Organic Maps
organicmaps.app
organicmaps.app
There’s a fork from one year ago, CoMaps, that is gaining different features
E.g., I am adding CarPlay Dashboard support that you can test by joining the TestFlight
We are in great need of both more testers and some proper iOS devs (I am not). We’re racing to get scene lifecycle support by September, perfect opportunity if you like modernising old codebases!
I've been using Organic Maps for almost 3 years. I lived in Chicago during this time, as well as some smaller American cities. I go back and forth between Organic Maps and GMaps depending on the situation.
I've found that Organic Maps' lack of traffic data isn't a big deal for me. It doesn't always give you an accurate ETA, sure, but it isn't any worse at actually getting you to your destination.
The thing with GMaps is that everyone has traffic data, so nobody has an advantage. Google's alternative routes end up equally saturated as the main routes, meaning a "dumb" maps app that always takes the main route will get you to your destination in basically the same amount of time. This is backed up by my own personal experience, and some academic research [1].
Now, when I do need an accurate ETA, I go back to GMaps. I'll also use GMaps to route to businesses sometimes, because OSM doesn't have up-to-date info about businesses throughout most of middle America.
Saved me a lot of speeding tickets on the interstate.
As someone who isn't a speed demon, I still like the police warnings because it's a timely reminder to check myself. Am I matching the flow of traffic? Do I blend in? Am I making myself a target?
I'm no speed demon (it's just not worth it IMO). But, in Chicago you can do 10-15 over on an interstate and nobody cares. The cops are doing 20 over. If I saw someone actually doing 55 on the Dan Ryan I just assumed they were stoned, and I'm only half-joking. Elsewhere around the Great Lakes, it was more like 5-10 over. Meanwhile, in the Bay Area the flow of unimpeded traffic is usually only 0-5 over.
Some places live traffic information gives you a choice between a 10 minute way and 40 minute way though, if you get stuck in the wrong spots it really truly sucks, and for us who live in these places, being able to easily route around those spots saves us a bunch of time and energy.
I want to use any client app that uses OSM for car navigation, as I contribute both money and map fixes, but currently nothing seems to come close to either Wave or Google Maps when it comes to traffic information, which ends up being pretty important (for some), so I end up using Organic Maps only for when I walk on foot.
I lived in one of those alleged places (Chicago) and didn't observe this in practice. When Google sees that 10-minute route, it quickly starts routing drivers that way, and eventually both routes equalize around, say, 30 minutes. When two routes are that disparate, by the time you actually get midway through the faster one, it's just as congested as the slower route.
I think there's a weird psychology to these apps. When Google gives you a wack route through a residential area, it feels like you're getting an advantage. It feels like you're beating traffic. But you never beat traffic in a car, because you are traffic. And Google never sends only one car on a faster detour. It was always half a dozen of them or more. I saw this a million times in Chicago.
Getting pretty local here, but I remember one of Google's favorite alternate routes vividly. Instead of taking the Edens south into the Kennedy junction, it would have you exit onto Foster and then take some rando residential street south to Montrose or Irving Park. Every single time it did this, I'd see a parade of cars in front of me and behind me. The white glow of GMaps on a new car's infotainment screen is unmistakable. I could see what was going on, all of us could see what was going on. Meanwhile, you're driving past a bunch of kids waiting for their bus, or a ride home from school, and those are all delayed because me and a hundred others are using a side street as a commuter artery. This saved, on a good day, five minutes on a 35 minute commute. It was more antisocial than it was efficient.
It's not necessarily about "advantage", especially on longer journeys. What if there is a crash on the Autobahn 1 hour in front of me? Even if I don't reroute, I at least have a choice of planning my toilet and lunch stop _before_ the crash site.
It is also possible to plan a different route if the crash is visible so far ahead. There are usually multiple routes I could take, and I decide based on the traffic and other factors, where I go. It can depend on the time of day, the time of year, etc. Maybe usually I don't take the one which is 100kms longer, but in the case of a crash, or even just heavy traffic it could be quicker still.
So for any non-trivial journey, I always use navigation, even if I could drive to the other place blindly. It's not really about navigation, it is about the current situation on the roads.
CoMaps forked out of OrganicMaps after a row about money
The hardest thing about any effort that is two or more people is the interpersonal, coordination, consensus, and organization aspects. Everything else is easy in comparison.
If they have to negotiate, constantly settle, and get no money, that's a hard sell.
Organic Maps is organized as a for-profit entity. CoMaps is not. This is a real difference, and the former asking for donations makes it look like a scam.
insanely shameful if not
the real reason is that user content, either you don't have anybody contributing, or you're flooded with abuse. there's no middle.
E.g., OrganicMaps often creates these kinds of notes: https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/5377887 which for certain kinds of edits is safer than trying to directly edit. StreetComplete does the same in many cases when something no longer exists. I think, shops and other places can often be added directly, though since that has little to no ties to existing data.
But yeah, I'm using mostly StreetComplete (SCEE) when outside, sometimes Every Door and Vespucci. For offline map apps like Organic Maps it's likely not easy resolving potential conflicts with live OSM data that might be weeks or months newer than the map data in the app.
In batches, to be exact. Multiple edits in relatively short intervals (a few minutes) are commited as one.
Do you have the slightest idea what OpenStreetMap is and how it works? It sounds like you have absolutely no clue, and it still doesn't prevent you from using that kind of language.
Would it be more accepted to just do a few small, potentially not metadata-complete edits myself or is the review structure (if there is any) geared more towards fewer, more steady contributors?
Did one direct edit once and iirc it took ages to land in the map and I wasn't able to grasp if came from new editors' edits being scrutinized more carefully by too few reviewers, from the nature of the edits (deleting a bunch of buildings after demolition and probably not replacing it with the right area type) or if the release cycle for new edits to be included is just way longer than I would have expected.
Different maps have different update cycles. The slippy map on osm.org is meant to update as quickly as possible, usually a few minutes, but sometimes there are hiccups. Zoom levels that show larger areas also update a little slower.
As long as what you are adding is up to date/accurate, I wouldn't worry about whether you've captured everything about the features. "This thing is here" is a lot better for the map than no information.
What StreetComplete is very good at, in my opinion, is simply QA on the ground. SC asks about features existing on the map (benches, bus stops, shops, roads, barriers, etc.) and some of them might go stale. So asking about opening hours of a shop might cause someone to look and notice that the shop is closed now, or replaced by another one, so in many cases the quests that add detail to objects have the nice side-effect that those are being looked at and reviewed whether they still exist, which otherwise does not happen often. The barrier to adding new data is often lower than fixing or removing outdated information.
And it's such a low barrier to entry, especially for people not familiar with OSM's tagging, since the UX is very well designed for beginners in my eyes (while still being useful for advanced mappers), that you can easily recommend it to people who like those kind of hobbies (e.g. geocaching, Pokémon Go). For me it was an excuse to go outside more, also to places I haven't been, during COVID-19, just to tick off another quest.
If you're keen on checking it out you should be able to find it in my recent Github contributions, following the link in my profile.
The difference is the planning, I'm building my tool around a collaborative use case. I'm often doing multi day bikepacking trips with my close friends. The planner supports real time collaboration, so multiple people can plan on the same route together.
Also for me it's an experiment in AI driven development (which I hope won't alienate people to much).
I can’t say what the exact cause is. Should probably work that out. But I’ve taken to recording using it and all trails at the at the same time with plans to bring the missing data over to comaps at some point.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/UIKit/transitionin...
Regarding testers we had a TestFlight build with non-functioning CarPlay, and it was only discovered by me (and I don't even own a car..)
If you're interested in taking a look, the easiest way to get involved would be to join our Zulip instance (Slack clone): https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/src/branch/main/docs/CONT...
Does Organic maps / CoMaps offer anything OsmAnd+ doesn't for someone who uses it for car navigation (especially on back roads in the wilderness) as well as hiking? (All in the Nordic countries.) I also record tracks with it.
CoMaps seem sincere.
For Nordic/outdoors, outcomes using either osmand/comaps/etc in practice are going to be very similar.
OSMand is a cartographer's friend - it does everything and more... With all the drawbacks of doing that.
CoMaps is better targeted to the needs of most people.
Thank you. Both use OSM. The similarities are so slight I'd be inclined to recommend a region specific map, as is our friend with norgeskart.no for those particular cases.
I admit I haven't reloaded OsmAND this year, but I do every year, and delete it every year. Moreover, for me, using OSM is partly to get away from trackers, and facebook at all costs.
Both have free apps (norgeskart has a 50kr / year subscription to support and add more features), and both are incredible for navigating trails, marked and otherwise, anywhere Norway.
But from this and sibling comments it seems that CoMaps have nothing to offer me (except possibly better search).
CoMaps is a much simpler and faster interface, that I use for driving navigation. (I use a 7 year old S10e, though, so it's possible that on a modern phone you'd not notice the difference?)
YMMV, but they're both free, so it's easy to try and see for yourself :)
- CoMaps is much simpler, but lacks features. OsmAnd has (too many) features and requires heavy configuration, e.g. to disable some features I never use and optimize battery life.
- Loading a track (GPX) in CoMaps is cumbersome (you have to "Open with..." from a file navigator). OsmAnd can load tracks from within the app, and just display them or turn one into a route. With CoMaps, I couldn't load more than one on a map. My GPX routes are prepared with BRouter on my desktop computer, since both apps are unable to build routes of 150 kms
- CoMaps is better at energy saving. OsmAnd drains my battery in 5-6 hours when the screen is on (the screen roughly accounts for half of the drain). YMMV. For long rides, I switch the phone off as soon as I don't absolutely require its help for navigation.
- OsmAnd has features that I would never give up. Notably, displaying markers on "drinking water" POI, so that I know when I'll be able to refill, or decide if I must deviate my route toward a drinking tap.
- There are more maps and data in OsmAnd than in CoMaps, and more visualisation options.
- Last time I tried CoMaps (from F-Droid), at some point the screen went blinking, alternating between home and CoMaps. The only way out was to shutdown the phone.
[edit: BRouter for routing]
Have you considered a dynamo hub with a headlight with USB output?
In CoMaps, they are shown under: search > categories > water (then you can press "show on map"). Not straightforward, but it is there. Fairly enough, don't know if "water" includes drinkable ones only.
I did buy OsmAnd a long time ago, but have since used the OsmAnd~ and needed an OSM client for a car.
I like OsmAnd because it is very powerful, but comaps is more elegant.
This seems like an interesting project to contribute a little bit to, but I can't deal with Java anymore...
It's probably easiest to discuss in the project's Zulip: https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/src/branch/main/docs/CONT...
Switch to Kotlin: https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/issues/1984 Migrate to Compose: https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/issues/4298
(Yes the OsmAnd+ is the paid version, but it is the old pay-once version and I have definitely got my money's worth at this point, and it supports an open source project.)
Why use fork of a fork which lacks features of the previous one?
Users don't care about dev drama, if it doesn't affect them.
The tone of this comment is quite different from the text of the open letter to which you refer. Specifically this section. I don't have any personal knowledge either way, but this stood out to me.
> As it was revealed by Roman @rtsisyk it wasn't unusual for the Shareholders to use project's donations as their own money e.g. Alexander @biodranik paid for his personal holiday trip expenses this way. At the same time all other contributors were consistently denied any access to any financial information (even to the totals of money donated/spent). (It's fine for developers to be reimbursed for their hard work, but it should be done in a fair, transparent and accountable way.)
How do you square this with Organic Maps being organised as a for-profit entity?
I don't think this is true. You can donate to a for-profit corporation. It just counts as income to them and isn't deductible to you.
Hardly disagree with this claim. Donation is something you give without any expected usage - otherwise it is a fundraising, payment, investment, etc.
In fact, nowadays there are many more closed parts in OM's map generator - many OM's bigger new features like hiking, cycling and bus routes depend on closed source improvements to the map generator. And some binary files required to build the app (e.g. packed_polygons.bin) are nowadays distributed under a custom non-FOSS data license. I.e. nowadays its basically impossible to fork OM as is with all its features - and the "right to fork" is a cornerstone of FOSS.
Also ref to: https://isitreallyfoss.com/projects/organic-maps/
Others in the thread highlighted other issues, like Organic Maps' proprietary license for some parts of the repo: https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/blob/master/DATA_....
https://itsfoss.com/news/organic-maps-fork-comaps/
> Despite being advertised as a community-driven project, key decisions, including financial management, partnerships (with Kayak, for instance), and the inclusion of proprietary components in the code were made by a small group of shareholders, often without input from the broader contributor community.
This is sketchy. The entity at the bottom of the page is Organic Maps OÜ, which is an Estonian private limited company. Estonia has non-profits (MTÜs). The fact that this isn't organised as one makes it a commercial venture, except one that asks for donations.
This app has had quite a history.
Contrast this with Apple Maps - when you open it, there are 4 big tap controls for actions like "Home" "Work", a search bar, and a map that covers a 1-mile radius around you .
I'd encourage your UX flow to go something more like: request location services > if granted, immediately start downloading their local tileset in the background > zoom to a 20-mile radius around the user
Instead of a pay-to-access model, a sustainable consumer map ecosystem could look like Wikipedia, or better yet, a peer-to-peer network like IPFS where you trade compute (route calculation) and storage. It could be a barter: you get to use the collective resources of the network because you are actively hosting tiles, routing data, or contributing metadata back into it. But that requires a critical mass to take off (like bitcoin did).
OpenStreetMap is great, but what we actually need is a modern consumer frontend built on top of an open, distributed layer: decentralized public registry for user-generated content, keeping your routes and trip itineraries discoverable by any client app rather than locked inside VC-backed silos.
Furthermore, current open-source projects miss a lot of quality-of-life features that commercial apps have—things like crowd-sourced opinions and reviews about places, public transit schedules, real-time traffic alerting and reporting, location sharing, street-view, and dependable speed limits during navigation. Without these active, live-data layers, the map looks stale and lagging behind the real world.
The user interface also needs to shift from a passive viewport to a high-contribution editor. Right now, if you want to make serious geometry edits, you’re forced into JOSM. It’s hard to boot, clunky, and quite clearly has never seen a proper UI/UX designer, scaring away everyone but the most hardcore power users. I'm a person who doesn't give up easily, but when I tried adding parking zone regions for the city I gave up after 2 days of trying to make some sense of this software. A modern mobile UI should let you freehand draw a route that snaps to paths, edit regions on the fly, or drop advanced metadata — like parking restrictions — in just three obvious taps, without a steep technical learning curve.
Finally, the client app itself should be a pluggable core. Instead of building every feature from scratch, it should allow users to plug in open modules for whatever they need, whether that's live public transit routing, traffic estimates, location sharing, or advanced 3D metro overlays. The data is there, and the rendering tech is there; we just need a shared, distributed network structure so companies can't charge us a premium to gate the social and metadata layers. I wish there was an EU initiative to have a fully featured app like that, unifying all the existing ones in place of N abhorrent, barely functional implementations in all of the different local public transport apps (looking at you italian AMT genova or you, french IDF mobilites).
Nope. I do not want any app to start downloading hundreds of megabytes without my permission.
How are they not ads? Is this the "icloud storage promotion in ios settings" discourse again?
I understand that you, being a contributor to CoMaps which people can see on your page, want to promote it, but it’s just spreading false info. Just one Russian community of OrganicMaps in Telegram has 4000+ members, CoMaps RU is not even at 200. Global group of OM is at 1650, CoMaps is at 840 of it.
It’s not OM who is compensating all over the place in this thread.
[1]: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap_Carto [2]: https://www.maptiler.com [3]: https:/osmapp.org
OSM in my experience is better at features (roads, hiking trails, and stuff like that), i.e. what's shown in that comparison screenshot.
Google Maps is better at place-metadata, such as opening hours; as well as user-contributed content like reviews and photos.
So I end up using both, depending on usecase.
But it really depends not only on the presentation theme but also on the data set itself and that varies by region. I'm sure that there are still places where the sources Google is buying are better than whatever is on OSM, just like there are regions where OSM is just so much more detailed than everybody else. And yet others, where OSM is generously fed by an entity that also supplies Google and all the others because they are not doing it for the map, they are doing it for the place.
CoMaps was forked from Organic Maps because of shift in how things were being done and ignored. I mean, those in IT know very well how that is ending.
CoMaps is highly active and receiving new features release by release.
If you wanna use a 5 stars app based on OpenStreet Maps: https://www.comaps.app/download/
The fact that OP just posted Organic Maps URL here with no context, and not mentioning that it is a dying project with its user base massively shifting to CoMaps, that is a red flag on its own.
I know the answer, tried both, I will let myself out...
It’s coming though: https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/pulls/4111
I have been using it to explore trails and 4WD tracks, just enabled it on the map at the top left corner.
You will see Outdoors which enables the trails/4WD tracks, Contour Lines and Subway.
And - as it had been mentioned above already - its coming to CoMaps too.
Trails and 4WD tracks have a distinctive colour semi-continue lines. I am using exactly that to discover new places and it has been awesome.
Anyone has context on the following not hidden over Git-* issues (I was left thoroughly confused trying to understand it)?
Plus the code that's necessary to generate the map files that OM relies on is no longer openly published. So while true that the actual app code is open source, you can't use it without relying on their proprietary map files.
Seems like a big red flag. And another reason to migrate to CoMaps.
Why do you think OM user base forked and mass migrated to CoMaps?? haha
Looking forward to iOS support so more people can use it.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:surveillance:type%3D...
So you can just add them using a normal OSM editor like EveryDoor or Vespucci
Maybe this flock camera situation would provide some impetus to getting this conversation moving again
With SCEE you can add the camera and then select it and use "edit tags" to add all the properties. I find it a nice middle ground between a full editor like Vespucci and the quick and easy SC. Haven't tried EveryDoor or MapComplete yet though (the latter's website aims to be as good as a native app would be, idk if they also have an app nowadays but it's an option either way) though
StreetComplete makes painfully visible that OSM is missing this info in a lot of places, but I never heard of any other map even trying to provide this accessibility info
In German cities I find that it's relatively complete btw, but yeah many places (also in Germany) don't have any data at all. Maybe there should be some collaboration where people can sign up for being notified if a blind person would like to visit an area near them and they can do a survey. It's not like it takes a lot of time to answer some questions about the five crossings a given village(-sized area) will have
I have since noticed, to my frustration, that whatever map data Uber uses has the same issue, and will send Uber drivers to this road behind my house that doesn't actually have any access. Trying to explain this to Uber and get it fixed is basically impossible.
We're this on https://cartes.app, trying to push the Web further (even on mobile devices) so that you don't even need an app for most use cases.
Maps are so often done as native apps that to my knowledge no one tried to just use the PWA capabilities to cache tiles on the Web. Of course what's hard is cache invalidation. Does the user want to update the tiles ? Never ? Daily, weekly ? Only some regions ? Or manually ?
Here's an issue about that : https://codeberg.org/cartes/web/issues/1078
It's in French, unfortunately Codeberg has no auto-translate capabilities yet.
app: https://maps.bpev.me
source: https://tangled.org/bpev.me/maps
Based on results from indexeddb pmtiles work:
I'm not saying ego problems don't exist of course. But taking Osmand and making a simple general public app out of this is a huge effort (human and tech), probably more than building a side app.
We've not seen anything from their side. We don't really understand why they wouldn't want a proper Web version.
It's even worse in the non-open source world : Kagi's maps are bad. Qwant dropped their cool map project, too expensive. Ecosia has none, redirects to Google, its main competitor.
They could "just" clone cartes.app and run `bun i && bun start` and `ansible-playbook` to launch their instance of cartes.app, but we can't reach them. Or fund the project.
What's important though is that we collaborate on the tools we all use. OSM, MapLibre, Photon, Pelias, Protomaps, Motis, Brouter, etc. are all tools that we somehow share, each end-user app having their own combination of them.
We also thought like you do when outside of this world. But now, its a human problem. How to reach people and how to gain the time that it would take to collaborate ? We don't have the keys.
> TilelessMap is an open, offline-first mapping engine designed for critical field use, such as forestry, emergency services, and humanitarian work. Built with C and optimized for mobile performance, TilelessMap enables full local map rendering without relying on cloud infrastructure — even in areas with poor or no internet connectivity.
They have an Android app with maps of Yellowstone, Sweden and Norway.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.tileless.m...
Geometry is stored as TWKB (Tiny Well-Known Binary) to reduce storage and transport size. During decoding, they do clever work using aggregate functions and reusing buffers across rows to reduce allocations.
There is real potential in the tech, but unfortunately little momentum behind it.
Which can be done with tiles. Or maybe I don't understand what you mean by "tiles"? What do you describe as "tiles"?
The difference with Tileless' approach, is that they load whole features from the database and don't split them into tiles. So if a feature extends outside the current view, they would load the whole geometry rather than the intersection of the tile's extent and the geometry.
Vector tiles are optimized for concurrent downloads and browser / CDN caching and doing a good job of that.
I've wanted to run it on my wear OS watch, but while you can sideload the APK, wearOS does not have a file browser, so it's not possible to import a planned route or similar. Has anyone here any idea for how to solve this?
There is still a super long way to go until it suits everyone's needs, but the end + even further is starting to come into sight.
Offline maps are an obligatory "survival" tool. Most people trust too much they'll have connectivity, but it'll be the first thing to go down when it's most needed (extreme weather, blackouts, conflicts, etc).
Thank you for the tip on the app!
Next it should standardize region naming.
For example, the new region is called “China Hong Kong” (every online ordering form out there does simply “Hong Kong”). Simultaneously, Taiwan is just “Taiwan”, so it’s clearly not about following a party line. Simultaneously, places like Falklands (not without its own disputes), South Georgia, Saint Helena have no mention of UK in their respective region titles, while Hawaii and Puerto Rico both lead with USA.
I think they should stick with toponyms, instead of trying to be some sort of political arbiter.
This can mostly work for sub-national names, but doesn’t really address cases such as Taiwan, Cyprus, etc.
Ah, the same people who I bought Maps.Me from in 2012 - that when I went to use it recently now bombards me with "sale ending in 4 hours!" pro subscription ad popovers in order to restore functionality (more than 10 offline map areas) that existed at the time I bought the app? No thanks.
I use OM for a lot of years and never saw any aggressive money ask, could you point me what I am missing?
The developers seem a serious bunch, the issue tracker has been actively curated for years (although it's snowed under). They have a subscription business model, which is a bit opaque but seems to be functional. And yet everyone always has the same complaint about the app: terrible UX.
If only the Organic Maps people had contributed their undoubted skills to improving OsmAnd.
The interface is a bit cumbersome, but it got way better over time and there are some really engaged developers behind it you can always contact. It's intended for biking and hiking, but you can also use it for cars. Meanwhile, they even support android auto.
It's the type of app that grew massively over decades and that offers basically every functionality that you can imagine.
Example: a modern mid-high end phone can contain this, a complete copy of Wikipedia, and a small LLM capable of understanding natural language queries and using tools. All on board, no connection needed.
Plus it an also carry most peoples' complete music and book collections and a meaningful chunk of most peoples' movie collections.
A mid-high end laptop can carry all of it and then some. Laptop and desktop storage is gigantic by previous generation standards. Mine is a higher end laptop but has 8TB storage. 512GB to 1TB is mainstream.
In my country, the typical laptop purcase from a retail chain is still 512GB or so, and moreover, few and fewer people own a laptop since it is becoming normal for a smartphone to be one's only computing device outside the workplace (even uni students are foregoing "real computers" now). Anything more than such a basic laptop is a premium product, and premium products cost premium prices.
The reason it moved to the internet was not that it wasn't possible to stay offline-first. If the app depends on your server, then the owner can monetise that (e.g. with subscriptions) or track the users. It is more interesting for companies than allowing the users to buy a snapshot of the maps once and never come back.
Offline-first nowadays comes from open source projects, not from companies.
Organic Maps migrates to Forgejo due to GitHub account blocked by Microsoft - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43525395 - March 2025 (49 comments)
Organic Maps Turns 4: The Privacy-Focused Alternative to Google Maps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42470155 - Dec 2024 (6 comments)
Organic Maps: Offline Hike, Bike, Trails and Navigation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42343654 - Dec 2024 (1 comment)
Maps.me co-founder tries to close down Organic Maps open-source fork - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42343121 - Dec 2024 (72 comments)
Google removed Organic Maps from the Play Store - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41272925 - Aug 2024 (224 comments)
Organic maps: Experimental feed based public transport mapping - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41152559 - Aug 2024 (35 comments)
Organic Maps is a free Android and iOS offline maps app for travelers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39582797 - March 2024 (24 comments)
In 2023 Organic Maps got its first million users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38746187 - Dec 2023 (88 comments)
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)
Organicmaps: Android and iOS offline maps app for travelers, tourists, hikers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27543012 - June 2021 (113 comments)
there's an app too, some features are paid, and there are some long-standing bugs, but is otherwise quite fine. I use it when I want a map, not just uniform gray void with roads that is google maps.
How so? GPS is like FM radio: you send nothing, you only receive.
Apps like organic maps or comaps let you use the maps fully offline and you can compute itineraries without GPS when your need this (from point A to point B, with as many stops as you wish).
I strongly recommend you to seriously look into comaps or organic maps if you don't know them.
Now, "GPS isn't working or depletes my battery, what do I do?" is an interesting topic worth looking into. It seems you are trying to automate what we all do when GPS doesn't work well. I find that relatively easy in a city, not so much in a road on the countryside.
That's not really GPS anymore so when discussing the topic it would be worth being exact on this.
If by AGPS you are referring to the use of nearby WiFi and cellular networks and querying a service for that (there are ways to have that info purely offline, but I do believe such databases rely on many people leaking their positions to exist at all), I'm not convinced your approach helps much:
1) if you run stock iOS or Android with the Google services, I believe you are already screwed anyway: I wouldn't trust them not to constantly leak stuff about you in the background even if you don't actively use the GPS, at least to build their traffic info and to keep their access network-based location database updated. If you are concerned about the privacy aspect of this stuff, you should be getting rid of the Google services anyway. That leads to the next case:
2) If you are running a phone without the Google services, then you don't have that kind of AGPS. Unless you go the extra mile of explicitly configuring microG to enable network-based location. I used to do this, but on my current phone, getting the position purely from GPS has been so reliable and quick that I didn't bother setting this up (I suppose it could provide some battery saving, but there are privacy concerns indeed, and not relying on such databases that basically depend on people giving up bits of their privacy is always nice). Your main concern there would be the shady blobs most phones run that could be doing you don't know what behind your back, but that's regardless how you use your phone.
If by AGPS you mean the download of the data about the positions of the GPS satellites (MSA) then yes, indeed, I agree, you will leak to your service provider (but not more than if you are not already fully offline - so basically if you use your phone like a phone you already leak as much) and to the server providing the data (which is probably Qualcomm (XTRA) or Google, or possibly your service provider). Then the solution is fully offline, and your current options are non assisted GPS, which can take 10 minutes in good conditions to get a fix if you haven't used it in a while, and reading the map. From what I understand, your current strategy is to help with the latter, which needs to be better than eventually getting a GPS fix (which feels somewhat niche, but I can see some advantages).
(There's also AGPS MSB where you basically ask a remote server to compute your location from what your GPS receiver gets and nearby cellular networks, the leak here is obvious but from what I've read this is quite rare nowadays, it was more useful when GPS receivers didn't have enough compute power to do the compilations themselves, so that would be mostly irrelevant.)
All in all, if I'm not wrong (happy to be proven wrong): as far as privacy is a concern, depending on what you mean by AGPS, your approach only applies to, respectively, devices without the Google Play Services or similar stuff, or to fully offline devices. It needs to be better than, respectively, GPS assisted with the satelite positioning data (which can be good for up to 7 days and then updated through regular GPS if I'm not wrong), or regular GPS. I believe your angle of attack can be battery usage, or better than the time to get a GPS fix. That seems quite tough especially that your approach as I understand it is intrinsically scoped (works mostly in cities where it's easy to ask about what's around).
I believe a stronger angle of your approach is resilience: less dependency on the GPS system which can indeed be jammed or which can fail (although there's redundancy: we do have several constellations of satellites from different countries, so a general failure seems unlikely, and a GPS failure would be catastrophic because many critical things depend on it).
Now, there are devices or places (especially in dense cities with high buildings) where the GPS simply doesn't work well, so a convenient, privacy-preserving alternatives to the GPS would be great in those situations6!
are you sure this is true? - i can still run the phone on airplane mode(with GPS off) after i have the maps downloaded and can go anywhere afterwards. i don't think there is any communication with the outside world after that.
I am not sure if you looked at the repo I linked. In the intro I clearly state that I am doing this work for my own curiosity and for a hypothetical scenario (where GPS is denied). Moreover, the tech I am relying on (TERCOM) has applications in other fields as well such as navigating under water (submarines use a version of this). Or missile systems such as tomahawks which use tercom extensively.
I'm sure I don't trust them.
> I am not sure if you looked at the repo I linked
I did skim it to get a grasp of your approach. But I'm answering statements made here too.
I think your project is worth pursuing. I'm genuinely curious what you come up with. This is actually why I spent quite some time writing my comments: I hope they helped you in some way. I do believe your project could use clearer presentation of the motivation (here or in the readme). In particular, the "GPS is not private" statement and the fact you didn't know about the existing private open source offline mapping solution also rang an alarm in me (a comparison with the "state of the art" would be nice). "Imagine GPS is jammed / is not available at this time at your place with your hardware" is actually sufficient as far as I am concerned. Relying on a privacy-preserving solution out of principles even on a spy phone comes with caveats that need to be exposed but I believe in this approach.
I'm not pushing back. If you have something like a blog that I could follow, I would subscribe to its RSS feed because I'm quite interested actually. If not, well it's already quite nice you share your curiosity work with the world.
why? that's a bit of an overreaction from your alarm bells honestly. i didn't know about organic maps because i never looked up for this solution and never came across this specific app in my readings. what i am working on (and want to figure out) has less to do with commercial angle of privacy (which organic maps solve) and more to do with navigating without relying on any external signal. i truly think we should be able to navigate earth (land/sea/air/subs) without any external human controlled signal (GPS/Internet/radio etc); that in my mind is true offline navigation. but you can argue that organic maps is also an offline navigation app and i think for an everyday user that's true.
your comments are helpful. thanks for being so thorough with your thought process. i am trying to write on https://trulytyped.com/user/4f448758/deepan-wadhwa - but i have not written anything technical yet and there is no RSS button there yet. let me add it today haha. thank you.
> why? that's a bit of an overreaction from your alarm bells honestly.
Maybe. Let me explain myself. In a former life, I worked in academia and you kinda triggered my research mode (which is, believe it or not, quite positive for you). There, your work is easily more solid and convincing if you reaserched a bit the state of the art. By working on an alternative to GPS navigation, in such a setting, I would expect you to know the field well.
Now, I understand that you didn't particularly look into apps pretty much focused on GPS positioning since they are not supposed to do what you want, and I'm aware that you aren't doing academic research nor pretending to.
> let me add it today haha. thank you.
No pressure, I'll try to think of coming back to check once in a while. Thank you as well.
But then, it of course isn't Google Maps. It is likely to be more out of date and will not understand "natural" search queries as Google does. I believe it just takes some getting used to. There is overlap between the two, each service has its strengths and weaknesses, but also unique features.
I'm working on https://cartes.app and we're well aware that search is not on par, far from it. But we have hundreds of other features and bugs to fix. https://codeberg.org/cartes/web
I've had Maps.Me on my phone for some years; it's often not as accurate or polished as the commercial offerings (Google, Here Technologies), but it's pretty nice. What might make me switch?
The following overview might help a bit: https://www.comaps.app/support/how-do-the-features-differ-fr... https://www.comaps.app/support/how-does-the-comaps-project-d...
So all forks of the same project. Maps.Me is not open source anymore (I think?), and CoMaps was started by a subset of the Organic Maps community that wasn't happy with the Organic Maps governance.
> What might make me switch?
Different reasons for different people, but OpenStreetMap is a great community project, for one. What I really like with those apps (I am now using CoMaps) is that they are open source, offline first and the UI is quite minimal and clean.
With CoMaps I don't think, there are any original authors involved (?). In any case I prefer organic, the original. Donated and very grateful that this app works so well (except for search where I sometimes use another app).
Google Maps will always have better POI data because they have a larger userbase and they've gamified adding POIs with the "Local Guides" badge.
The main reason to switch is to have an offline-first experience. Google Maps does not provide offline maps everywhere, e.g. South Korea. And if you've ever tried using the Google Maps app on a weak connection, it's frustrating because it still tries to download remote tiles instead of using the ones you've downloaded.
Lastly any contributions you make in OpenStreetMap will show up in Organic Maps / CoMaps for everyone.
Personally, I use Google Maps on a daily basis, but have Organic Maps and regions downloaded for travel and just switch between the two. It's good to have a reliable fallback.
We ended up taking screen shots of Google Maps where we zoomed in on local streets, on an ad hoc type atlas. I wish we had this app back then
Tried CoMaps, saw no reason to migrate to it at all - why migrate to basically no-name app (in terms of popularity) which is developed by who knows who (not even a Maps Me or OM devs) if Organic is totally good, has updates, stable, works well and has no ads? Have no idea what is this ad talk to be honest.
OSMAnd is nice, but too cluttered, OM is much easier to use. Only cool thing is being able to get live updates to a map if you changed something in OSM, but never actually used it for real.
I regularly try comaps, but while it's pretty smooth at rendering, the detail is visibly lacking at anything except maximum zoom level. When enabling contour lines, it's cluttered and hard to read. I tried to use it a few times on hikes, and while it's still much better than gmaps, if you're looking for something to use on a hike as an actual readable map and not just something to follow directions on, I'd say bite the bullet and get osmand.
osmand has indeed confusing interface, but the map rendering itself is excellent and can be heavily customized as needed.
On the web front, tracestack and mapy are both excellent presentations.
It's also very easy to edit some basic data through the app so if you notice an error in the map it's usually possible to fix it right there and then.
Comparing a building in my city between the two maps by flipping between the apps, it looks identical to me. Not a scientific test though
Edit: didn’t know about the ads / proprietary server issues. I guess this is the only sort of place to find out unless users are browsing the GitHub repo.
Google Maps is very good at showing car parking spaces, which is the requirement if you live in a suburb in California like its developers.
Do there exist apps that share their offline map data? As in: install app A, dowload offline map data for country xyz, use in app A, install app B, use same map data in app B (or C, D etc) without re-downloading the map data?
As I understood, that was not the case as each app uses its own format which is some underlying public geo info (presumably too big to have on device), filtered / processed in per-app fashion.
The sillyness & waste of this is obvious. So: any progress in resolving this situation?
Until you realise that there is not one true way to show a map, and that different apps may actually have different needs. Suddenly it becomes obvious that not all apps can use the same shared offline data.
I make changes to OSM so they can be propagated to a cycling-specific mapping tool I use (it's a commercial tool with their own custom map layers) - it takes about 3-4 weeks from when a change is made on OSM for it to be incorporated into their data set.
So yeah, it's not as simple as "we all use OSM so we'll just share all our rendered mapping values".
Users could pick & choose what subset(s) of map data they want to store locally. Different apps could pick & choose what features to offer, how to use available data & how to render it.
Sad to see that such a conceptually simple problem hasn't been addressed yet. We're talking a good # of apps here, many millions of users, and enormous amounts of storage & bandwidth wasted.
Edit: I'm assuming that last bit is a problem for the app developers themselves, too.
Some apps show raster tiles. Which means that if you want a different style, you just cannot share them. If you want the same style but you don't want to show exactly the same data, you can't share them. "Ok, you say, I personally don't care about raster tiles, I believe that everybody should be happy with vector tiles". That is wrong, but let's assume it.
Vector tiles are much more compact, but at the cost of the rendering engine: it has to read the information stored in some format and render the map according to different things like the style. How do you load the data to access it and rendering rapidly? Maybe you want to remove data so that it's more efficient and doesn't lag, or maybe you really want all that detail and more phones will lag when loading. Maybe you want to optimise the storage, so you remove the information you don't want to show, etc. Those requirements are incompatible, it's a tradeoff. Different apps choose different tradeoffs and therefore don't share resources.
Don't get me wrong: some apps could decide to share resources, and that would be fine. But it's not like all apps have the exact same needs and should obviously be sharing all that.
If you think that maps are "obvious" and a "conceptually simple problem", then you surely don't know much about what goes under the hood when you load a map in your phone. It's is actually quite complex.
So you can see the work of keeping map files cross-compatible would either hamper the release of new features, or take a bunch of work, all to save a few hundred MB on people's phones
I frequently use it in the airplane without WiFi and wish to have high definition, but downloading country by country is too cumbersome.
1. Address lookups. Many of the buildings in OSM have yet to get street addresses added, so navigating to an address is a bit hit or miss. This gets fixed with time as people update the maps and wouldn't be a show stopper.
2. Real time traffic and detour navigation. This is really needed when navigating around busy cities where a wreck on a major highway can result in significant delays. This needs a combination of an external service (separate from OSM) but also one that has enough adoption to have usable data.
Google has the benefit of having their own street-level imagery for house numbers and street names, Android devices for real-time traffic info, and the ability to simply scrape web pages for shop data including opening hours. but in places with a reasonable number of active mappers, OSM is so much richer and more up to date.
There are cases where a brand might have broken opening hours information such as "Mo- Tu - We 09 00 -4 p m". For alltheplaces.xyz scrapers, a human is often able to make sense of the situation and fix the problem through a few lines of extra code. Contacting the business to get the hours confirmed would only be necessary in very rare cases.
Where it would perhaps make the _most_ sense to contact a business to confirm opening hours is:
1. Ahead of public holidays to confirm planned temporary changes to opening hours. Many brands don't bother to update hours on their websites for such temporary changes, or at least don't list those hours until the week prior, which is usually too late for OSM, ATP, offline maps, etc which would ideally want to know these changes to hours up to a year in advance.
2. To confirm actual dates of permanent store/restaurant closures. Many brands in liquidation tend to fire the website developers (or can't pay them to work) and leave an outdated website online until the final shop or restaurant is closed. Commonly it's only some "CLOSING DOWN SALE LAST DAYS EXTENDED TO FRIDAY" post on social media that informs visitors accurately.
Organic Maps didn’t accept my PR with it…
Almost a year ago, that is SO COOL! I'll be trying CoMaps for store hours now.
Some OSM contributors go brand-by-brand/operator-by-operator in making sure OSM features have the most up-to-date opening hours added to them from matched ATP features. As such, OSM may be fairly accurate for chains too.
For a standalone shop or restaurant the opening hours situation is usually still better with Google Maps rather than OSM. There aren't enough OSM contributors who care enough to check and maintain opening hours for every shop, restaurant, fuel station, etc.
I'm sure it annoys the stores that keep their website and Yelp etc. updated but there is no way to know who is reliable.
I wonder if we can build a decentralized version of such a reporting service.
CoMaps fork is adding OpenAddresses integration and traffic (linked above)!
OpenAddresses is perhaps the gold standard for open source address data compilation from government datasets. Note for the future that alltheplaces.xyz (project I contribute to) is looking like it may eventually perform the automatic address data download/extraction/compilation that OpenAddresses currently performs. This has the benefit that in backwards countries, alltheplaces.xyz also obtains some addresses through other means--such as advertised location of international restaurant chains. And quite often, being within +/- 100 address numbers on a road is good enough for navigation. Google Maps obviously crawls addresses from all over the Internet AND has quite a high tolerance for errors, hence will perhaps always seem more complete than OSM.
2. Some further ideas for open source mapping applications trying to determine real time traffic situations:
2a. Use GTFS/GTFS-RT feeds for bus networks to detect real time delays but also to compare planned bus route schedules for different times of the day (different traffic conditions) where buses share the road with the public. There's already a few maps out there that overlay nearby GTFS-RT feeds for the city of interest and usefully provide a visual indication of how well public transport vehicles are currently moving.
2b. alltheplaces.xyz extracts public traffic camera feeds which could be presented to users when they plan/commence a journey as an indication of what lies ahead on the route.
While not updated as frequently, their releases have a pretty high quality and coverage.
https://github.com/orgs/OvertureMaps/discussions/298
That being said, it's hard to fault them for trying to monetize some dimensions that are not well supplied by the public, and that companies work to acquire. Still, I agree, it's disappointing.
Maybe the data could be shared/distributed via hypercore or similar.
I find heatmaps are my primary way of finding new mountain biking trails and routes.
Edit: hmmm I don't think I understand that wiki. Most of those are not the type of heatmap I was thinking of. I'll keep looking into it though.
Here's a link that has traces enabled (aka layer "G"): https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/52.47166/13.40590&laye...
There's also a list of recent uploaded traces: https://www.openstreetmap.org/traces
What I absolutely can’t stand is the routing. It once tried to send me through residential Oakland on some Manhattan-grade staircase labyrinth instead of just taking normal streets.
Always best to double check the routing suggestion.
(CoMaps is the open-source, non-profit community fork of Organic Maps.)