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!
CoMaps forked out of OrganicMaps after a row about money
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.
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.
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_....
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?
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/
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.
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:
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.
> 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.
Looking forward to iOS support so more people can use it.
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?