Organic Maps was my go to app for a navigation app where you can fix errors yourself immediately! So much better than having to work for free on the proprietary apps, and hope they accept your edits
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!
Any ones which tries to avoid realtime traffic, especially in India? Also ones which detects some shortcuts as narrow, meandering roads that will be extremely slow.
I'll preface this by saying I can't speak for India. I live in the US. Use your own discretion to decide what here might apply to you.
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.
This looks really solid. It's the thing that would make me switch over. 90% of the time I know exactly where I'm going but need Google Maps to tell me what's unexpectedly in the way while I'm trying to get there.
My problem is that more often than not the road or business name I'm trying to find us just not in the database. If I'm at home I'll try to add it but if I'm driving that is not going to happen and I'll just use something else.
Yeah, that's a great call-out. While I can reckon my way most places, memorizing cross streets isn't my strength. Not having at least decent recency on top of traffic makes it tough.
> 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.
Indeed and this is one of the key reasons we have started CoMaps. The main OM shareholder made it clear to us that interests of the company and the shareholders are at the forefront.
Some parts of the server were closed source for a bit. No longer the case. Also people got upset that the developers used the product funding to pay for their personal expenses. The idea is folks want the developers to isolate all the money they make from this project and use it to only pay expenses directly related to this project. If they need to eat or something they should get a job, presumably.
> If they need to eat or something they should get a job, presumably.
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.)
> Some parts of the server were closed source for a bit. No longer the case.
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.
I was hoping for an offline open map with specifically tracking (My tracks from Google or now 3rd party) so I can log my adventures. bonus if I can save a printable thing for my wall or something...guess I know what this weekends project is.
OSMAnd is similarly OSM-based, offline, and FOSS (available from F-Droid) and does tracking. It is not typically recommended in posts like these because its wealth of options is daunting to the general public, while Organic Maps and CoMaps are more streamlined.
I would recommend people use comaps instead which is the actual FOSS fork. OM has a long history of malicious behaviour like quietly adding ads, turning a part of its previously open sourced code proprietary and misappropriating donations. OM has lost most of its community a year ago to comaps and are now rushing vibe coded features to compensate.
> the same people, who created MapsWithMe/Maps.Me app
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.
Organic mentions Open Source, but I just saw that FDroid mentions the following: "This app contains non open source components - compiled binary data files (including but not limited to .mwm map files) under a non FLOSS license"
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.
Would you consider using cache storage for enabling offline capabilities? Maybe I am in the minority but I usually go to organic maps for offline usage.
Yes it's planned. Should work in theory, but no one tried before.
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 ?
FWIW, I have an experimental open-source implementation of offline-capable PWA protomaps. Haven't advertised it much, because I haven't sorted out performance (particularly on mobile), and it's a bit buggy still. Also, don't have cache invalidation. But it does work. Usually. xD
I had my first hiking in a route without network connection one month ago, that was the first time I used the GPS without network by Organic Maps even I knew I could do it in the past. It showed me the possibility that some feature work well without network. It's a really good experience.
StreetComplete is one of my favorite apps. It's like Pokemon Go mixed with Wikipedia because it gamifies contributing to OpenStreetMap, which powers (all?) mainstream opensource maps.
Looking forward to iOS support so more people can use it.
> 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.
There are no tiles. All geometry is loaded and rendered directly from an SQLite database on every render.
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.
I would define a tile as a slice of geometries, not whole features.
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'm very pleased to see open source mapping/navigation systems. I have had the hypothesis for a while that many of the UI/UX designers on the google maps team do not actually drive a car.
People at Apple are not left-handed, they don't drive, they don't work out, and they don't seem to go out in the cold very much. Oh, and they definitely don't play video games.
I used comaps on a hike. It really is good at not draining your battery.
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?
Organic Maps a great app in many ways, but I still don't get how people can actually use it every day and say it replaces Google Maps when its search feature totally stinks. I know it's a hard problem, but this is the number one thing that needs to somehow be fixed. I can't tell if I'm just too dumb or if FOSS/degoogle fanboys are just pretending. I just know I've tried to use it exclusively many times and always had to give in to Google Maps because the search totally failed.
This is more about OSM than Organic Maps, and I agree that looking for businesses it's not great. But looking for mapped features such as toilets, water taps, benches, fountains, etc. is far superior.
I actually think the search feature rocks, because you have high fidelity OSM maps to query. Can't search for drinkable wells in Google Maps!
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.
+1 That, and it works in mountainous areas like the Alps or Pyrenees, where you're lucky to have GPS and most definitely can't rely on 4G for Google Maps
We the FOSS world just have 100 to 10000 less budget to implement this feature. It's a hard problem, and you can't ignore that lots of other features are missing. E.g. street view or place comments.
Is there a nautical map equivalent of osm or organic maps? One that emphasizes waterways by drawing them thicker when zoomed out like regular maps draw roads thicker? Plan routes over the water? Even google maps lacks a nautical layer.
This is exciting!! I was not aware of organic maps until today. I use offline maps in google maps also. It's not fully private if it requires GPS connection though!! That's why I have been working on https://github.com/deepanwadhwa/anumaan for a while now. The focus is on navigating without internet and without GPS.
> It's not fully private if it requires GPS connection though!!
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.
You are largely correct about everyday location privacy but I was thinking more in the adversarial direction (read military/ GPS denied zones) when I started this work. There have been news about GPS being denied/spoofed over european region. When your phone can't get the GPS signal, it would try to retrieve alternative signals (A-GPS, cellular network etc) - this is where an adversary could be listening for leaks. So GPS denial could effectively be a trigger and the follow ups after that trigger could lead to leaks.
This is correct but if the phone's internet is off, there is no way for BSSID look up but maps might collect this in the background for telemetry and send it to the server once the internet is turned back on.
I use OrganicMaps a lot for long walks and it's great. Works perfectly offline if you have downloaded the map of the region beforehand, which is helpful if you are in an area with poor reception or just want to conserve phone battery by turning off data. And being OSM, it is great for showing less prominent paths/trails and other useful info like drinking water sources, picnic benches etc. And supports importing GPX trails. So IMO it's way better than Google Maps for this use case.
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.
This is my regular hiking and cycling map, fantastic for offline use as well!
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.
I had bad experience tracking my bike ride with it on iOS - seems like app offloaded and didn't record half of the track. Strava and OutRun don't have this problem.
I remember over 15 years ago my wife and I were honeymooning in Europe (rom the US). While we had iOS devices that could use maps, the data services then were terrible, and GPS was effectively useless
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
I'll repeat a question asked in an earlier thread on OM:
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.
Always loved this. There are still parts of the UK where you’ll have no data offline navigation is great, and the walking paths are better than you can get elsewhere.
It's a fork from Maps.me, the streamlined map app popular with normies. I myself use and love OSMAnd, but in the travel communities I am active in, most people react badly to OSMAnd as something arcane and nerdy.
How does Organic Maps differ from Maps.Me (which it also mentions), or PocketEarth mentiond in comments here? Or CoMaps for that matter?
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?
In terms of forks, I believe it was Maps.Me -> Organic Maps -> CoMaps.
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).
I didn't say "founders", I said "community". The community is more than just the founders. If anything, the part of the community that left did it because of their disagreeing with the founders.
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.
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.
While default osm data is great, I've been very impressed with the partnership/collective of Overture Maps data. It's osm + esri/tomtom + corporate processing/funding.
1. This is largely country-dependent with some governments being quite adamant that address data should be in the public domain, and some governments doing the opposite and selling address databases to private companies for some quick cash, where private companies then sell address lookups for some absurd per-lookup price for the next few decades. Most of the world though is probably just not rich enough to compile, publish and accurately maintain a national address database.
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.
Also current place names. You can sometimes find a business on OSM that has correct metadata, but in many areas the majority are missing or stale (like, closed 10+ years ago.) Solving this is an "interesting" problem to say the least when many businesses these days have nothing more than an Instagram/Whatsapp handle.
See alltheplaces.xyz for continuously updated straight-from-the-primary-source opening hours of chains of shops and restaurants, public facilities such as libraries, etc. This is probably as accurate as it gets AND you have the confidence of knowing exactly where the data came from (down to the URL) and when it was last checked.
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.
Both this and addresses is something that's really easy to survey with StreetComplete.
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.
Yeah (2) is the killer feature especially in totalitarian shitholes (pretty much every country nowadays) full of money grab ops disguised as police checkpoints and cameras.
I wonder if we can build a decentralized version of such a reporting service.
Using CoMaps gave me the "Oh shit!" moment for the first time that the convergence of enough high quality open map data and a reasonably designed maps app to consume it was finally happening. It's crazy to think about how much thankless work it took to the point where we have something that is in many ways at parity and even exceeding in some dimensions the user-hating map software.
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.
This belongs to a class of thing I've been predicting for a while: as non-volatile storage (not RAM but flash etc.) gets cheaper and cheaper, offline snapshots of quantities of information that used to require an Internet connection to practically access become possible.
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.
Offline-first used to be the norm before everything started requiring an internet connection for some reason. I was using OSM data offline 15 years ago on smartphones.
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.
This sounds like an optimistic comment from a decade ago. Cost of storage has gone up recently, as a glance at data-hoarder fora will show. Phones have less storage capacity nowadays inasmuch as many manufacturers are removing SD card slots. The idea is that normies keep stuff in the cloud; self-storage of very large amounts of data is an edge case.
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.
Tried it for while, works with GrapheneOS and Android Auto well enough.
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.
Organic Maps was my go to app for a navigation app where you can fix errors yourself immediately! So much better than having to work for free on the proprietary apps, and hope they accept your edits
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!
https://www.comaps.app/ https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps
All these apps rely on the data provided by OpenStreetMap (OSM). It is a Wikipedia-like project where anybody can contribute edits.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/
Any recommendations for an OSS maps app that provides tracks like Strava,l and Komoot?
Any ones which tries to avoid realtime traffic, especially in India? Also ones which detects some shortcuts as narrow, meandering roads that will be extremely slow.
I'll preface this by saying I can't speak for India. I live in the US. Use your own discretion to decide what here might apply to you.
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.
[1]: https://trid.trb.org/view/1495267
There’s actually work ongoing on live traffic support from various public sources!
https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/projects/21877
This looks really solid. It's the thing that would make me switch over. 90% of the time I know exactly where I'm going but need Google Maps to tell me what's unexpectedly in the way while I'm trying to get there.
My problem is that more often than not the road or business name I'm trying to find us just not in the database. If I'm at home I'll try to add it but if I'm driving that is not going to happen and I'll just use something else.
Yeah, that's a great call-out. While I can reckon my way most places, memorizing cross streets isn't my strength. Not having at least decent recency on top of traffic makes it tough.
There’s Magic Earth which uses OSM map data but also integrates live traffic information. Not sure whether it works in India, though.
https://www.magicearth.com/
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/
Thank you! This is highly relavant. I wish OPs would put a bit more research into what they post
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.
> a small group of shareholders
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.
Indeed and this is one of the key reasons we have started CoMaps. The main OM shareholder made it clear to us that interests of the company and the shareholders are at the forefront.
what are the concerns over governance of organics maps ?
They tried to put ads into Organic Maps, and they only backed down because CoMaps sprung up in response.
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_....
Some parts of the server were closed source for a bit. No longer the case. Also people got upset that the developers used the product funding to pay for their personal expenses. The idea is folks want the developers to isolate all the money they make from this project and use it to only pay expenses directly related to this project. If they need to eat or something they should get a job, presumably.
https://www.comaps.app/news/2025-04-16/1/?ref=itsfoss.com
> If they need to eat or something they should get a job, presumably.
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.)
Going on holiday is why I work. And I use organic maps when I’m on holiday. And donate. Good luck to them.
> And donate
How do you square this with Organic Maps being organised as a for-profit entity?
Same as when I donate money to Apple.
> Some parts of the server were closed source for a bit. No longer the case.
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/
So sad. I imagine 99.9% of organic maps users will never know.
I was hoping for an offline open map with specifically tracking (My tracks from Google or now 3rd party) so I can log my adventures. bonus if I can save a printable thing for my wall or something...guess I know what this weekends project is.
OSMAnd is similarly OSM-based, offline, and FOSS (available from F-Droid) and does tracking. It is not typically recommended in posts like these because its wealth of options is daunting to the general public, while Organic Maps and CoMaps are more streamlined.
Comaps can record tracks if that's what you need :-)
I would recommend people use comaps instead which is the actual FOSS fork. OM has a long history of malicious behaviour like quietly adding ads, turning a part of its previously open sourced code proprietary and misappropriating donations. OM has lost most of its community a year ago to comaps and are now rushing vibe coded features to compensate.
> the same people, who created MapsWithMe/Maps.Me app
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.
Organic mentions Open Source, but I just saw that FDroid mentions the following: "This app contains non open source components - compiled binary data files (including but not limited to .mwm map files) under a non FLOSS license"
Anyone has context on the following not hidden over Git-* issues (I was left thoroughly confused trying to understand it)?
OrganicMaps rolled their own 'data license' for the actual map files: https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/blob/master/DATA_...
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.
>Plus the code that's necessary to generate the map files that OM relies on is no longer openly published.
Seems like a big red flag. And another reason to migrate to CoMaps.
Organic Maps and its fork Comaps still lack a Web client.
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.
Would you consider using cache storage for enabling offline capabilities? Maybe I am in the minority but I usually go to organic maps for offline usage.
Yes it's planned. Should work in theory, but no one tried before.
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.
FWIW, I have an experimental open-source implementation of offline-capable PWA protomaps. Haven't advertised it much, because I haven't sorted out performance (particularly on mobile), and it's a bit buggy still. Also, don't have cache invalidation. But it does work. Usually. xD
app: https://maps.bpev.me
source: https://tangled.org/bpev.me/maps
Based on results from indexeddb pmtiles work:
https://github.com/jtbaker/pmtiles-offline
https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles/issues/395
I had my first hiking in a route without network connection one month ago, that was the first time I used the GPS without network by Organic Maps even I knew I could do it in the past. It showed me the possibility that some feature work well without network. It's a really good experience.
StreetComplete is one of my favorite apps. It's like Pokemon Go mixed with Wikipedia because it gamifies contributing to OpenStreetMap, which powers (all?) mainstream opensource maps.
Looking forward to iOS support so more people can use it.
https://streetcomplete.app/
https://www.openstreetmap.org/
For the more experience OSM contributors, there is also a fork called SCEE[1] that adds some extra "quests" and a ton of UI customisability!
[1]: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/SCEE
iOS has Every Door[1] and there’s also MapComplete[2] which works as a PWA.
[1]: https://every-door.app [2]: https://mapcomplete.org
There is also https://gitlab.com/tilelessmap/tilelessmap with some of the same focus areas.
> 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...
I am curious: is it called "tileless" because it uses tiles, but offline? Or does it somehow not use tiles?
There are no tiles. All geometry is loaded and rendered directly from an SQLite database on every render.
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.
> There are no tiles. All geometry is loaded and rendered directly from an SQLite database on every render.
Which can be done with tiles. Or maybe I don't understand what you mean by "tiles"? What do you describe as "tiles"?
I would define a tile as a slice of geometries, not whole features.
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.
IIRC it usually means it stores the vectors and draws it clientside.
If there any chance for supporting AppImage for linux? Are there any plans for that?
I'm very pleased to see open source mapping/navigation systems. I have had the hypothesis for a while that many of the UI/UX designers on the google maps team do not actually drive a car.
People at Apple are not left-handed, they don't drive, they don't work out, and they don't seem to go out in the cold very much. Oh, and they definitely don't play video games.
IDK, my hypothesis is that they only go anywhere by car. The way they hide public transportation and pedestrian-only streets sucks.
I used comaps on a hike. It really is good at not draining your battery.
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?
I just wished Organic Map had a better way to download many countries/regions at once.
I frequently use it in the airplane without WiFi and wish to have high definition, but downloading country by country is too cumbersome.
Organic Maps a great app in many ways, but I still don't get how people can actually use it every day and say it replaces Google Maps when its search feature totally stinks. I know it's a hard problem, but this is the number one thing that needs to somehow be fixed. I can't tell if I'm just too dumb or if FOSS/degoogle fanboys are just pretending. I just know I've tried to use it exclusively many times and always had to give in to Google Maps because the search totally failed.
This is more about OSM than Organic Maps, and I agree that looking for businesses it's not great. But looking for mapped features such as toilets, water taps, benches, fountains, etc. is far superior.
I actually think the search feature rocks, because you have high fidelity OSM maps to query. Can't search for drinkable wells in Google Maps!
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.
+1 That, and it works in mountainous areas like the Alps or Pyrenees, where you're lucky to have GPS and most definitely can't rely on 4G for Google Maps
We the FOSS world just have 100 to 10000 less budget to implement this feature. It's a hard problem, and you can't ignore that lots of other features are missing. E.g. street view or place comments.
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 guess it depends on how you use Google Maps, but I mainly navigate to addresses, and Comaps works fine for that.
search greatly improved in the past couple years. try it again?
I thought I updated the app before my recent backpacking trip in Europe, but I will give it a try again.
E.g., in the CoMaps fork test builds there is now a change to prioritize nearby places more
https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/pulls/4604
Another CoMaps Search issue:
https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/issues/4449
Is there a nautical map equivalent of osm or organic maps? One that emphasizes waterways by drawing them thicker when zoomed out like regular maps draw roads thicker? Plan routes over the water? Even google maps lacks a nautical layer.
The OSS tool for nautical charts is OpenCPN.
OsmAnd has a nautical map plugin you can enable.
The plugin is just part of why OsmAnd is good for nautical use, there is also an alternate view in the configure map menu for nautical use.
For some reason osmAnd was the only GPS map that would work on a flight for me.
This is exciting!! I was not aware of organic maps until today. I use offline maps in google maps also. It's not fully private if it requires GPS connection though!! That's why I have been working on https://github.com/deepanwadhwa/anumaan for a while now. The focus is on navigating without internet and without GPS.
> It's not fully private if it requires GPS connection though!!
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.
You are largely correct about everyday location privacy but I was thinking more in the adversarial direction (read military/ GPS denied zones) when I started this work. There have been news about GPS being denied/spoofed over european region. When your phone can't get the GPS signal, it would try to retrieve alternative signals (A-GPS, cellular network etc) - this is where an adversary could be listening for leaks. So GPS denial could effectively be a trigger and the follow ups after that trigger could lead to leaks.
They may be thinking of Google's coarse location feature where the handset checks SSIDs in the proximity against Googles database for fast lookup.
This is correct but if the phone's internet is off, there is no way for BSSID look up but maps might collect this in the background for telemetry and send it to the server once the internet is turned back on.
Is it feasible for something like this to have heatmaps?
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.
Don't think anyone other than Strava and Komoot have sufficient user-generated trail database to be useful for your use-case.
I use OrganicMaps a lot for long walks and it's great. Works perfectly offline if you have downloaded the map of the region beforehand, which is helpful if you are in an area with poor reception or just want to conserve phone battery by turning off data. And being OSM, it is great for showing less prominent paths/trails and other useful info like drinking water sources, picnic benches etc. And supports importing GPX trails. So IMO it's way better than Google Maps for this use case.
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.
This is my regular hiking and cycling map, fantastic for offline use as well!
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.
How does this compare to AllTrails for discovery, tracking and accuracy?
I had bad experience tracking my bike ride with it on iOS - seems like app offloaded and didn't record half of the track. Strava and OutRun don't have this problem.
For offline use I use pocket earth https://pocketearth.com/ I'm pleased with it, it's one of the best out there.
I remember over 15 years ago my wife and I were honeymooning in Europe (rom the US). While we had iOS devices that could use maps, the data services then were terrible, and GPS was effectively useless
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
I believe MapsWithMe (now Maps.me) was released about that time, but I personally didn't get an iOS device until 2013.
At that time I think I was using CityMaps2Go. Not sure if it still exists though.
Migrated all of my pins to Organic Maps from Maps.me when it started to aggressively monetize. Smooth process. Been a happy user for years!
I'll repeat a question asked in an earlier thread on OM:
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?
Storage constraints haven't been on developers' radar last 20 years.
> The sillyness & waste of this is obvious
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.
Always loved this. There are still parts of the UK where you’ll have no data offline navigation is great, and the walking paths are better than you can get elsewhere.
How is it different from OSMAnd?
It's a fork from Maps.me, the streamlined map app popular with normies. I myself use and love OSMAnd, but in the travel communities I am active in, most people react badly to OSMAnd as something arcane and nerdy.
Much better performance and much less cluttered UI, at the cost of having fewer features.
Better and easier to understand and use UX.
How does Organic Maps differ from Maps.Me (which it also mentions), or PocketEarth mentiond in comments here? Or CoMaps for that matter?
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?
In terms of forks, I believe it was Maps.Me -> Organic Maps -> CoMaps.
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.
Organic Maps was founded by two of the Maps.Me authors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_Maps#History).
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).
I didn't say "founders", I said "community". The community is more than just the founders. If anything, the part of the community that left did it because of their disagreeing with the founders.
> What might make me switch?
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.
CoMaps is a fork/spin-off of Organic Maps, which in turn is a fork of Maps.ME
Is this support all countries? Specially Indian region
Will this take down Big Maps?
There are two things keeping me using "Big Map".
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.
While default osm data is great, I've been very impressed with the partnership/collective of Overture Maps data. It's osm + esri/tomtom + corporate processing/funding.
https://overturemaps.org/
While not updated as frequently, their releases have a pretty high quality and coverage.
1. This is largely country-dependent with some governments being quite adamant that address data should be in the public domain, and some governments doing the opposite and selling address databases to private companies for some quick cash, where private companies then sell address lookups for some absurd per-lookup price for the next few decades. Most of the world though is probably just not rich enough to compile, publish and accurately maintain a national address database.
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.
Agree!
CoMaps fork is adding OpenAddresses integration and traffic (linked above)!
https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/pulls/4162
Also current place names. You can sometimes find a business on OSM that has correct metadata, but in many areas the majority are missing or stale (like, closed 10+ years ago.) Solving this is an "interesting" problem to say the least when many businesses these days have nothing more than an Instagram/Whatsapp handle.
There's one more for me: reliable store hours.
See alltheplaces.xyz for continuously updated straight-from-the-primary-source opening hours of chains of shops and restaurants, public facilities such as libraries, etc. This is probably as accurate as it gets AND you have the confidence of knowing exactly where the data came from (down to the URL) and when it was last checked.
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.
Both this and addresses is something that's really easy to survey with StreetComplete.
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.
Google doesn't just scrape websites for store hours, they actually call to confirm them: https://support.google.com/business/answer/7690269?hl=en
Agree, which is why I added support for displaying when the hours were last updated in CoMaps
Organic Maps didn’t accept my PR with it…
https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/issues/688
Yeah (2) is the killer feature especially in totalitarian shitholes (pretty much every country nowadays) full of money grab ops disguised as police checkpoints and cameras.
I wonder if we can build a decentralized version of such a reporting service.
Using CoMaps gave me the "Oh shit!" moment for the first time that the convergence of enough high quality open map data and a reasonably designed maps app to consume it was finally happening. It's crazy to think about how much thankless work it took to the point where we have something that is in many ways at parity and even exceeding in some dimensions the user-hating map software.
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.
is there any current benefit over comaps?
comaps is a fork of organic maps
I love organic maps
This belongs to a class of thing I've been predicting for a while: as non-volatile storage (not RAM but flash etc.) gets cheaper and cheaper, offline snapshots of quantities of information that used to require an Internet connection to practically access become possible.
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.
Offline-first used to be the norm before everything started requiring an internet connection for some reason. I was using OSM data offline 15 years ago on smartphones.
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.
This sounds like an optimistic comment from a decade ago. Cost of storage has gone up recently, as a glance at data-hoarder fora will show. Phones have less storage capacity nowadays inasmuch as many manufacturers are removing SD card slots. The idea is that normies keep stuff in the cloud; self-storage of very large amounts of data is an edge case.
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.
This is amazing
Tried it for while, works with GrapheneOS and Android Auto well enough.
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.
amazing