There is also CoMaps (https://www.comaps.app/) which is a fork of Organic Maps, after concern over the governance of Organic Maps https://itsfoss.com/news/organic-maps-fork-comaps/
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.
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.
This app has had quite a history.
(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_....