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davelondon

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!

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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?

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]

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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