I always assumed that Organic Maps was a sophisticated way to distribute OSM data, nothing more.
You're correct that the maps are OSM though, you can always contribute to OSM and that will also help Organic Maps (or whatever new community based map project comes out!)
Maybe a comparison would be this: if you want to hike somewhere the "old school" way, with a compass and a paper map. You will buy a paper map made by someone else, you will localise yourself on this map, and then you will trace a path between where you are and where you want to go. As you hike, you will update your location on the map (by using e.g. your compass) and choose your next steps accordingly.
In this example, the paper map is not doing any navigation. It doesn't know what GPS is, it doesn't have a compass. It's just map data printed on paper. You are the one making the navigation, right?
- OSM is the paper map.
- Organic Maps, or OSMAnd, or whatever app you use as a frontend to OSM is "the navigator" (you).
Does that help?
Organic was seen by many as this app, despite its specific choices like being offline.
Contributing to this app is hence very important for OSM to exist given Google & Apple Maps.
Use map data offline, user makes a correction/addition, upload that when app has internet access.
Ideally any app using OSM data would enable contributing to the underlaying map data. But that's probably not how it works.
For what it's worth: I like Organic Maps for being more lightweight, quicker rendering & simpler configuration than OSMand. But it (still? haven't used in a while) does lack some useful features like points of interest (supermarkets, gas stations & such).
Would be nice if it were easy to share (offline) map data between apps. Download in app A, backup on sd card , use from app B, C, D, or on other device by swap/copy sd card. Maybe it's possible, but I haven't figured out how (on Android). At least it's not easy/obvious/automatic.
I'm also really hoping for that. Some kind of local OSM map server that all apps in the ecosystem call to provide geodata.
I run OSMand, StreetComplete, Organic Maps and Magic Earth on my phone. I need all of them to download the exact same geo data. And for convenience reasons, I usually load entire countries. It's so annoying having to download a country in app #3...
Let's hope a community-led fork does so well that OM becomes a footnote in history. Or it causes OM owners to make a U-turn (but who cares @ this point. Just go ahead with community-led effort).
Would need a new name though. How about a public-is-invited contest?
Like the one linked to in the article?
Wasn't the whole thing about Organic Maps to be a community-led fork of maps.me?
So now we're at a fork of a fork?
This history is full of such "forks of forks" (whatever you're trying to imply with that):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix#/media/File:Un...
The very fact that a fork can be made is good for the users. It doesn't mean that users have to follow the latest fork, though.
I was pushing hard to replace Google Maps, but eventually, I gave up. OsmAnd is great if you need that "swiss army knife of OSM apps" on your phone, but I rarely do. Same with Maps.me/Organic Maps, try to search for something, mistype only one letter (surprise, surprise, that happens a lot on mobile), and you have no chance to get results. Alternative path for your bike route? Forget about it. Rendering is awful, either ugly, or slow, or both.
I am trying to switch to Mapy.com (Mapy.cz before), it's a surprisingly user friendly app, however, not sure how they are going to monetize soon. So far the best on phone, I hope they will push and really become a Maps-replacement. They recently switched from a Czech-focused concept to a proper world-wide map (mapy.com); both web and mobile is great so far. (I am not Czech, and have no relation to mapy, simply really like their app)
If OsmAnd got a new rendering engine (no, not that "3D" sluggish thing it has for a couple years now), like streetcomplete has (or the Strava-built-in mapbox renderer), it would be possibly the best.
Point-to-point navigation at places where you already downloaded maps is alright (same with osmand), but for exploration, or public trasnport, I would need to use moovit, mapy, osmand (wikipedia overlay is awesome), or google maps.
Although it'd probably be good to be able to query Transitous itself when online.
[1] https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/blob/master/docs/...
I tend to use the official app of the public transports wherever I am. Turns out many of them actually use OSM as a backend :-).
https://2019.stateofthemap.org/sessions/LBGPCD/
Unfortunately it didn't take off, was discountinued in 2023.
Photon is quite good at this, coming with english/french/german plug-and-play. But it's online, so very hard to implement on each user's phone, which is the limitation of Organic and Osmand.
Once you're using Photon or an equivalent project, you need to do a lot more to provide Google's experience : - itinerary suggestions like "from london to winchester" - coordinates detection - handle abbreviations like blvd, in all the languages (Nominatim does it better than Photon, from what I know) - handle category search, e.g. typing "coffee in Marais" -> a full-text-search won't work taking only the features' name, you need to do some semantic separation of terms - etc.
> Alternative path for your bike route? Forget about it.
Same pb : offline routing is harder. BRouter is excellent, with lots of alternatives, but online (can be installed on OSMand but it's nerdy).
Disclaimer : I'm working on https://cartes.app, a Web map app. We're using Photon and Brouter, but lots need to be done, including i18n to english, soon I hope !
What "3D sluggish thing" are talking about ? Streetcomplete, like most OSM vector 3D maps use MapLibre, for a few months now https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/pull/5693
Edit : sorry, I read Organic. Indeed OSMand is sluggish for me as well. I don't know why they went for something other than MapLibre. It's probably in-house and entangled in their code :/
Streetcomplete is amazing; I understand it provides less polygons to render but it does an absolutely amazing job at it, even when there are thousands of quests.
OSMAnd existed looong before MapLibre :-).
But my biggest gripe with using organic maps with driving is its search function. I couldnt care if it doesnt have all the online social features like google maps and come up with the police/safety warnings and restaurant ratings. I just want its seach to actually find the place I want to go.
Most of the time I try and avoid using google maps, but then I go back and try organic maps. Notice it doesnt have where i want to go listed in its search, so i google the address to plug in. I can enter in the exact address and it wont find it and then go back to google maps.
Try Magic Earth https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.generalmag...
I live in an area where OSM is really good with that (just because people contributed the data). If your area is less complete, it feels like it's a good opportunity to contribute!
There are many apps that will help you contribute to the map, or you can do it directly from the website: https://www.openstreetmap.org.
It doesn't mean you need to spend tons of time on it: I contribute data a few times a year. It's better than nothing :-).
What do you mean? It's possible to add intermediate stops to shape your route. Or do you mean something else?
With you on the search not being forgiving enough.
My example is going from Zürich West to Downtown. Here is my experience:
* Organic maps: calculates fast, although through a street with a lot of traffic, no alternatives offered.
* OsmAnd: takes 5 seconds on a flagship phone to RENDER the current view. I try to avoid zoom and pan. What the hell. Calculating the navigation is either a couple seconds or a minute. The whole UX is totally broken, however, at least you can select to prefer byways / bicycle routes.
* Mapy: fast rendering, fast pathfinding, alternatives offered, configurable to use bike paths.
* Google Maps: totally random what happens, it's a combination of the above (I guess it tries to use live traffic data, too?)
Now the funny thing is that there is an actual signaled bicycle path (which I prefer, since it avoids traffic), and OSM does have this data. None of the app would prefer that path, unfortunately (it's maybe 20 minutes instead of 18 minutes, but much safer).
It feels like most of the apps are hyperfocused on one type of navigation / exploration / feature set (being offline is huge, though), and nothing comes close to Google Maps' "not the best, but delivers alright UX across all these features" approach.
Yeah, getting a nice bike route on OrganicMaps indeed involves some manual app convincing when an obvious bike route exists, I had the exact same thing last week, I agree this could be improved especially given the data is already present in OSM.
There is often construction or other temporary issues, so having on-the-fly rerouting that I can trust is key.
How do you do this? Is there something I can read or watch about this? Are you using BRouter?
They now sell premium. Presumably some features (offline maps? or offline navigation? suggest a hike?) will be locked behind premium :-/ They do have great UX though
Would someone here know a similiar tool for iOS or MacOS? Or any recommendations to edit roads.
We are currently driving with a 4.5 tonne motorhome in Europe and the road weight and height limits are usually marked properly in osmand+ but when they are not we waste multiple hours rerouting in the alps and I would really want to help the next person in similar situation.
There's also EveryDoor [1] which is very nice to edit OSM and they do seem to have an iOS version. Depending on what you want to edit, it can be very handy.
I have not tried the numerous other, more advanced options [2].
The same is true for address search. If you have an online address search like photon the search can be more user friendly. We've put together photon and GraphHopper routing on GraphHopper Maps: https://graphhopper.com/maps/ which you could self-host on your own (i.e. also use offline): https://github.com/karussell/local-maps
GraphHopper Maps is also available on fdroid store or you can install the website as PWA in iOS.
Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of GraphHopper.
I don't know about others but that's the main reason I use it. My day to day mapping app is still Google Maps but I always keep a copy of Organic Maps with downloaded maps of wherever I'm going as a backup. While I do not use it often, it's gotten me out of a couple of sticky situations while camping and roadtripping.
Organic Maps (and other offline mapping providers) are far from perfect and the UX is just not the same as it is on Google Maps for example. But with it being a backup app, if I need to open it I don't really care about the limitations, I just need an offline map.
I'd prefer an open-source alternative, but as you said, there isn't any that currently fits my needs.
The concept is appealing—it's essentially Plato's philosopher king. The BDFL can unstick decision making and ensure the project moves forward without having to litigate every decision in committee, they maintain context and vision throughout the life of the project, and because they're not accountable to anyone they can make the right call for the project rather than having to make complicated political trade-offs. It's all the perks of a monarchy.
Unfortunately, we've seen over and over again that the BDFL model also has all the problems of monarchy. If you get a good one it's the most effective form of government, but people are fickle things. Frequently we see things like this, where the BDFL turns out to have been malevolent after all or decided that they are the project and are entitled to the sole profit from it. WordPress comes to mind.
A good BDFL is worth keeping, but I think we'll find that drawing inspiration for our community structures from real-world democracies/republics will be more stable and reliable in the long term and more generalizable across new projects. Democracies aren't perfect, but by design they smooth out the variance of the individual humans in the community, giving you much more predictable results over time than monarchies do.
So it's more like herding cats instead of nuking everyone that decides to ignore the presidencial orders or not paying taxes.
No one is happy about it, but collective action is hard when it's not baked into the system.
* Organic Maps devs are from Belarus, company is registered in Estonia. This is very difficult setup already, and I can imagine authors just want simplest setup possible. Perhaps they do not want to waste energy on nonprofit that is very very difficult and expensive to do internationally!
* If they sell the company so what? Create another fork and move on. It is opensource, but that does not mean authors can not get some money!
* Biggest expense for Organic Maps is hosting and mirroring map data. Is this fork going to use (and pay) their own servers?
* Is there list of developers and contributors behind this fork? I only found "us" and "we" and "community"!
Sure, but I think this is what's happening now. Not because they are selling the company, but apparently one issue is that nobody in the community knows where the donations are going.
They (CoMaps) complain about transparency regarding finances. I believe this would be a good reason to fork.
Non-profit does not guarantee transparency, look at Mozilla as an example.
This fork is just a bunch of anonymous dudes on internet, who setup PayPal and replaced donate button. Until they do map data hosting, there is not much credibility!
Edit: there are 3th party mirrors for manual download, so I guess they can use those.
In the research I did, OrganicMaps was the only viable open alternative to something like Gaia and it wasn't particularly close. It does a pretty good job of that, though their map styles leave some things to be desired and meter only topo lines is a bummer.
My limited experience playing around with the codebase made me appreciate that this isn't a small or simple project. It is a huge mixed codebase of C/Java/etc to share rendering across platforms and even just the map file generation is no small thing.
Color me skeptical that a fork will get off the ground, this seems more likely to me that both projects will struggle for a good while longer. Announcing a fork is easy, delivering something with enough value beyond rhetoric that will draw users over is another.
Could be, time will tell us. But it works as expected: people can fork if they want to, users can choose which app they use. Users can even use both OrganicMaps and CoMaps if that's better for them!
I currently use OrganicMaps and OSMAnd in parallel, depending on what I do. Works great!
Is anyone from the Organic Maps and OSM contributor communities familiar with the people forking this, and can vouch for their intentions and the necessity of forking?
How do we get confidence in that?
Today (bear with me), I was looking at a tool called SwiftWave it lets you run your own Platform as a Service. The only reason I mention it is that I found interesting how they’ve really broken the problem domain into a series of smaller open source projects.
https://swiftwave.org/docs/contribution_guideline
I’d love some folk riffing on how this may help, surely nice interfaces for cycling vs driving vs public transport don’t need to be reinvented across projects. How can diff apps work as an ecosystem to allow the brining together of more sophisticated apps that mirror the feature set of the large funded maps apps?
They mention financial transparency. I don't know the details, but "we want to know what our donations are used for" is a reasonable request to have, I would say.
ano-ther•3h ago
> There was no real progress in negotiations with Organic Maps shareholders.
> It appears that Viktor is only open to a guarantee not to sell the project, however besides that he wants to retain full control of Organic Maps.
> And Organic Maps future is uncertain still, as the disagreement between shareholders (Viktor and Roman) has not been resolved.
matteason•3h ago
netbioserror•2h ago
protimewaster•2h ago
johannes1234321•2h ago
I am not sure there is a huge market for selling the company, though, given the track record of the owners for taking the money and then forking away and trying to pull the users over.
lolinder•2h ago
The BDFL archetype is basically Plato's philosopher king. It's a nice and appealing idea in theory, and works well if you get a good one (Matz for Ruby, by all accounts). But it's risky, and it's hard to be sure yours is actually benevolent and will stay benevolent.
ChrisMarshallNY•21m ago
I often say that the best thing that I ever did for the project, was walk away from it. The team that took it over, has made it extremely successful.