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Posted by tosh 7 hours ago

Organic Maps(organicmaps.app)
623 points | 183 commentspage 4
codingjoe 6 hours ago|
How is it different from OSMAnd?
TFNA 6 hours ago||
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.
fender256 3 hours ago||
Arcane and nerdy is a good description of OSMAnd. That's why I love it and would never switch to anything else.
xigoi 6 hours ago|||
Much better performance and much less cluttered UI, at the cost of having fewer features.
orbital-decay 25 minutes ago||
And at the cost of map fidelity. Complex curves look terrible at certain zoom levels in CoMaps/Organic Maps.
frabcus 6 hours ago||
Better and easier to understand and use UX.
thom 6 hours ago||
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.
zgucci 4 hours ago||
If there any chance for supporting AppImage for linux? Are there any plans for that?
etdznots 3 hours ago|
There is a desktop client but it’s kind of immature it seems to me compared to the iOS and android frontends
sgt 7 hours ago||
Will this take down Big Maps?
bmitch3020 7 hours ago|
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.

dhx 5 hours ago|||
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.

eisa01 6 hours ago||||
Agree!

CoMaps fork is adding OpenAddresses integration and traffic (linked above)!

https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/pulls/4162

mwexler 4 hours ago||||
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.

sehugg 5 hours ago||||
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.
bronson 7 hours ago||||
There's one more for me: reliable store hours.
dhx 5 hours ago|||
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.

ygra 6 hours ago||||
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.

exhilaration 5 hours ago||
Google doesn't just scrape websites for store hours, they actually call to confirm them: https://support.google.com/business/answer/7690269?hl=en
eisa01 6 hours ago||||
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

mmooss 3 hours ago|||
IME there is no reliable source: Stores' (including restaurants') own websites are inaccurate enough that I need to call them if I need to be sure. Yelp, etc. are at least equally inaccurate.

I'm sure it annoys the stores that keep their website and Yelp etc. updated but there is no way to know who is reliable.

photios 6 hours ago|||
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.

einpoklum 5 hours ago||
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?

palata 5 hours ago||
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.

johnsea 4 hours ago||
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).

palata 4 hours ago||
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.
int_19h 2 hours ago||
What was the nature of the disagreement?
palata 1 hour ago||
I think mostly transparency about how the donations are being used by the project.
cmdoptesc 4 hours ago|||
> 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.

thinkingemote 5 hours ago||
CoMaps is a fork/spin-off of Organic Maps, which in turn is a fork of Maps.ME
einpoklum 10 minutes ago||
Ok, but - how is Organic Maps better than Maps.ME (and is Comaps better than Organic Maps in some way other than the transparency issues)?
cobra_69 5 hours ago||
Is this support all countries? Specially Indian region
eisa01 3 hours ago|
Yup! It is worldwide since it uses OSM data

https://www.openstreetmap.org/

throawayonthe 6 hours ago||
is there any current benefit over comaps?
johanyc 5 hours ago|
comaps is a fork of organic maps
throawayonthe 3 hours ago||
correct
mistercheph 5 hours ago||
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.

kannishk 3 hours ago||
so helpful
roschdal 5 hours ago|
I love organic maps
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