorter option.

Unfortunately most bike routing apps will always prefer bike path even if it is just 100m along the main road where you need to go of the road and then return.

Yeah the good apps give you options.

In this case there was no reason at all to take the major roads. Many parallel options existed.

I also just gave it a go. I live in Amsterdam where biking is pretty much the dominant mode, and it wasn't great. I told it to take me to a place in the north of the city (over a river), and it gave me directions over a bridge which is about a 14km trip rather than via the free ferry which makes it more like 4km. It also oddly doesn't optimise to the route I usually take (for the segment that makes sense) which is both shorter and quieter. Perhaps it tries to minimise corners, but on this route it doesn't make sense to.

OSMand both has the "shortcut" and knows about the ferry.

Tested Organic Maps for the first time on an emergency drive to Chicago and the Midwest, and with the fiancee? Author's got guts.

Not opensource but Locus Map is the one I always return too. Very feature rich and developed by a team that cares.

Second this. It's a swiss army knife of a map. Supports planning, track recording, export to various formats and online services like Strava, tools for Geocaching, map overlays, points/track database with folders, dashboards that turn your phone into a bike computer, and many more. And yeah the developers are super nice people!

I dunno if anyone remembers running navigation software on a Palm Treo when a 1 gb sd card was super expensive, but you would actually download a major highways file of the United States with all the major roads and that was only 50-100mb. While the last mile smaller roads were enormous files and you would download a state or metro area for your departure zone and your destination zone. It worked really well.

You can probably navigate fairly well off of major roads maps that are publicly available for long trips, but the last mile local roads and short distances are paradoxically the major challenge.

I had the same weird “do a u-turn at an arbitrary point on the freeway” problem with Google maps for about a month while there was construction in the area. Strangest thing. (Was not a get off the freeway and back on)

I love OrganicMaps but lacks in certain situations.

When I want to be able to zoom into any and all of my bookmarks, I have to keep the map data of all countries I've ever been visiting. Thats tens and tens of GB of data on a mobile phone.

And everytime there are maps updates I have to redownload all of it. Tens and tens of GB of data.

When you're traveling and forgot to DL everythibg beforehand and have to use some WIFI hotspot you might not be able to get your maps downloaded. Happened to me multiple times.

So, my feature request:

- smaller maps data

- incremental updates

- online maps

...oh and better search of course. ;)

Also worth to keep an eye on: https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway/

Doesn't even scroll properly (no acceleration). The UX of all open source mapping apps suck really bad, not even most basic interactions are done right.

the alternatives are even worse, that's the premise;

you get better maps than with gog/apl but have a slightly "different" ux

The maps themself aren't any better in my neighborhood (or rather the the places on the map). I tried contributing once but OpenStreeMap ux and data model/tagging taxonomy is a convoluted mess too.

It does on iOS - maybe not for the Android version?

Yes, should've clarified I was talking about Android.

For a long while Pocket Earth Pro trumped Organic Maps and OSMand. It's still very fast. Walking routes in Europe are excellent. No traffic, which is not important, I find. Unfortunately it also appears to be abandonware.

I am curious how it does its routing. For the Bay Area to a place I go north of Truckee, it takes what may be the shortest route (super curvy) rather than the best.

I've been using Organic Maps for a few years now since Maps.me died

I mainly use it for offline access to hiking trails and it has been great for that.

I use mapy.cz often, because of the UI and better maps. Only the traffic is probably not estimated the best.

Nice article, thanks. This reminded me of the early days of waze.

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