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
Disclaimer: I make this
Thanks to you folks, Street Complete will also come handy to make places more accessible.
How I've done similar before is to record a GPS trace with an OsmAnd plugin, upload it to OSM servers, import it as an overlay in the web-based editor on desktop, and used that and satellite imagery as reference to draw in the missing trail.
In a pinch you can also record a trace and edit directly on it in the field with the Android app Vespucci, but its UX is clunky and much less friendly to new contributors than the web-based iD editor.
If you added a gopro and SLAM to the GPS trace and imported USGS topographical data I wonder if you couldn't fully automate the process.
In areas where 3dep is recent, you can usually see a trail under forest cover. It's pretty great.
OSM also has a public database of GPS tracks that contributors use to aid in mapping. Even just walking the trails with GPS tracking on and then uploading the tracks to OSM without doing anything else is a valuable contribution that will allow other contributors to map the trails at some point in the future.
I use the app Vesspucci for actual editing, it works well (but larger changes to OSM is a "full PC" kind of task). Notes from StreetComplete (from all users) show up on a TODO list in the app, so the more advanced users can decided on whether they want to create a node on the map from the note.
By improving OSM, it allows people to use privacy respecting maps like CoMaps which work offline. I'm sure intelligence agencies are pretty happy with the ability to ask Google where any google account is at any time.
Billions of people us Google maps, is that not disturbing that google knows where that many people are?
What I find interesting to see, and I think it's not just me who can see this - that basically every mention of CoMaps and why it is good and Organic is bad is it not only seems to be mostly written not by a regular users, but by people who contribute to CoMaps (!) - they all fail to show why exactly anybody should migrate from established app with authors who have years of experience of making Maps.Me and OM - to a basically a no-name (based on downloads) clone who is made by... "community"? We don't even know who that is, original developers and people with experience are not involved.
All the talk is not about functionality of the app or anything which is actually important to users - it's all basically complaints about some kind of _internal drama_, add some misleading stuff about "dying project" or "lost community" from some commenters. So many cries about "ads" which are not actually ads but affiliate links in hotels POI which nobody clicks anyway, it's so mild it's just weird to lament about, at least I as a long time user see no issue at all.
I can advise CoMaps community to focus on developing the app which can actually make real users migrate and use because of functionality, speed or other things that matter, instead of making your community look toxic because of this trash-talk. Show real improvements in comparison with OM - make live maps updates like OSMAnd, make bookmark folders with specific colors tied to it, make app barely eat any battery, make convenient and powerful interface to add data to the map - then people will move. But for now Organic Maps is totally fine and many people like me see no reason to move from it anywhere.
FYI I've been the most active non-shareholder contributor of Organic Maps for 3+ years. Though you won't see me (or other ex-OM contributors who've left to start CoMaps) in OM github contributor stats anymore, because OM had banned us (and nowadays they also ban users in their chats and SM accounts for just mentioning CoMaps). But you can still see our PRs, e.g. I've authored Outdoor map style amongst many other improvements.
You're right though that CoMaps had been founded because of things like governance, transparency, community and FOSS values, while many users are just interested in features (and hence often prefer Maps.ME even, which is like 10x more popular than OM looking at downloads).
In short:
It was perfectly legal to publish this code (Apache 2.0 repo and DCO signed agreeing its a public contribution) and OM shareholders have always claimed that the map generator code is open and people are free to fork it.
However it turned out they were holding back a bunch of commits to prevent people from easily forking the project while maintaining still that the commits are FOSS and will be eventually pushed to the main repo, its just they're "experimental" still (but in fact they had been used in prod for a few years already).
We made an agreement to fix this discrepancy and push the commits to the public repo, so that we can honestly state that Organic Maps is truly an open source project with no tricks and reservations. This has happened several months before the conflict between the shareholders and community contributors.
And indeed a good part of the commits had been pushed public during next months. And when I published the rest of the commits OM shareholders knew about it of course and again they didn't say anything against it.
However after about a month (after negotiations to improve OM governance has failed and ex-contributors, me included, have started CoMaps) they have started accusing me of "stealing" those commits.
If you're interested in more details then please refer to https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/organic-maps-open-lett...
At first we've been having discussion and arguing about the matter and related topics in OM chats. But people saw their very shaky arguments and how they refute their own previous words about openness of the maps generator etc.
So then they started just deleting such discussions and eventually banning CoMaps contributors.
And nowadays they censor all mentions of CoMaps in their chats and SMs and often ban users who dared to mention us.
Also "not surprising that OM banned you" - what process of adjudication was there before the project decided to ban someone who, by his description at least, is a key contributor? How was this person found guilty, and who decided on the penalty?
---
PS - I'm not involved with any of OM, CoMaps, Maps.ME, and actually just found out the first two even exist.
> What do you mean, leaked? Isn't this a FOSS project?
The client-app (CoMaps/Organic Maps) indeed is fully FLOSS. It uses OSM data, but that data is packaged into a specific and optimized format. The code _generating_ this optimized data (and serving it to the clients) was kept proprietary.
I guess the secrecy comes from that time.
OrganicMaps could be the best app there is in terms of functionality (it isn't), but if there are significant issues with their governance they are harmful to the broader OpenStreetMap community.
So we recommend CoMaps and OsmAnd, and carry on mapping.
How did you evaluate that? I use CoMaps, I am not a contributor to it, but in the comments I read I do not remember seeing many people specifying clearly if they are or not contributors (there might have been, but it did not feel like "mostly").
For me CoMaps worked well in the ~6 months for my use-cases (with some issues with the search as everybody reports for both projects). I like much better the site of CoMaps than of OrganicMaps, which influenced a bit my decision to use it. I also like they are hosted on Codeberg than on github.
I don't think you read enough, I saw plenty of real problems with Organic maps described.
What problems exactly?
What's wrong with that?
I'm fine with this use, rewarding a developer, but neither was this transparent nor was it fair for all others working on the project (and supposedly getting cost claims refused).
On top of that, they contribute years of man-hours for free to the project. I believe it is completely fair for hard-working dev to use donated money to have some rest.
Imo, consumers of all that good are too spoiled to also require strict discipline or transparency or even hating original authors(as seen on HN).
We've already seen attackers simulate whole communities for attacks on individuals, and I'm just wondering when we're going to see someone simulate a whole open source community in a longer play, as an kickstart on a longer term strategy of compromise
I think we saw the "opensource app go rogue for financial interests" and all of its related drama much more than state actors faking communities. So, Occam's razor applies here, IMO.
Is there an example of this? To what end?
Do you really need someone to rhyme out why state actors do what they do?
Otherwise it sounds like a made up conspiracy theory….
You don’t have to explain anything… that’s your call. A claim with nothing to support it doesn’t change either.
> But for now Organic Maps is totally fine and many people like me see no reason to move from it anywhere.
In my experience OM drained my battery like crazy (I used it for KML tracks) and after consistently seeing that, I gave up on OM..
I can't speak for CoMaps, as I have never tried it.
I can imagine it's frustrating to see your own work continued by others, when you were hoping to benefit and continue the work and all this drama helps no one. Still better if both sides would avoid the ad hominem attacks and conspiracy theories about the other side.
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.
> 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.
CoMaps had been started because Organic Maps shareholders were not interested fixing those governance and transparency issues.
That's the main reason they forked and started a new project.
- a result 500 feet away that sounds nothing like what you searched for
- a result 23 miles away that shares one word but nothing else
- a result 572 miles away that has a business name that contains exactly what was searched
- ... nowhere is there an exact full-name match that is 1.3 miles away, which can easily be found by exploring the map
Yeah, it really loves to suggest US options.
Also thinking about using embeddings to complement this.
I’ve been working on geocoder which uses a trained model to parse and classify address queries into a tokenized form. In addition to being more accurate than traditional rule-based parsing, this approach also gives the search engine more to work with beyond the tokenized boundaries of each word. The model also attaches provenance annotations to the address components, allowing the geocoder to have a better understanding of the geographic hierarchy of the components makes sense, rather than matching a string in a database.
The code is changing fast but you can try it out entirely in your browser here! Let me know if you’d like to see any specific features not on the roadmap :)
There are different ways of using maps. A lot of the stuff I do with mapping apps I really do just pan and zoom, and that works for me.
OSM argues that it's a "map database" but it stores labels like "opening hours" and "social media links" - why stop there? The UGC vs non-UGC debate has been the biggest crutch of all open map projects and no one managed to solve it yet.
There is already plenty of apps which show them, like OsmAnd or https://cartes.app , https://osmapp.org or https://openclimbing.org where you can even upload the photos from the map UI
Yes, that is something google maps excels in. Absolutely. But trying to compete here would mean they have to shift into being a social media and their biggest effort would be content moderation.
There are some intermediate options here. Osmand integrates Mapilary images (I'm not a fan personally), they have travel guides built in (they became usable now, even small cities have decent descriptions where I live) and tiny things like that.
On the other hand, OSM-based tools are crushing commercial maps in... being a map ;)
I really don't buy this argument. You already have to moderate submissions - what's an extra field? Sure, UGC is more opinionated but just don't add star ratings and anything that promotes gaming of system. Just let users expand the dataset with more information, it's almost never a bad idea - isn't that entire point of crowdsourcing datasets?
Sure, a 'description' or 'name' tag can contain something inappropriate (like a slur of defamation). If it has high impact, it'll be reverted quickly. If it has little impact, not a big deal. Many tools don't even show the 'description' tag
Pictures are a whole other level. You need to blur faces and license plates. What if someones house is photographed? How to detect inappropriate images? Should one study the laws of all countries? Even the freedom of panorama contains many differences between European countries, let alone privacy rights, ...
That is not a flag "is the crossing wheelchair accessible?".
It's user created picture or text. This can be any kind of content, abusive, regulated by law, spam, subjective for chat control "age verification" controls, copyrighted and so on.
Moderation is a hard topic. Only very small communities can do that well.
Absolutely, can be abused. But there can be thousands of reviews of a pizza place, with text, surprising languages, slang, pictures... But only one description.
Thanks for the laugh.
Keep in mind that Google Maps has a >1 billion yearly budget (citation needed, but other global maps have similar budgets)
You can go look up pretty much any tiny, hole-in-the-wall restaurant on Google Maps and there'll be dozens of user-contributed pictures of the interior, the menu, etc, but on OSM you'll be lucky if the opening hours are accurate.
I'm not sure there's a good solution to this, but certainly more OSM front ends exposing the data and contribution tools to end users helps.
Is there any standard protocol/format for "layers" that could be added to such Map apps?
Let's say I want to write a plugin to add my own kind of data, and then I want to export this new kind of data so that someone can import them.
Or I want to create a website with my own data on top of existing one.
It is also best to add it directly into OSM, importing data afterwards is tricky.
My talk at Why25 should be a good intro (https://media.ccc.de/v/why2025-198-openstreetmap-for-beginne...), but the OSM-wiki also contains some valuable sources: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tags , https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_features
There are also various libraries to show OSM as background map on a website and allow you to draw features on top. Those support various formats (GPX, GeoJSON, ...) Leaflet and MapLibre are the biggest here, with leaflet being the easiest and MapLibre being very flexible and performant
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.
CoMaps also has a better system for distributing map data now which isn't bound to app updates. Not sure if this has made its way back to the other app, but it's quite nice.
Organic Maps is a for-profit venture that accepts donations. That's sketchy. Management also seems to have prior Kremlin links. Which is sketchy.
You mind sharing links / sources / etc. ?
I don’t understand why it is “sketchy”. Also do you have any proof on “Kremlin links”?
Local search will always be slow and bad.
But server search doesn't need that much. It's just that OS initiatives are severely understaffed. OS apps that have a Photon instance are already rare to find. Let's not talk about having an Overpass instance...
What is very hard to reproduce is Google's place review data.
It's golden to enable good search.
fake anyways (quite easy to get negative comments deleted), and even for bad reviews.
Best look elsewhere or not at all.
What's important is people talking about "has air conditioner" in a hotel review or "has vegan" in a restaurant. OSM has none of this data.
I was talking in deep in the weed OSM signal group and apparently its a split between the address data not being present, and OrganicMap / CoMap being bugged.
The way to triage is asking nominatim, the geocoder from OSM. If it can resolve : its on the client side, if not, its a data problem.
I'm just parroting here. Happy to learn more.
This is THE only issue I have with those OSM client ( I don't care about traffic )
It's obvioulsy expensive in terms of ops + dev, but also just to host.
It can't scale with only 0,0001 % of users donating to the app.
Fortunately, NLNet's there to fund work, but it's still nonethless only a tenth of what would be needed.
Plus map applications and general search engines don't talk to each other... I don't know why, but it is so. Maybe because all the well-known search engines are closed-source ?
Map rendering is nice, and crisp.
Functionality really is bare-bones, though.
So for example there is a metro layer - but it's subway only.
No trams. I kinda need trams where I am - they're a major part of the public transport system, more so even than the metro.
Problem is of course a lot of people need a lot of different things, maybe you end up looking like OsmAnd, which much as it is irreplaceable, the config/setup is a bit of an upturned spaghetti bowl.
So unless you set a waypoint halfway between every single entry/exit, it will want to get off the parkway and take US 321 instead.
You can manually set up the route using a bunch of waypoints, but then it tells you the distance/time to next stop (which are arbitrary map points) instead of the distance to the end of the parkway, and you can't save the route so you'd better not touch it or want to look at anything else on the map once you have it set up.
I got increasingly frustrated looking for a replacement that I made https://plotalong.app in my spare time so that my wife and I could plan and save our motorcycle trips together. We still have to add the occasional “via” waypoint but it’s leagues better than Google maps at sticking to the scenic route
I need to update the marketing site and get new users into the map faster, but if you want a quick way in here’s an actual trip I took last year and spruced up to serve as a demo https://plotalong.app/maps/5c735b43-cb84-5a7b-8976-2d4e0c383...
New features and improvements come out regularly so if you have any suggestions send me a message
If you're ever near the Smokies, here's a loop from Knoxville through Foothills Parkway (west section), Tail of the Dragon, and Cherohala Skyway, with a detour up to Maple Springs Overlook (site of a popular annual hill climb).
https://plotalong.app/maps/b53f3c01-4e3c-4b52-a560-4a3259e08...
I will make a native iOS app, but probably only after this summer roadtrip season passes. as far as CarPlay goes, I'll have to find a way to test that first (all my cars/bikes have "dumb" head units). I have the site added to my homescreen on my iPhone and it works for me at least, same thing on desktop I installed the PWA with Chrome and have it in my dock
you're right that other providers don't understand through-waypoints. it's more problematic for groups than individuals, but I haven't wanted to take on live navigation yet because it's so hard to do right and to do real world testing. I could just trust Mapbox to be good enough with their Directions API, but then I'm not adding that much value and so I'm still going with planning/collaborating as my primary focus and encouraging folks to export to google/apple maps or their GPS for now. thanks for all the suggestions!
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/carplay/using-the-...
Between the three roads on my map I'd have to recommend Cherohala Skyway as my favorite drive. Only done it once, but it's a beautiful fun road with great scenic overlooks. Longer and more relaxing than Tail of the Dragon, and I'd rate it more enjoyable if not as exciting.
That's a car-based opinion though, can't speak to motorcycles.
https://www.visitmonroetn.com/cherohala-skyway
EDIT - a couple questions on pricing:
1) If I do one month on the paid plan to create a route, then cancel the subscription, do I still keep the route I made? Can I share and export, but no edits? Or can I still edit existing waypoints, but not add new ones? Realistically this is something I'd only use once or twice a year so I want to understand how the subscription structure fits with that.
2) How do collaborators work? I'm guessing only the route creator need a paid account, and other people can join it from free ones, but it would be helpful to clarify.
When you're working on the iOS app let me know if you need a beta tester!
Similarly, on a motorbike I'd choose some particular roads for more fun, but that also requires committing the route to memory.