CoMaps emerges as an Organic Maps fork | Hacker News Reader

CoMaps emerges as an Organic Maps fork

lwn.net

50 pointsaltilunium15 comments

Related post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44453888 (55 comments, 4 months ago)

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43961908 (206 comments, May 2025)

I wish them the best. I tried getting off of Google Maps, and it became a safety / quality of life issue to return to it (for United States driving directions). I tried both CoMaps and Organic Maps. CoMaps really struggled to know what address I was referencing for driving directions (and would take minutes to sort out the directions for long trips, a task Google Maps knocks out in about a second with one server query). It also doesn't seem to have the traffic signal data (or has a worse source for it) that Google has access to, and since I live too close to a major city to ignore things like "public event causes massive traffic disruption," I need that traffic signal in my route planning.

That having been said, we could use better solutions than trusting huge megacorps with a task as vital as mapping and directions, so I want them to succeed.

I feel like mapping for realtime directions for navigation with traffic and a PoI dataset info is a "money sinkhold" infrastructure problem. No one will pay for it especially if its "free" with google/apple.

Its just too difficult to manage _alone_ as an open source or not-for profit project or even a subscription based thing. Though there are nice niche alternatives like alltrails, nothing complete exists IIUC.

A company will have to have a solid adjacent source of income to support such massive projects, analogously to like how rust is paid for by mozilla by money from their other sources(like browser rev sharing). But as a new company, criticially, that rev stream cannot be _easily_ made from people's location data _alone_, not only because of privacy concerns, but because location product market is quite fragmented with 1000's of different products and it would become hard to scale those products to match the revenue stream needed to keep this kind of massive product alive.

I feel that at this point this service is so critical it could be provided as a utility.

It's pretty funny that the first order of business for the fork was to debate a "design lead" role. They decided against and it looks like the app is totally functional https://www.comaps.app/

It is pretty interesting because it is true that design is better solo'd than committee'd. I wonder how open source communities usually solve these issues.

They work in the open from the beginning, so it's easy to track:

What's up: https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/projects/16883

and an example of major UI discussion that you are interested in: https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/issues/348

I use it since the fork and love their energy and tempo. It's amazing when you take into account it's history, that it was closed source at some point (maps.me), opensourced, forked...

Presumably, "design" here is referring to the visual, graphic design.

> It is pretty interesting because it is true that design is better solo'd than committee'd.

This applies to all manner of "design", especially when it's at the edge/interface, which includes humans interfacing with a tool, but also with interfaces such as APIs. It's hard to maintain consistency and coherency and vision in the design of anything when it's committee'd and/or a free-for-all.

I just tried it, the map is nice but the bike routing is terrible (I checked for my commute, about 15 km, and it took a path as mixed with cars as possible)

The underlying maps are from Open Street Map[0], so you can contribute fixes.

[0]: https://www.openstreetmap.org

I contribute quite a lot to OSM. My point was that the routing for bikes is bad. The routes are avoiding lots of bike lanes and miss completely oarks and forests.

They are reachable by bikes on the map because of your add a stop they will bring you there, then back, even if the obvious route through the forest or park is better

Been using it since, warmly recommended.

The article is from June 13, 2025.

It is sad to see in discussions like this how ugly human behaviour can be. Many people work together to create something good and meaningful only for a few greedy individuals to exploit it.

I hope that one day, in a distant future, humanity will experience an awakening and finally rise against the destructive traits we inherited from our long-gone ancestors.

Maybe bio-hacking will come to our help...but probably it will make everything worse first.

uh, i think "related" is used a bit too loosely here...

Instead of genetically engineering humans to change their behaviour, I think forking the project is a good solution.

Seems like you're confusing societal incentive structures for human nature there, bud

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