In 2023 Organic Maps got its first million users | Hacker News Reader

In 2023 Organic Maps got its first million users

organicmaps.app

243 pointsRicoElectrico88 comments

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I'd love to start recommending my friends use Organic Maps over Maps.me, but it's missing one critical feature:

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

https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/1694

... right now your bookmarks aren't synchronised anywhere so if you lose your phone all your bookmarks are gone.

When that's working I'll change over in a second!

As comments in the first link suggest, the project emphasizes privacy, and it would have to be done in a privacy-respecting way.

The second link is asking for iCloud synchronization.

A project that emphasizes privacy and open platforms might want to just deprioritize requests coming from people on privacy-violating, closed platforms, since those people hurt their own credibility in the approaches they suggest.

Can't you just sync some encrypted blob to iCloud? How is iCloud privacy violating?

From reading the bug, they don’t support iCloud backup, which is surprising to me, since I thought supporting backup was trivial on iOS.

As the bug points out, they could use core data sync for people that are navigating using multiple devices.

I believe all of the above supports transparent E2E encryption at this point.

(For backup, there is a toggle, since E2E makes your backup useless if you lose the only device that contains your keys, and many people only have one apple device, and don’t want to bother enlisting their friends to secret-share their recovery key).

If privacy advocates want to persuade people outside their bubble, this is surely not the right attitude. Imagine telling someone who wants iCloud sync, "oh you're hurting your own credibility"? Uh yeah (backing off slowly), guess I'll go back to Apple/Google maps and miss out on the ineffable benefit of your non-functional, but deeply virtuous, software.

These kind of projects aren't trying to cater to people who don't care about privacy. It caters to people who care about privacy, inside the bubble. I don't think Organic Maps is trying to become a unicorn Google Maps competitor that everyone can use.

We've lost a lot of ground on various open projects because of a bunch of people taking the free gifts, while being oblivious -- or indifferent -- to why we have those.

Maybe it's time to try a different approach.

You shared things and people used them, yes. Now the new approach is… what exactly? Write software aimed at a minority of activists who pass its purity test? Be my guest, but spare me the piety and attitudinising of OP, and don’t be surprised when small scale results in high unit costs and missing features.

Most of the privacy advocates I know have given up on persuading people outside their bubble and now merely want tools that don't spy on them.

Proseletyzing doesn't really work, mostly because any attempt to have this conversation attracts people like you, contributing nothing but bad-faith sumamries and pretending anyone who disagrees with you is crazy or dangerous. Calling the software "non-functional" because it doesn't assume that everyone wants everything they do shipped off to a third party 'sync' service is disingenuous. "Backing off slowly" is just a pointless ad hominem.

It's nice that the result is a slowly increasing collection of applications which don't make the same assumptions as the walled-garden offerings. It would be nicer if it could happen without the peanut gallery attacking everyone.

This is the kind of feedback all such projects get. A million "if you just implement this one critical feature...".

It must be really hard to balance giving all those users what they want, building quality code, keeping the project focused, and having low costs. Is it possible to enable this through extensions, or leveraging a product like OpenCloud?

"Save everything to the cloud by default" is a standard piece of functionality for mobile apps now, not a small side feature.

It's a bit much to require an open source project to deal with the infrastructure to provide that, don't you think?

All reasonable solutions would require the user to have done their part in setting up a nextcloud instance or something akin to that. And then, as the repo discussed, you would still see "oh, the majority don't know that".

On the iOS side, Apple provides the infrastructure via CloudKit.

Given the project's goals, that would be off the table.

Someone could always fork it and add that feature though!

Not requiring any cloud can also be a feature, and an important one for an offline-first project.

Saving things to the cloud as an option, or an officially blessed way to auto-export data locally for your own backup setup, is important though.

Yeah, and it's a huge trap, because the authors might believe the users. The truth is, if the app gave you that much value, you would have been using it, and would have found a workaround for the bookmarks export.

I really like this post by Mark Cuban and the HN discussion about Why you should never listen to you customers. Worth checking out..

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1244756 [2010]

https://blogmaverick.com/2010/04/06/why-you-should-never-lis... [2010]

What exactly do you mean by OpenCloud ?

Sorry, I meant OwnCloud - similar to SandStorm. I don't have much experience working with them, so I might be talking rubbish.

If I remember correctly, you can export bookmarks to a file, though this definitely doesn't replace proper synchronization.

You can export placemarks to a file and then use your own tools to sync. There's no reason why every single app has to include the kitchen sink.

This. I'm tired of creating accounts. I have my own filesystem.

I think Apple solves this pretty well in iOS… there’s pretty simple iCloud API’s apps can use to store basic data (also structured data with CKDatabase/etc) which automatically just use the user’s iCloud account storage and implicitly are synced across devices. Apps don’t have to implement any cloud storage or consensus/etc, they just use the platform API’s and everything just works. I’d be shocked if android/play store didn’t have a similar thing.

Same thing on Android, e.g., WhatsApp uses Google storage automatically for backups.

I hate the way whatsapp does it specifically because it wont let me back up to file.

Oh it does backup to file, you just have just have to backup a very weird and almost hidden folder

Huh, on Android or iOS? On Android the backup settings page offer a backup to Google Drive, it also says "Your messages will also back up to your phone's internal storage."...

On my phone the on-device backup can be found in /storage/emulated/0/Android/media/com.whatsapp/WhatsApp/Databases, and I remember reinstalling WhatsApp, logging in with my phone number, and it found the backup and restored the messages.

What's your proposed workflow? Hit "export" every time you create a bookmark? Add a weekly reminder to export?

If it regularly exported automatically, it could get picked up by a syncing app, but otherwise...

Use Syncthing or KDE Connect to sync a folder with that file between devices.

This is needlessly inconvenient and you know it

Where is "that file"? In an obscure part of the Android file system? Can I even access it without rooting my device?

Let's be honest, the average user will not do this. In fact, this comment reminds me of the infamous Dropbox one which suggested a similar failure of UX.

Saving a file is not beyond the average user.

I'm not sure about that, Google Maps and many other apps these days now autosave such that the average user today likely doesn't save anything manually anymore. But even still, I have the same question as the sibling above [0], what is the proposed workflow for saving such a file?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38748346

Autosave to file. Sync file to $backup.

I already do this with as many apps as I can.

Now if only the app itself can do this for me so that I don't have to do it myself, which was my original point.

But organic maps users will never be average users!

The average user is sticking with the default Apple or Google offerings, not looking for privacy respecting, FOSS, fully offline alternatives.

This attitude is why open source userland applications' UX is so bad. Sure, people who use them are not average, but everyone appreciates good UX, even within the constraints of being "privacy respecting, FOSS, fully offline."

I'm OK if Organic Maps isn't designed for the average ignorant user. I've been using it for over a year now and its great, don't need it ruined so a bunch of casuals can download it

The whole offline first thing is the feature here. Also it is open source fix it yourself.

Online backups ? no way. They have enough of my data.

I’m a contributor to OpenStreetMap, but what I find very lacking is the POI data

It’s only updated if there’s someone like me in the local area, or if it’s a tourist destination. But even then it can be sparse (eg just visited Merida, Bacalar and Valladolid in Mexico), and it’s worse in “non-western” countries

Tellingly, Overture Maps that use OSM for the street data to not use the POI data.

A lot of people pointed out that the POI data of Overture had mediocre quality. While that is true, they do at least have coverage in places OSM do not. If you know the name of the place you can at least find it

I’m not sure how this can become better, I’d think that a prerequisite would be that corporate users like Grab, DiDi, Uber start contributing

But that may not happen as they are not allowed to combine datasets [1]. Hence you have a chicken and egg problem: The dataset is not usable until it is complete…

The street data fundementally have the same problem, but that is easier to edit remotely and may be more stable in contrast to POIs

So I’m starting to question if it’s really worth it to continue update POIs in OSM, but I also would not know how to contribute to Overture as it does have quite some errors :)

[1] https://github.com/OvertureMaps/data/discussions/102

edit: Or maybe it is possible to conflate them, but that is not planned - https://github.com/OvertureMaps/data/issues/96

An idea might be to have an "Adopt Your Own Neighbourhood" campaign. I don't know if this is seen as wanted in the OSM community, it might attract a lot of low-effort contributions which might wear out longtime volunteers.

The way I started contributing to OSM is when I was tired of seeing old or no POI data and thought "enough is enough". I first started editing the shopping mall in my neighbourhood, then the schools, and so forth. It is now 5 years later and I can quite keep up locally with POI.

Same, 95% of my edits are POI data in the past two years and I fixed two of the main shipping streets in my neighborhood

But yeah, not sure how scalable even such a campaign would be. I’m the only user I know that use EveryDoor to confirm/update POI in a city of 500k people…

You’d probably need at least 1 out of 1000 people globally to actively contribute. That’s almost 10 million people, quite a bit more than the 1 million Organic Maps users and 250k OSM contributors in 2022 :)

local mappers interested in mapping their area are highly welcome!

if anyone here is interested and unsure how to start, feel free to ask at https://community.openstreetmap.org/ (official forum, requires OSM account) or at one of other contact channels ( https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contact_channels ) - there is Slack, IRC, Discord and so on.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/ may help but it is sadly suboptimal for someone completely new.

If you just click edit you will get tutorial for default in-browser editor.

> So I’m starting to question if it’s really worth it to continue update POIs in OSM, but I also would not know how to contribute to Overture as it does have quite some errors :)

It's not a chicken-and-egg situation. Here, the egg is clearly OpenStreetMap data, and the chicken are other maps (such as Overture) that benefit from OSM.

Contribute to OSM for better eggs, or contribute to Overture to make your chicken look better.

In my OSM career, bike-traveling the world, I have added POIs in all kinds of unlikely places in the developing world. But a real challenge is adding more than just the indication that there is, for example, a shop there. It’s hard to add a name= tag when the shop has not hung up a sign with a name. It’s hard to add an opening_hours= tag when the shop has not posted opening hours, and even if I ask the owners, they might say hours are totally fuzzy. Such clear information is largely a feature of the developed world.

In some parts of urban Latin America, the challenge in adding POIs is that it is ill-advised to slowly, aimlessly walk down the street with your phone, because it could get snatched.

> “It’s hard to add a name= tag when the shop has not hung up a sign with a name. It’s hard to add an opening_hours= tag when the shop has not posted opening hours”

Even Google Maps has this problem. There’s a lot of “great noodle shop second on left” type business names in some parts of the world. Owners often live above/behind/in the shop/restaurant and they open more or less on demand. Hours will change seasonally - if there’s customers they’re open and if there isn’t they close.

The real trick with POI data is not just the data itself but the metadata that tells you how important it is. If you know how many people are searching for a place, visiting a place, reviewing it etc then you can boost its prominence in map rendering and search results, greatly improving UX.

An ideal solution would be for all the travel, mapping apps, etc that compete against Google (TripAdvisor, Yelp, Apple Maps, Facebook, all the in-car apps, etc) to share some kind of global OpenPOI database on top of OSM that aggregates reviews, photos, metadata, etc. And also gives owners a single source of truth to update their business data, keep it updated in real time, and have it disseminated everywhere…

What do you think about Street Complete [0][1][2]? I know it doesn't let you provide all and any data, but I find it super friendly.

It lets you add details to objects that already exist in OSM. It looks very polished, has nice map, icons, and this default style of sticking to your actual location like some location based games for crazy people (I'm a former Ingress player, Enlightened FTW).

My neighborhood has all details about building size, roofs, street lights, you know if there are markings on the ground on street crossings (for people with poor vision), each path has clear info of what's it's made of, and stores has open/close hours provided. Super cool, easy to use and has real impact.

[0] https://streetcomplete.app/ [1] https://f-droid.org/packages/de.westnordost.streetcomplete/ [2] https://play.google.com/store/search?q=street%20complete&c=a...

> I know it doesn't let you provide all and any data, but I find it super friendly.

But shops can be added (using shop overlay).

(I am one of people developing StreetComplete)

Didn't realized.l, thanks!

Kudos to you, as you can see I love the app.

I adore this app and it makes it even more fun to wander around new areas on foot.

One thing I ran into is that there are buildings that aren't shown in Street Complete. I tried adding a note but there seems like no way to add them in. If there was some easy way to flag a property as having a new building and relying on desktop users to fill in the details that would be super helpful!

long tap to create note, attach photo of location, is the best StreetComplete specific solution

You can install Vespucci to draw buildings directly on smartphone

StreetComplete is great for newbies, especially those that need the gamification approach to be more motivated. But if you are already an experienced OSM editor, you likely have developed muscle-memory in Vespucci or EveryDoor that lets you quickly add additional tags while barely looking at the screen.

Also, as I mentioned in my other post, adding POIs and additional tags in some regions’ urban areas is difficult because you don’t want to walk around with your phone out. And the USA makes it challenging to add and update POIs because you often can’t just walk down a street, the sprawl sets everything too far apart for that. The existing mobile editing apps, alas, cannot make up for political failures.

I live in Mérida. The POI data on Open Streetmap is pretty bad. I've been updating it on OSM but my changes never seem to make it to Organic Maps.

I was in Mérida a year ago and used OpenStreetMap to get around. I thought the quality was quite good! Thank you!

Organic Maps is so great. I don't need offline maps as often as I used to but I'm very glad to have this app when I do. And thanks to the folks for rescuing Maps.Me after that product got corrupted.

They absolutely deserve this! App is light weight and works smoothly. Every once in a while I do get into unmarked building numbers, to get around that I search location on google maps (in browser) and get the coordinates and then plug them into organic maps - not a big deal for me.

For day to day use I use Apple Maps, but when hiking Organic Maps is my absolute favorite. A lot more useful than Apple Maps or Google Maps (as it includes routes that are missing in the other two) and it allows to add custom tracks which is super useful for navigation.

Organic Maps is great, especially for planning hikes, but I'd be careful about relying on the OSM topos for wilderness travel. I got burned pretty hard in the Alps by OSM when a trail didn't actually exist. Since then, I like to use Organic Maps for a digital "reconnaissance" of OSM points of interest and then a country-specific topo map like USGS or IGN for backcountry navigation or route finding.

Note: AlpineQuest is a great app for this and is one of the few apps that doesn't charge a subscription to access our taxpayer-funded maps.

I had a similar experience using Organic Maps for hiking. I was hiking on a forested hill near an urban center. Both Google and Apple Maps only had a couple of the biggest trails while organic maps showed an extensive network. This was really helpful for exploring but I ended up having to take a pretty long detour to get back since the trail I had planned to take didn’t exist. I also encountered a trail marked on the map that had obviously been closed for years and was extremely overgrown. I really like the app but I wouldn’t trust the data for backcountry navigation at all.

This app is incredible. Downloadable, offline contour maps with driving directions.

And yet sadly, is very difficult to use on freeways in North America.

While I am thankful for their time, it's as if all the devs don't drive. Or don't drive on freeways.

It never announces an exit soon enough to take action, at 130km/hr, when you also have to move over 5 lanes.

I've had it announce an exit when I'm beside it, making it impossible to take any action.

Well, anyhow, hopefully rough spots like this get ironed out, we need a Google competitor.

It's sad, because this one thing keeps so many on google maps.

The devs are quite responsive on GitHub, so you could help contribute by opening an issue :)

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

One of the things I love most about OSM, and has kept me contributing to it for 19 years, is that it isn’t car-centric like the rest of the mapping industry. The world would be better with much less reliance on cars and OSM is a small part of that.

But if you want to have an open source freeway navigator, there’s nothing stopping you: Organic Maps and OSM data are both open and welcome contributions.

Had the same experience, and ended up being satisfied with Magic Earth[1]. I tried more or less every major navigation service (paid and "free"), and I ended up sticking with it.

And no, I'm not affiliated in any way; just wanted to share a recommendation because I was in the same boat.

[1]https://magicearth.com

If you have an iPhone, Apple Maps is amazing for driving.

When in driving mode, the UI simplifies completely, only showing you the minimum you need to drive. The spoken directions are super clear, telling you things like "skip this light and go into that lane and then take a right at the next intersection". I let Siri guide me just by voice and it works brilliantly, even when navigating spaghetti intersections.

On GrapheneOS, I switched from OSMAnd~ to Organic Maps, and have been mostly happy with it.

Organic Maps user interface could still use a little refinement (such as to give an unfamiliar user a sense of what mode they're in and how to get out of it). But it's much more approachable for basic use cases like "From where I am in the city, I want to get to address X."

Totally off topic, but it struck me that it would be funny to try to map out the world with thousands (millions?) of Roombas.

All called “Mrs Danvers”. They can swim underwater, climb mountains, fly over walls in their quest to map the whole world. They connect to each other, become sentient, join forces with ChatGPT and launch a land war against humans. This is how the world ends, not with a bang but a mild hum.

They not only map the world, but clean it... of everything.

Organic Maps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37347447 - Sept 2023 (485 comments)

OrganicMaps is Android and iOS offline maps for travel without trackers or ads - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27576882 - June 2021 (116 comments)

I don’t really use it as a Gmaps alternative (unless I’m out of signal range), but strangely it’s the best free app for hiking.

I think key features are being able to navigate to a pin anywhere (many hike apps are stuck on predefined trails). The other is it shows you up front a profile of the elevation change over distance. Combined with offline by default makes it the best free hike app I’ve found.

This was one of a short list of things I missed from Android.

How did I miss the iOS version?

Christmas came early this year!

I've used Guru Maps over the years for the same purpose (eg, tracing my path in walks/drives through regions without carrier coverage). Curious to see how this compares.

If any Organic Maps developers are reading this, one feature that I'd like to see would be the ability to define or upload and select a custom colour palette.

I expected to find that this was just another VC funded “steal users until the inevitable mass enshitification” and I was unable to find anything pointing to this.

Colour me surprised. Going to definitely check it out.

It is actually reverse case: app was open source was developers were able to recover it when maps.me started enshitification.

Since “enshittification” is now a word, so should be “disshittification” or maybe “deshittification”.

Weird and random to see the hotspring marked on the map. Have been there many times but it was all word of mouth

This sounds like ZaNavi. Is it better, worse, about the same?

"Application that is no longer developed and has been removed from PlayStore."

Compared to that, Organic Maps work and is being actively developed.

Ah. I got ZAnavi from F-Droid. It downloads maps directly from Open Street Map, so it's not dependent on the app developer for data.

I tend to prefer apps that don't get "updated". Too often, that means adding ads, begging, or tracking. The "Simple" series of Android apps went down that hole.

What do you mean by "downloading maps directly from OSM"? OSM is a database.

If it is downloading rasterized images from the web site, then the difference is that Organic Maps is a vector mapping app.

I think it's using downloads from https://download.geofabrik.de/ That extracts regions from Open Street Map and packages them as files.

What if their format changes? The app will no longer work.

It is fairly standard source for OSM data afaik. Organic Maps uses it as well at least for some cases.

Honestly without address search it's nearly useless for a lot of use cases.

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