https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48794575

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.

My only complaint to OrganicMaps was the slowness to calculate a direction, which in part is certainly because the path is calculated locally instead of some cloud server but old garmin devices also weren't online and can calculate paths on far less powerful hardware. So I'm guessing there is room for improvement on that part.

It's timing estimates are often 5-15 minutes off Apple Maps, which I find accurate, on ~two hour drives, but I imagine it depends on the traffic.

To improve OpenStreetMap, which CoMaps uses as the data source, I use StreetComplete[1]–it puts quests around your location which ask you questions, it's user-friendly. A thoughtful feature is that it lets you download data in a location on wifi, in case you didn't want to use cellular.

OpenStreetMap is like Wikipedia for mapping, anyone can contribute and improve the map, and StreetComplete is like Pokemon Go in the sense that you walk around and complete quests, except StreetComplete helps humanity, while Pokemon Go[2]....

I should check to see if I can notice my StreetComplete edits getting onto CoMaps. Might be hard because they're often about accessibility at crosswalks. I've seen quests asking the number of stairs in a staircase. Seriously, is there anything they don't collect?

[1] https://streetcomplete.app/

[2] Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48487029 26 days ago 317 comments

i think one thing that's going for google is the network effects and what it's able to do.