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Comment by saubeidl | Hacker News Reader

What do you think is the biggest UX issue with maps.me/organic maps/comaps/whatever?

The biggest for me is definitely the lack of public transportation. This is something even gnome-maps support. Global search (eg. things that are not downloaded yet) only works for some bigger entities, that are part of the world map (although I understand that this would need some server-side support). Not having a satellite map is also a bummer.

Point-to-point navigation at places where you already downloaded maps is alright (same with osmand), but for exploration, or public trasnport, I would need to use moovit, mapy, osmand (wikipedia overlay is awesome), or google maps.

Oh that's a great callout. I did some quick research and it appears Gnome's public transport feature is powered by https://transitous.org/ - I wonder how much work it would be to add this to Organic Maps?

Impossible in the medium term, unless Organic goes online.

There is a lot one could do offline. Highlight close by stations, have overlays/styles for transport focus (they got an overlay for "Subway", which in some areas includes commuter trains but not for bus/tram/light rail/...)

And in theory one could add bundles of data based on GTFS data which many transport organisations these days publish and do routing at least based on schedule times.

Yes, but that would be miles behind G/A maps, on top of being hard to implement.

E.g. Motis needs walk routing data that weights hundred of gigas.

Question is what it's for. A proper transport layer on the map would be valuable to me. Even without timetable data. That's even in relations on openstreetmap already.

Next improvement might be to highlight lines based on frequency of service. Still possible to precalculate with little need on device.

Routing ain't easy. That's true.

We'd love to have your input for improved transit in CoMaps! I agree it's an important priority. Last GSoC there was a project for ingesting GTFS feeds against OSM data, since local agencies are often much better about their details than OSM is, but as a student project it was slow and limited in scope.

They seem to have some sort of experimental support for GTFS [1], and one important part of Transitous is being a GTFS aggregator, so maybe they are not too far away from being able to use that part of Transitous.

Although it'd probably be good to be able to query Transitous itself when online.

[1] https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/blob/master/docs/...

> The biggest for me is definitely the lack of public transportation.

I tend to use the official app of the public transports wherever I am. Turns out many of them actually use OSM as a backend :-).

Not an UX thing, but I find myself going back to Google Maps to find restaurants, reviews and reliable opening hours all the time. Neither Apple Maps nor Organic Maps offers the same level of quality (not to say that Google Maps reviews can be problematic in themselves).

The OsmAnd guys tried launching OpenPlaceReviews.

https://2019.stateofthemap.org/sessions/LBGPCD/

Unfortunately it didn't take off, was discountinued in 2023.

https://github.com/OpenPlaceReviews

Really sad, but understandable. Everybody’s going to Google because it’s where the most reviews are... because everybody’s going to Google.

It's almost impossible for anything to compete with Google Maps on business information because they have built such a vast commercial ecosystem around it with advertising, Maps users etc.

And at least back when I tried it a long time ago, it wouldn't pull in updates from OSM in a timely manner. Like I updated something in OSM and a month later it still wasn't available in organic maps. Maybe it is better now?

Search. I've wanted to like Organic Maps, but the search function is the absolute pits and forces me to still use Google Maps. Without good search, there's next to no point in me using it.

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