OSMAnd vs. Organic Maps | Hacker News Reader

OSMAnd vs. Organic Maps

blog.firedrake.org

121 pointsicheyne85 comments

I've been building https://github.com/styluslabs/maps with support for 3D terrain, custom layers, and plugins for search and routing.

Vector tiles are generated and served on-demand by https://github.com/styluslabs/geodesk-tiles so there's no need to download an entire country or region first.

Wow the readme looks very impressive, would love to try this on my next off grid trek

Is it just you building it, is there a business behind it?

No business, just me!

But can you download a country up front? For offroad motorcycle trips I often get in to areas with no mobile connectivity

Yes, you can download any region and set of layers for offline use.

A good OSM app for desktop is sorely needed, I'll be sure to check this out. Thanks for building this as free software and for making it available on Linux. Nicely detailed README as well.

You should probably submit a Show HN.

edit: just checked it out, building and running it on Linux was very easy. Nice!

A new maps app and a revival of Tangram ES from the developer of my favourite note taking app, I'm glad I checked this comments section :)

And I see you open-sourced Write, thanks!

Why not Maplibre ? I'm curious.

I use Osmand a lot. It work well, but I dearly wish they'd improve some UX issues.

I always seem to have the map telling me how far it is to some temporary marker I placed months ago that I can't easily work out how to remove.

Also any time I do navigation, the Trip Recording plugin pops up as a sticky system notification even when I haven't enabled trip recording.

But the offline navigation is a killer feature, and following custom GPX's.

> I always seem to have the map telling me how far it is to some temporary marker I placed months ago that I can't easily work out how to remove.

You can either tap the marker and tick it off, or use Menu -> Map markers if you can't find it. You can also use Menu -> Configure map and turn off Map markers completely.

> Also any time I do navigation, the Trip Recording plugin pops up as a sticky system notification even when I haven't enabled trip recording.

Hmm, it does pop up every time for me but dismissing it works.

Yeah figured out the map marker thing now. Ticking it off didn't really help because it then just switched to the next one.

Just one of those things where the default behaviour isn't great and relies on the user to reconfigure.

Well, the behaviour is great if you're using markers only as short-term working "notes" and always ticking them off when you're done (use favourites for places you want to save longer-term). But yeah the marker feature doesn't explain how it wants you to use it.

I use the markers to loosely transcribe walking routes from books or the web then tick them off during my walk. I was always curious if this is what they're actually designed for, though.

I use them for Audax checkpoints, but given how they work and their iconography I suspect they're primarily for orienteering.

I most commonly use them for marking the location of my car or campsite when going bushwalking and wanting to be certain I can find them again. Also sometimes for marking annotations I want to add to OpenStreetMap later...

did they implement A* for offline pathing? i remember they were thinking on it and what was in place was oom on my phone

I don't know what algorithm is used. Mostly I'm using it in pretty simple situations like working out the distance to the next campsite along a hiking trail.

You can disable the notification. Took me a while to find this as well.

Menu > Plugins > Trip Recording > Settings > Notification (Second to last option)

Thank you!

It calls Organic Maps new (and the article is recent) but Organic Maps has been around for a while now?

FWIW I prefer Organic Maps for casual usage - I think OSMAnd is very featureful but the UI is less intuitive IMO.

It's been around for some time and is a fork of Maps.me, which was called MapWithMe before this.

Which is now completely filled with advertisements and limit on how many maps you can download.

It went from great to very intrusive.

What do you use Organic Maps for? Driving directions, walking, hiking, cycling? All of those or something else? It doesn't seem good for hiking because it's missing so many basic metrics that Gaia has (elevation data, different speeds like rate of ascent). I've got a rough impression that it's mostly suited for urban European locales for walking directions, but in the US I only use mapping apps for driving (turn by turn directions) and hiking in mountainous wilderness (as opposed to some places in Europe that had nearly urban "hiking").

AllTrails is better for 99% of activities and way easier to use. If you want some kind of uber-specific feature, use case or location, there is usually one app that is better for that (like onX for hunting/fishing, or Yahoo Maps for... Japan)

I use OrganicMaps / CoMaps for hiking. It has contour lines, it gives an elevation gain graph when you build an itinerary, and does seem to take the elevation gain in account when estimating time. I have not planned complex hiking itineraries with it too.

OSMAnd also has interesting features for hiking.

Recent HN thread on the fork of CoMaps from Organic Maps:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44994927

Note however that unlike Organic Maps, CoMaps lacks support for old devices. Without Organic Maps, an old iPad would be a useless junk instead of a great navigation aid.

On Android, CoMaps works on Android 5, which is not bad at all. But they are probably going to drop support for Android 5 soon because libraries might themselves drop support for Android 5 (Organic Maps will probably have the same issue).

https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/issues/1274

I've been trying really hard to get off Google Maps and almost managed to do it, but one thing that Google Maps offers and the others are not even close (at least for me) is discoverability.

For example if I am out riding some trails and then I want to pop out of the wilderness to grab a bite only Google has been able to provide good information of whats nearby (reviews help a lot as well).

Other than that I've been switching between OsmAnd and Gaia GPS (and Garmin built in device maps).

I guess that's country-specific. Over here, Google Maps has woefully outdated business info, apart from big names like McDonald or Starbucks. And I'm not even talking about building shapes, sidewalks, paths, or even roads.

Meanwhile in OSM, everything is much more detailed and kept up to date. I know, because I'm a mapper myself, and help keep it that way.

Google Maps seem like just another ad platform, for companies to pay if they want to be shown in higher zoom levels.

Just so I know for future travels: where is this and what do you use instead?

So far I have seen Google Maps be pretty useless in parts of Asia with their own software infrastructure (e.g. Korea or Japan) but it's been very useful in most Western countries.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45090654#45122373

One of Europe's less developed countries.

An app to use that is closest to Google Maps experience is probably Mapy.com. It has decent navigation capability for cars, bikes and pedestrians, both in and out of cities, and slick UI.

Also worth trying is CoMaps, OsmAnd or Locus Maps.

> Google Maps seem like just another ad platform, for companies to pay if they want to be shown in higher zoom levels.

I know, mostly that's my pet peeve as well and I guess I got trained to see through the noise. It is the last Google product that I am struggling to get rid off.

> I guess that's country-specific. Over here,

Where is that?

I am slowly trying to get move to OSM backed apps and hoping to put in the effort as a mapper/contributor as well.

I'm in one of Europe's slightly less developed countries.

And I can only recommend getting into mapping as a hobby. It got me to discover parts of my own city and region I've completely overlooked despite living there for decades, and gave me reasons to get out more.

I just wish it was easier to edit the map on mobile, but alas, nothing beats big desktop screen with a good editor and a precise input method. Mobile screens are small, and my fingers are fat. :)

I use exactly this feature (and for the exact same reason!) and Organic Maps has been more than helpful for me. Search, Categories, Food, and then View on Map.

Yep. And, unfortunately this is a bit hidden, but if you search "Vegetarian" it finds places where you can eat vegetarian and "Vegan" for places where you can eat vegan. I wonder how many hidden magic search strings like this there are, I'll report an issue for CoMaps to make them discoverable.

> I wonder how many hidden magic search strings like this there are

This drives me insane. I often use OSM for things like "show me all sources of drinking water along this route". But you need the magic key word.

In this case, it's certainly not "drinking water (food) and not "drinking water (tourism)". It's also not "water tab (service)". "Fountain" works mostly OK (since fountain water must be labeled as non potable by law here if it is), but sometimes the fountain will be a tiny bird bath in someone's back yard.

It's so stupid, OSM has data on publicly accessible drinking water, I know because I add them. There's even meta data on whether there's an explicit sign "potable" or not. I just haven't found that magic key word to display them.

For water specifically, it works well on CoMaps / Organic Maps (search > categories > water).

It's too bad we don't have a convenient UI for desktop. OSM has to be the only thing that's more convenient to use on mobile for no good technical reasons. Just nobody has done it yet.

> Maps (search > categories > water)

For my home town, that displays historic wells (deep, dry, no bucket, barred and locked) but not the little tab in the sandbox of the playground and not the public restroom in the center.

So on first sight it's less useful than "fountain". But I'll play around with it on my next tour.

It'd be worth checking if these nodes are actually correctly mapped. For instance, historical wells that are dry, locked, etc should probably not be labeled with amenity=drinking_water. And the missing one should probably be updated to have it.

More on this at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Ddrinking_w...

In case you don't already know this and for others, you can use the editor at https://osm.org or the Every Door app on your mobile phone during your next tour for this (you'll need an OSM account to edit the map).

I'm not 100% sure the CoMaps "Water" category uses amenity:drinking_water, but I have relied on it for this many times during bike tours or hikes without much surprise :-)

> I'm not 100% sure the CoMaps "Water" category uses amenity:drinking_water, but I have relied on it for this many times during bike tours or hikes without much surprise

Is there a way to search for the "amenity:drinking_water" tag directly in OSMand or CoMaps (or any other app)? Because this would probably fix everything.

In the end, the apps suffer from the complexity of the underlying data. It probably wasn't a good idea to have drinking water (tourism), drinking water (store) and drinking water (man made), fountain, water tab, well, ... and probably a dozen different categories for map makers to chose from.

Well, the reality is complex and OSM wants to be precise :-)

Apps shall then make it easy to look for stuff and OSM labels are quite low level, they usually have their specific/internal representation of things. All this to say:

- I doubt CoMaps allows searching for "amenity:drinking_water", at least I haven't found a way to do this.

- That's what the higher level and more user-friendly Water category is supposed to be for. This will limit possibilities, but optimize for the common cases. If the Water category surfaces wrong things or doesn't surface things it should, it's a bug that needs to be fixed.

- You might have better luck with apps for editing OSM for working with OSM labels directly but appart from basic use of Street Complete and Every Door, I haven't explored complex OSM app editors like Vespucci on mobile.

I still use OSMAnd because it can take photos (with GPS coordinates) at waypoints while recording a track.

I use this to take photos of images from my DSLR while on nature walks.

I later download the waypoint photos and upload it to iNaturalist to get the location information I need to link the location to my higher resolution camera images.

More reliable than linking my camera to my phone (via Bluetooth) to record the location info.

JOSM, the OSM editor, has a clever way to do this. It links photos to locations on your track using the timestamp of the photograph. The only problem with that is the time on the camera is probably off by a bit. So to solve that you just take a photo of the time on your GPS device at some point in your walk (usually the start). That's then used to determine the offset to align everything.

Personally I've settled on OSMAnd, due to its extra features (e.g. hillshading and map configurable hiking trail display) and better (IMO) map styles. The Topo style is one of my favourite styles for hiking.

It has two downsides not mentioned in the article: OSMAnd's maps are noticeably larger, and the renderer is much slower.

I couldn’t make heads or tails of how to navigate with OSMAnd until thumbing through GitHub issues and finding out about https://opensupermaps.com/ which, after importing a few gigabytes of text files, allows general search of street addresses - not a great learning curve for adoption!

What I’d really like to do is copy the old school car GPS interface of, select state, select city, select street, house number, where at each stage it narrows down the list of possibilities so you only have to type 3 or 4 letters before auto completion. If there’s any pull request I would make it would be to build that out using the open super maps database

Modern maps apps basically do this for you by using your current location or currently viewed area to automatically put the current city results first.

Maybe it depends on regional data availability, but here in the Czech Republic, that's mostly how search in OSMAnd works: You search for a town, then a street, then a house number. I don't know why it only works for you after importing third-party data.

Related but annoying question. What are you all using for public lands access and land ownership? This is a similar problem where the paid/closed apps (OnX et al) have very good data but serious issues for obvious reasons.

there is a plugin for US data in OSMand which can be enabled for BLM, USGS, and some others

Caltopo is great for this. They require a subscription to download (raster) maps but you can cache a bunch of tiles before you leave to get the gist. These days this is one of the very scarce use cases I don't use OSMand for.

And now we have CoMaps [1], an Organic Maps fork.

I have both OSMAnd and CoMaps installed and started with OSMand, but I see myself reaching for CoMaps exclusively now.

Both apps are very good.

[1] https://www.comaps.app/

There's some backstory to the CoMaps fork that is detailed here: https://openletter.earth/open-letter-to-organic-maps-shareho...

Disclaimer: I don't know anything about this other than having seen the above link mentioned in a comment elsewhere as to why people should switch to CoMaps.

I am sympathetic to the motivation for forking CoMaps, but their website, aside from a few vague statements, does not give me any reassurance that they are better governed. Who are these people (names)? How are they incorporated, and where? How are donations spent? How is the development direction decided? Until these points are clarified, I am hesitant to switch to CoMaps.

From what I can gather, they are not yet incorporated and they are working through organizational questions in [1] and the issues thereof. The `ACCOUNTS.md` file there gives an idea about the main people behind the project and the donation page on Open Collective [2] also documents team members and how they spend those donations.

[1]: https://codeberg.org/comaps/Governance [2]: https://opencollective.com/comaps

This is publicly available:

- People who are regularly contributing to the project: https://codeberg.org/org/comaps/members

- Not yet incorporated, plans likely to have a non-profit in Europe.

- All donation spending is on OpenCollective - https://opencollective.com/comaps

- People who want to contribute to the project can just do so on Codeberg, there is no master plan, people just discuss the work, anyone can provide input : https://codeberg.org/org/comaps/members

For comparison, Organic Maps shares nothing about donations and is opaque about direction and decisions. If those question need to be answered before using an app, then it may be time to drop Organic Maps.

One of the best map apps I saw is Mapy.com -- same OSM database, but works way smoother and looks better than OsmAnd. Less features, of course, but 99% of time I just need to see the map.

It's better known as mapy.cz Indeed, works really well, I use it mostly when hiking or cycling, but it's also helpful when sightseeing. It provides all details from OSM tiles when needed.

Do note that mapy.cz is not open source and that they started moving more and more features into their subscription based paid offering... The beginning of enshittification.

Mapy are (that name is plural) cool but as I remember the app requires account.

> that name is plural

As is Google Maps, but nobody says “Google Maps are…”

They have a really nice feature I haven’t seen elsewhere to find a circular walking/cycling/ski route of a certain length. Useful to get ideas on where to go if you have some time for a walk or ride in an area you’re not entirely familiar with.

Note that Mapy is built by a spyware company, just like Google Maps.

I have both OSMAnd and Organic Maps installed, but I usually end up reaching for OSMAnd. I like the softer color scheme of Organic Maps better, but not the decrease in detail. Neither are perfect about choosing when/where to draw street names, but I have to zoom/pan a lot more to find them in Organic Maps.

Also, the address search on OSMAnd used to be much worse than Organic Maps, but it has improved, and I actually prefer it over Organic Maps now.

The only reason I have OSMAnd installed along with OrgMaps is for those occasions when I want to find water fountains nearby, since you can filter by object type

You have this in the category search on Organic Maps and CoMaps as well :-). This, and toilets.

I have used osmand for a long time, but one thing that really broke it for me is when Android removed the ability for apps to read other apps data, thus making it impossible to backup track records with folder sync

I think it can be fixed by configuring where to save these. But I find it interesting that one os change in the api can have a somewhat remote impact on feature use.

That was unsettling, I downloaded OSMand, which determined my location is spite of my dissabling everything possible related to location on my phone, and then wanted another 100megs for my area on top of the 150 for the app, which means that it is worse for time and data than just useing osm, when looking at areas all over the world, which I do daily. I am looking at one(or more) of the newer 2 Tb, ultra mini ssd's that I would then consider building into my franken phone that works as my mobile data wifi hotspot for all of my other devices, as I realy realy want a local copy of OSM, and Wikipedia, all of it.

My problem with OSMand even though it is immensely powerfull is the rendering speed is so slow. Sometimes i just want to have a quick look where I am, but it takes so long to load higher detail levels.

Have you tried it since the vector map release a few weeks back? I found it greatly improved rendering performance.

Which version does carry this release and does it have to be manually activated?

I'm running 5.1.3 and it's rendering is awfully slow

I would like an answer to this aswell. Its realy not rendering fast and i have it redownloaded this week.

What do you mean the vector release? OSMAnd has had vector maps forever (since the beginning?). Did they change the rendering?

What I don't like in Organic (and by extension CoMaps) is curve and polygon rendering. If you put it side by side with OSMAnd, you can see how crude they look in Organic.

An important thing to mention is that OSMAnd has multiple (somewhat confusing) paid tiers.

Since its FOSS you can presumably just compile it yourself if you wanted to bypass the paywall (the ethics of this are left as an exercise for the reader). However, Android Auto support is behind the paywall and Android Auto only works with apps downloaded from the play store.

OSMAnd definitely has more features (especially with the paid tiers) but, personally, I just wanted to get from A to B and I actually struggled to work out how to do that in OSMAnd which didn't give me a great impression of it.

I have both installed since I can imagine OSMAnd being better if I was planning a hike or something, but for day to day navigation CoMaps (Organic Maps fork with better governance)

> Since its FOSS you can presumably just compile it yourself if you wanted to bypass the paywall (the ethics of this are left as an exercise for the reader).

You don't even have to do it yourself - F-Droid does it too. (Which is why it's called OSMand~, as a nod to OSMand+.)

I frankly don't see any trouble in paying for open-source software once. I see it as a way to support the development. I often buy "premium" versions even if they add nothing on top of the OSS version.

As of OSMAnd, $40 might look like a steep price even for a lifetime unlimited license, but they regularly run sales where the same costs $25.

I’m pretty sure I’ve spent more than $40 on paper road atlases, and last time I updated the offline maps on my Toyota it cost me a $220 for the SD card from OEM, so a lifetime license is a steal.

I paid for OsmAnd+ a long time ago, now it asks me to pay a monthly 2.99 Eur for OsmAnd Pro it seems?

Their pricing model is confusing. There is a one off purchase for + and then a seperate monthly charge for pro. Some features are in both, some are just in one or the other and there doesn't seem to be any logic as to what features go into which.

Even if you buy it, they will still constantly nag for you to get their subscription service. And they arbitrarily lock most new features behind it, like 3D views and such.

One killer feature in OSMAnd is the ability to add new maps layers. It's possible to find Strava's heatmaps as overlays (unofficially), which can be really helpful for instance.

> Since its FOSS you can presumably just compile it yourself if you wanted to bypass the paywall (the ethics of this are left as an exercise for the reader).

Why would this be unethical? If the licensing -- that they explicitly chose to release it under -- allows this, then what you are really paying for is the convenience of someone else doing the build for you, and getting automatic updates. If you don't value that enough to pay, then it's perfectly reasonable -- and ethical -- to build it yourself and get the paid features for free.

(Not saying I'd do that; I do value someone else building and updating for me, and also appreciate the difficulties in funding open source enough that I'm fine parting with some cash for useful stuff. But I wouldn't look down on someone for doing a self-build.)

If you download OSMAnd from F-Droid you get all those features for free, except for Android Auto integration which isn't the fault of the developer, but because Google arbitrarily restricts anything not using GMS from working with it.

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