I use CoMaps, it works great. You get notified in the app to download the updated maps you selected every 2 weeks or so. Could be wildly different than that, just what I notice.
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?
Last I checked, not with StreetComplete. But the OSM wiki has a table of Android apps https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Android which column "Record tracks" can be sorted by, to see which apps have that feature.
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 are in the U.S. please each out to OSMUS, they are amazing and can connect you with trail mapping resources. There is a vibrant community of folks keeping our trails mapped!
As the other commenter mentioned the web editor is probably the most beginner-friendly editor. It might seem a little daunting but it's actually not that difficult to edit OSM. When you save your change there's an option to request a review of it. That'll get an experienced contributor to take a look at it and help clear up any mistakes.
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.
You can edit existing trails, but directly adding new ones is not intended. What you can do is create a GPS track, and then upload it with a note describing the problem.
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.
Yes!
Accessability quests I often see are:
- Do these steps have a ramp? (with several ramp-type options)
- How many steps are here?
- Do these steps have a handrail?
- Is there tactile paving at the top and bottom of these steps?
- Does this crossing have tactile paving?
- Are there sound signals for the blind here?
- Do these traffic lights have a button to request a walk signal?
- What's the height of the curb at this crossing?
- Is this place wheelchair accessible?
If you want to do more advanced accessibility mapping, also have a look at https://mapcomplete.org/onwheels - same concept, but different implementation. Also OpenStreetMap based, so data you add there is shared amongst CoMaps, StreetComplete, ...
This is great, I'm working on a project called AccessPath for detailed accessibility review of a place. Currently the prototype[1] is using Google Maps but I will be moving on to OpenStreet Maps for obvious reasons.
Thanks to you folks, Street Complete will also come handy to make places more accessible.
Exactly, this theory is absurd because they would never help society, they could just use Google Maps/ other proprietary data.
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?
I've read both Organic Maps thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48794446 (as it's my favorite map app I use for years around the world, and I'm an active OSM contributor as well) which quickly became overrun with CoMaps followers trash-talking about OM, now this thread appears.
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.
> made by... "community"? We don't even know who that is, original developers and people with experience are not involved.
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).
Well, after you intentionally leaked the map generation code (which was not intended to be published) before creating the fork, it's not surprising that OM banned you. How do your actions align with governance, transparency, community and values?
What do you mean, leaked? Isn't this a FOSS project? Why would it have secret code?
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?
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PS - I'm not involved with any of OM, CoMaps, Maps.ME, and actually just found out the first two even exist.
Not involved in OM or CoMaps at all; but involved in OpenStreetMap.
> 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.
Hmm, keeping the server-side code proprietary is rather underhanded. Was the license of the "leaked" code actually proprietary? Anyway, sounds like the "leak" was in the public interest.
> you intentionally leaked the map generation code (which was not intended to be published)
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.
Also me and other CoMaps contributors had been actually banned several months later after they've started their accusations, so the ban is not directly because of the accusations.
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.
Petty bureaucrats misusing their privileges to ban key contributors from FOSS projects is a recurring tale I'm afraid. I've seen this happen with Thunderbird, and later also with LibreOffice (well, The Document Foundation to be exact). It is ridiculous and frustrating, especially since most other contributors and users remain passive and let these things just happen (even when they don't agree), typically because they don't want to put in the effort, or to risk their cordial relations with those in power. I very much sympathize with your predicament.
I don't really think it's primarily the CoMaps devs and contributors warning others about OrganicMaps. It's mostly OpenStreetMap contributors (e.g., mappers) like myself who followed the relevant discussions and events and decided that the community is better off routing around the problem.
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.
> it not only seems to be mostly written not by a regular users, but by people who contribute to CoMaps
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.
About evaluation - you are right, they don’t say they are contributors in their comments explicitly (which they probably should do), but it was quite telling in one case, when a person trash-talked about OM clearly without proof, but then if you go to its profile and visit a personal website from there - turns out that they are a contributor.
I totally expect that’s is also the case with other commenters, but it’s fair to say it’s mostly a guess on my side as for most people you can’t say for sure as they don’t have GitHubs linked to the profile. But I’m 100% sure there are several contributors commenting there, especially taking into account how many CoMaps comments and mentions are there and overall popularity of this app, which is not very big.
> 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.
I don't think you read enough, I saw plenty of real problems with Organic maps described.
Affiliate links being included in the app, despite community objections? The lead dev using donations to pay for holidays? Those are a couple that come to mind.
If the donation is framed as a single developer benefitting it should be fine, but at least when I was donating that was framed as donations to the project which suggests something else.
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).
Guys in OM core dev team paying for hosting, app accounts, legal questions, etc(AFAIK, they subsidize all that from their own money because donations are not enough).
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).
Hosting etc. expenses are a minor fraction compared to OM's donations inflow. And its enough to hire devs, the first dev was hired more than two years ago, but they have been hiding this fact to look more poor and attract more donations.
Even long-term active contributors have been denied even totals information about donations and got to know about first hire by chance about a year since the fact.
Because we have similar costs in CoMaps, e.g. the most expensive part is the map generation server and both OM and CoMaps rent the same model from the same provider and its less than 250 eur/month.
And according to https://ariregister.rik.ee/eng/company/16225385/Organic-Maps... in 2025 they got ~120k eur and this figure likely doesn't include all the donation sources (in addition to the main Stripe channel they also have OpenCollective, LiberaPay, crypto...)
That's fair, however 120k is peanuts for company of developers. I still think it is fair to use that money at dev's disposal.
I got map generator concerns which is totally valid - but that OM trashtalking for things that was never stated(i.e. purpose of donations) is just wrong - even if you like CoMaps, why not be grateful for all awesome work done by OM team which is the foundation of CoMaps?
Because he can estimate based on typical hosting costs for similar websites, on one hand, and a lower-bound estimate of the number and amount of donations, on the other.
I’m an Organic Maps user and from a cursory glance I can see no reason to use CoMaps instead, it looks like the same app and I’d wish they’d make an attempt to clearer differentiate themselves since this will be an obvious question.
Given the nature of the problems with OM, this makes sense. The dispute is about governance and money, which is something that only the people involved in development will deeply care about. It makes sense they're the main people talking about it.
I dont know anything about this app besides your framing of "out-of-nowhere community builds an app" but am sometimes suspicious of nation states building these types of open source project forks. It's so easy now, and the cost seems incredibly low, to get into very intimate workflows (of very specific types of people).
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
> We've already seen attackers simulate whole communities for attacks on individuals
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.
To what end? I can think of 10 reasons immediately off the top of my head, but it’s far easier to fill existing open source projects with agent contributors for most of them.
Do you really need someone to rhyme out why state actors do what they do?
When something is only a few thousand dollars away from us in "the adjacent possible", I hardly think one needs to be a conspiracy theorist to suggest we consider it...?
I don't have the means to research, but certainly there would be ample resources for such an attack in certain spaces??? Manufacturing social signal is hugely valuable
I feel like governments have so many options for hacking that forking open source and dealing with all that is likely more work than whatever outcome they hope for.
I was the same, but did end up switching due to features. I'm not sure I remember which sealed the deal, but I remember at least being able to remove/change the left-most button that just points to an About screen IIRC, and updating maps without going through the app store? And just the fact that improvements to Organic Maps also seem to make it to CoMaps, whereas I don't think they flow in the other direction.
Long time OM user, just installed CoMaps. Basically the same app, except a few additional features. Increased label size is very nice! I struggle to read street names in OM while on bike.
I have no stake in the game other than that I have donated to both projects, but CoMaps seems to have a more sustainable path forward as true FOSS, no need for more drama. Having read some of the discussions I understand that there's also at least one of the original developers on board, so reference to an abstract community without experience seems to be a bit misleading.
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.
> 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.
To clarify - this quote pertains to the Organic Maps situation
> 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.
You can look up who the contributors are, e.g. in their open-source repo: https://codeberg.org/comaps
There are also issues and projects with lots of discussions about what to prioritize, etc.
So, bashing that “community” is too fuzzy is perhaps not very warranted. (Although I guess they should add a section “Who makes CoMaps?” to the FAQs or so.)
The fact that OM leadership pulled the same open-closed game twice is telling. Many open source contributors who donated their private time and effort to the project just didn't want to do that any more when OM leadership started the game again.
That's the main reason they forked and started a new project.
One of the main things that keeps me from using essentially all OSM-based mapping apps as my primary is that search seems incredibly bad. I can't blend city and name, road and category, can't usually filter by features or open time, and results are almost always something like:
- 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
Are there any apps that do this better? Android and desktop (e.g. linux) ideally. I'd love to use them more, but I've had endless problems using them. Good map data is kinda useless if it can't be retrieved, and trying to work around it by panning around and manually saving a hundred or so favorites really kinda sucks.
True, although I do also have a lot of problems with Google Maps. Particularly, when I search for a small town 100km away, and instead it brings up a medium sized down in the USA. Or even more ridiculous cases, like I slightly got the name of a business wrong, so it went with a different business in the USA.
Could you try https://cartes.app and share your search terms and expectations ? We're using Photon, an OpenSearch search engine. We've build a dictionary of place categories to help in-browser with FuseJS.
Also thinking about using embeddings to complement this.
Cartes search and user experience was surprisingly good! Well done. I was caught off guard by having the requirement for a Bluesky account for reviews instead of something open source/federated but wasn't able to read the explanation page as it was french only, but I think the international version is still work in progress, so I'll gladly return in the future.
We're not using Bluesky, but Atproto ;)
So place reviews is federated and open-source : we use Eurosky/Mu.social daily for our social accounts.
Also, Bluesky itself is open-source.
> but I think the international version is still work in progress, so I'll gladly return in the future.
"coffee": shows city names in other states, and two places in Iraq.
"valentine": shows... house icons? and a business icon in other states and countries. (top result is apparently a "commune" in France. not sure I'd use a house icon for that tbh)
"valentine coffee": good substring matches for the business name (3 results) and two results in other countries.
Thanks, it lets me understand the bugs that make coffees impossible to be found for you. The first problem is that for performance reasons, we don't enable category discovery and search at high zoom. They only appear at zoom 13 (https://cartes.app/#13.7/43.04398/-87.911), and your link was at zoom 12.41. This category suggestion would have let you show all coffee places on the map. But not yet filter your searches to this category only, that will be a game-changer feature we're working on.
The zoom limitation is a known problem, but probably worse in the US where cities are less dense than in Europe. I'll prioritize it, thanks.
2nd problem is that the "coffee" word doesn't trigger the coffee category. It should, I'll investigate too.
On your link, two Valentine coffee are shown on the map with the query "valentine", but none are in the search results list, and they're on the edges of the map. Interesting bug : probably a side effect of adding address search last week, I'll investigate.
You're probably our first US-user test, thanks again :)
I do have resist-fingerprinting on, thanks! I'll have to poke at that, I'm curious about the technical reasons. A dialog would help, this is the first I've heard of it and I don't mind exceptions for sites that aren't injecting javascript on billions of unrelated pages.
>and they're on the edges of the map
I don't think they were very edge-y from what I remember... but I'll double check. And will get a screenshot if I disagree - maybe it's something about window size or display density.
>we don't enable category discovery and search at high zoom.
Yeah, I've seen that in a few apps. It's kinda fine when zoomed far out as it's not like you'd be getting a representative distribution, and it might flood more specific (and intended) results out. It broadly makes sense, though I mostly see people confused and frustrated by it in-person (there's rarely any way to tell it has happened). Some of that is just them being overly familiar with only Google though.
But if that category search is not enabled, why doesn't it find business name matches? And why are the results far outside the viewing window?
Also I think that zoom level is almost certainly worth allowing (not necessarily defaulting to) category search. In a dense city it'll overwhelm things, but in much of the USA that might find 2-3 things, if any at all. Maybe it's worth blending in the number of results you'd get if it was enabled when deciding? Like "<10, use category". Or do you also do that?
Prioritisation on search behaviors is super hard, I definitely understand that... but that's why user-controlled options are useful. OSM apps nigh-universally seem to be removing that as the years go by, and the end result is that it's almost unusable because it doesn't let you find things you know exist. Google mitigates it with enormous amounts of ad money and hundreds/thousands of engineers feeding recommendation systems to show 10 decent results out of 100,000 matches (and a lot of learned helplessness by their users), but I don't think that's worth emulating, and they still have a ton of optional controls for filtering. OSM data is convoluted and messy and hard to make convenient, but not having any control at all seems obviously worse to me. Even a `raw-field-name:"value"` seems better, it's passively learnable and fairly easy when tokenized.
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Lest this all seem like ranting / an upset user: I just have lots of opinions about mapping! And I'm broadly rather unhappy with existing apps. I'm literally always glad to see new attempts, and I don't expect everything to be built for me, so thank you for trying things :) I'm entirely happy to say a ton more or just not be your target audience and stick to technical stuff.
> I don't think they were very edge-y from what I remember... but I'll double check. And will get a screenshot if I disagree - maybe it's something about window size or display density.
For some reasons, the results drawn on the map are more numerous than the ones we show in the result list. I've raised an issue to investigate this. https://codeberg.org/cartes/web/issues/2480
> But if that category search is not enabled, why doesn't it find business name matches? And why are the results far outside the viewing window?
Good question. It's a Photon (our search API) problem as far as I know. We probably did set a local search ponderation too low for this use case.
In case the user chose the (default) "search here" option, we could also add a proximity ranking.
I do agree with your last big paragraph : we don't have Google's budget, hence the "search here" option which already solved lots of dead ends. Thanks a lot for this discussion !
Does it just use "here" / viewing box as a bias, not a hard cutoff? Personally I definitely expect "here" to mean "absolutely no results outside my window under any circumstances" (with some room for fuzziness with different screen aspect ratios, though even then I expect fewer results, not more). I'm not familiar with what Photon does tho, and it's not particularly clear from a quick skim of the site/readme.
Search is a really tough problem in OSM for a few reasons, but I think a lot it stems from bad address parsing.
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 :)
Is this referring to the difficulty of figuring out what "123 w dhuwdaodks plk" means? I can certainly see that (especially internationally - model-based parsing makes a lot of sense there, assuming enough good training data exists), but like I reliably can't even find precise matches in dedicated fields like "business name" or "city". Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and no open source app I've found yet seems to offer any way to select or filter on fields that definitely exist across locations that definitely exist (I've checked the data by hand). It feels extremely strange, like they're all trying to copy each other without stepping back and figuring out if any of it makes any sense at all to their stated audience.
I mean it when I say that's "maybe slightly better than average". When it gets extra weird I generally go check the OSM node data out of curiosity, and fairly often I find searches returning things where literally no field at all matches any word I searched for, across many different apps. I don't really think that's an address parsing issue, though I have definitely noticed many apps being picky (but completely unspecified) about search formatting when looking for addresses.
> Good map data is kinda useless if it can't be retrieved, and trying to work around it by panning around and manually saving a hundred or so favorites really kinda sucks.
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.
Anyone here has been using coMaps and care to share their experience, especially in comparison to OrganicMaps?
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 and organic maps are very similar (they forked very recently). The only difference I can think of from the top of my mind is that organic maps is not fully open source (map files and generator are proprietary) and has some kayak sponsored suggestions/reviews
My biggest issue with OrganicMaps is that the search isn't very good. It really struggles to find my destination sometimes. That's the one thing I'm afraid Google will always be better at.
It doesn't take so much to enable a good server search on top of OSM + openaddresses.
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.
I just checked (in CoMaps): A restaurant around the corner is listed as "Pizza, Vegan, no wheelchair access, outdoor seating". No opening hours, though (but other places have).
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 )
For good (server) search, one needs many layers (Photon, Pelias with OpenAdresses, Overpass, in-house pmtiles, etc.) using many DBs, each needing server ressources or expensive paid APIs.
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 ?
This can be due to missing address information in OSM. I also find the grouping sometimes odd, e.g. searching for a street, the place names are from one level higher.
I prefer CoMaps' tile styling, they did a bunch of updates to it early on to differentiate it from OrganicMaps, IMO it's much nicer.
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.
Been using Comaps for a while, mainly for cycling, and it works very well. Before that I used also organicmaps and it was fine as well but I think made a few more mistakes in routing. That said, obviously this is not a parallel test but rather successive. Of course the split happened with drama, but I just like the Comaps vibe and am happy with it.
I used to use OrganicMaps. When coMaps forked, I changed to it. From my perspective there were no negatives. If anything, coMaps looked to be under more active development.
What FOSS maps need is user generated content. For example, having "swimming spot" on my map is not really that useful - it needs photos, some description, additional information of what it actually is and how to reach it as bare minimum to be actually competitive.
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.
Thanks! The wikimedia_commons tag is very useful - I'll start contributing there. Though my point still stands that UGC integration could and should be much better.
I strongly disagree. Open maps don't have to compete in this space and it would make them worse.
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 ;)
> shift into being a social media and their biggest effort would be content moderation.
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?
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.
Which is hard to get to, doesn't even render on some apps at all, it's easier to automatically or manually moderate as it has a more defined purpose and it's pure text (not meant for personal feelings towards the place, not meant for rating etc).
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.
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, ...
I don't really need a tag saying how to reach the place, but better public transport support would go a long way. I also have this issue with places marked as parkings, to determine whether they're public, open or even reachable.
The OSM foundation strictly keeps it with 'map data'. There are however many other, small projects that fill in the gap; for example 'Panoramax' for streetview imagery or lib.reviews for reviews. I've made a webapp that ties those services together (https://mapcomplete.org)
Keep in mind that Google Maps has a >1 billion yearly budget (citation needed, but other global maps have similar budgets)
Yeah a lot of these features exist, they're just very fragmented, which given that the OSM community is already pretty small makes it almost impossible for them to reach the critical mass necessary to actually be useful.
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.
As great as Waze and Google Maps are for dynamic routing and responsive path-finding, I am using rental scooters now, and at this point I really need to design some bicycle routes with intention and purpose, and Maps simply refuses to save any "dragged" or "pinned" route in any meaningful way, and I suppose this is deliberate, because A.I. knows best, kids!
Even for driving the major apps are crappy about routes. I was on Foothills Parkway a while ago and wanted to keep Apple Maps running just as a "miles/time remaining" indicator. It can't do anything other than fastest route, with the option to ignore highways.
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 had the same issue planning roadtrips where the journey is the destination. I’ve paid for apps like InRoute despite poor UX, inability to access my routes from desktop, and zero collaboration support
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
Very cool! That solves creating and saving a route with extra navigation waypoints, so the other thing I'd want out of it is a native app with CarPlay where I can get total time/distance remaining, time/distance to next stop, and the option to pick which waypoints count as "stops" (versus just being there to control the route). I see there's a GPX export but I'm sure that won't handle the waypoints how I want it to. Guessing native apps are out of scope though?
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).
thanks for trying it out! I actually happen to have a trip planned for next month in Shenandoah and Blue Ridge Pkwy, looks like that loop is a little out of reach for us this trip but I want to go back to hit Tail of the Dragon and others
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!
CarPlay support can run in the simulator, obviously you'll need to fake the GPS location too for this to be useful. And you need to get special permission from Apple before you can even use the simulator, they keep CarPlay even more locked down than everything else.
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.
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!
thanks for the tips about CarPlay development. I'll definitely target parity with the web app at first so hopefully it'll be something I can get access to eventually
regarding (1), yes, you keep the routes you made even after your subscription ends. the limits revert to the free tier so if it had more waypoints or was longer than that then you just can't add or move waypoints. removing waypoints to get back down below the limit works and you still export your trip to formats included in your tier (e.g. google/apple/waze)
you could absolutely pay for a month just to plan and export all your trips for the year, bookmarking them with google maps or saving the files for your GPS for instance -- not a problem. I am currently exploring alternatives to monthly & annual subscription schedules to further support seasonal usage, too
per your 2nd question, that's correct, only the creator needs to pay to have 2+ collaborators. you can try it out on the free tier with 1 person at first to see if it works for you. if you just want to share maps publicly you can do that without subscribing, too
Had a feature idea, what if you could assign names/colors to sections between waypoints? For example, say between waypoints 2-4 in my map is Foothills Parkway, and color it red on the map and the elevation diagram?
Especially on the elevation view would be neat to see it color coded by which parts are which road.
Might help incentivize premium upgrades too because there's a benefit to putting waypoints at actual meaningful locations instead of playing "how can I maximize the route control with 8 points." Or heck that's enough of a cosmetic thing that you could just make the color editing part of the premium plans.
A minor bug report - the verification email said the link was good for 24 hours but when I tried to click it yesterday evening it was already dead.
That was incredibly frustrating when I had some driving restrictions on a learner's license - not every road was available for me and after planning it all out in detail, I realized there's no way for me to move it over to my phone.
Similarly, on a motorbike I'd choose some particular roads for more fun, but that also requires committing the route to memory.
Anything other than cars I believe google maps/waze is nearly unuseable for navigation, yah. I think they even removed "bike" pathing too. Public transport is pretty alright, but very inaccurate vs local app when they use the same data and routing is lacking intelligence sometimes.
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
If by layers you mean tiles, you can make a server providing ZXY tile images. Some OSM clients (e.g. BRouter) allow adding custom tile servers for baselayer and overlays.
This is what I use in my main GrapheneOS profile. I still have a dedicated profile for Google Maps though as I still have not been able to give up their greater datasets (i.e. traffic) in all cases.
Decent app though. I saw someone here mention proprietary code but I wouldn't worry about it, just install the F-Droid version. That's why I use F-Droid - to guarantee I don't get proprietary blobs.
Proprietary parts had been mentioned in the context of Organic Maps - their map generator is partially closed source, and even OM F-Droid build includes some proprietary assets.
In CoMaps we are serious about being 100% FOSS and this is one of the reasons we've forked from OM.
To be honest, I use Organic Maps over CoMaps simply because Organic Maps is available in Accrescent (which is in turn provided by the GrapheneOS App Store), and CoMaps is not. Both Google Play and F‐Droid are just enough of a hassle (and I mildly dislike both of them) to keep me on the map app that doesn’t require either one.
Tangential, but does anyone know if an app exists that that the video feed of your phone with the GPS loc and reads the signs from the road and compare it to OSM to update it if necessary?
Let’s be clear, in the end I use Waze for routing due to the traffic updates, but I see sometimes outdated speed limits and know OSM is one of its sources.
I remember seeing something like this where it could identify signs and things, but the quality from what I recall was not great (could be way off and have many duplicates). I might be remembering Mapillary, which has a Map data button at the top left and seems to show signs [0]. I don't think it auto-updates OSM based on these data.
Oh I don't have a link but there was a project just like this someone hacked together a while back. I think it used Gemini live or something and as you walked and scanned things it would suggest changed to the map. It was a rough demo but seemed promising.
I've been wanting to do something similar but just by taking photos of menus and updating the POI with new hours/website/phone etc
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.
I assumed the metro layer was specifically for underground lines, as they won't show up in the normal layer. I just checked for London and the tram lines and stops show up as expected in the standard view.
I'm still mostly using Organic Maps though, and from time to time I switch to Comaps to see the differences.
In general I like the colors of CoMaps more than OrganicMaps (light theme, dark is so-so), but I still use OM because:
- OM shows colors for marked trails. Pretty recent feature and not as good as in Mapy.com, but at least I don't need to switch to Mapy.com just for this feature.
- recently OM added public transport routes. UX is quite bad, but it's much better that having nothing! It was quite useful at my last trip.
The nicest feature that CoMaps added recently are map updates that are independent to an app update, and they try to update maps like once a week. So it's much more probable that you will have more up to date data there than on OM. So I started using it more too :)
I use CoMaps, it works like a charm on GrapheneOS + Android Auto.
I have also contributed to the OpenStreetMap by adding POI and requesting logic to be changed.
The only major issue which I got used to but sucks, is the search when it does not involved famous places or streets or both.
Streets will be shown as minor or major and alike, I do need to use Google Maps Browser version to find the place, and the on CoMaps manually navigate to said place.
But the fact that I get a map update a week, sometimes two maps update a week which other apps will take months and subscription, that alone is worth hustle.
Depends a lot on where you live. My village is pretty fresh cuz I update it lol. My impression is that it's quite good in western Europe, might take a month in major US cities, and probably years old in most other places. I think Indonesia, Israel, and Japan are decent as well.
While I do use mapping programs for directions, I more often use them for a more accurate estimate of time and traffic density. I haven't looked very hard, but I haven't seen any OpenStreetMap data or equivalent that shows "Real" travel times and traffic density.
OSM is great as a map, but the biggest thing keeping me from switching from Google Maps to any OSM solution is the "white pages". My most common use case for a maps app is location-based search.
Having a complete and updated registry of businesses with operating hours is the bare minimum, and OSM apps already struggle with that. I also want pictures of the establishment, pictures of the menu for restaurants, and price estimates for fuel and hotels.
I understand the cost of hosting and moderating that stuff is enormous, but that's what it will take for me to finally convert.
I just opened CoMaps. The first thing that happened was that it zoomed out from my previous location in another city, and then zoomed in on my current position.
I can't find anything more recent or for CoMaps specifically, other than auto-created "alternatives" pages. I would absolutely love to hear from anybody who has tried both!]
Think of it as a very stripped down and opinionated version of OsmAnd. It lacks a lot of power features, but is extremely fast and all of the options are easily available and work out of the box. So it's great for everyday use (especially in cities with a lot of POIs) but not as good for in depth travel and route planning.
For example, I've used F-Droid OsmAnd extensively when planning my trip to Japan, because its guides, WikiData and Wikipedia integration are godsend for finding interesting places to visit, but used CoMaps when I was there to look things up and build routes. I'm also exclusively using OsmAnd for writing GNSS tracks because I can fine tune the parameters of measurements it captures.
I used to use wikiloc, but most of the things that offer which were the most interesting things were by paying, so I think that it could be some opportunity for using these maps and vibe coding for creating something spectacular!
Is it possible to change the maps' colors and contrasts now? Last time I checked I thought the lower contrast and washed-out colors compared to Organic Maps were a poor choice so I switched back to OM.
Just used it the other day while I was back-country hiking. Set some markers for some landmarks and calculated hiking distance/duration between them. CoMaps is awesome! It's also the reason I contributed to OpenStreetMaps for the first time a while ago, contributing the name of a landmark/structure up in a local mountain.
This is correct. Tools might however display them slightly different, have different update schedules or make different cartographic choices (e.g. not showing node networks or something)
There is a subway overlay.
And there is marked hiking routes overlay being in development.
There is a also an outdoor-focused map style (some people call it a layer too).
perfect timing. i was using OpenStreetMap for my ios running app and I found out that there is a cap so I ended up switching to a paid solution and have been trying to build something like comaps by downloading all the tiles
Mapy.com does that really well [0] (not affiliated). Not open source though. It uses mix of sources - OSM included - to render map (best render imo - especially the "outdoor" layer) and they are pretty large contributor to OSM in Europe. In free tier you can have one country downloaded for offline use. Sharing .gpx is no problem. Traffic data only in Central Europe.
Half of the solution at least on Android is https://gpslogger.app. Then you need to find a way to render the data to a map, such as with https://dawarich.app. Looks like the last time I looked at that project (and wasn't quite sold on it) was 1.5 years ago, so time for a second look.
I have set up Owntracks with a self-hosted server, and the android app reports my location to it periodically over MQTT. I would prefer to use https://dawarich.app/ but last time I tried it it was clearly very beta-quality and not ready for reliable usage.
I tried it for family location sharing a few months back and, I don't remember exactly, but I remember the UI/UX feeling a bit slow/clunky in general, eventhough setting things up was user-friendly. Definitely potential there, though.
I use CoMaps, it works great. You get notified in the app to download the updated maps you selected every 2 weeks or so. Could be wildly different than that, just what I notice.
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
Do you know if you can add hiking trails using StreetComplete? I noticed some trails are missing in my area and I would like to contribute
Last I checked, not with StreetComplete. But the OSM wiki has a table of Android apps https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Android which column "Record tracks" can be sorted by, to see which apps have that feature.
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.
> an overlay in the web-based editor on desktop, and used that and satellite imagery as reference to draw in the missing trail.
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.
A decent representation of the actual path is usually pretty straightforward. The metadata and topology are more of the work.
In areas where 3dep is recent, you can usually see a trail under forest cover. It's pretty great.
If you are in the U.S. please each out to OSMUS, they are amazing and can connect you with trail mapping resources. There is a vibrant community of folks keeping our trails mapped!
https://openstreetmap.us/
As the other commenter mentioned the web editor is probably the most beginner-friendly editor. It might seem a little daunting but it's actually not that difficult to edit OSM. When you save your change there's an option to request a review of it. That'll get an experienced contributor to take a look at it and help clear up any mistakes.
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.
You can edit existing trails, but directly adding new ones is not intended. What you can do is create a GPS track, and then upload it with a note describing the problem.
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.
You can record tracks or add places right in the app.
Very interesting. Can the Street Complete be used to improve accessibility of a region, say to mark the availability of a ramp?
Yes! Accessability quests I often see are: - Do these steps have a ramp? (with several ramp-type options) - How many steps are here? - Do these steps have a handrail? - Is there tactile paving at the top and bottom of these steps? - Does this crossing have tactile paving? - Are there sound signals for the blind here? - Do these traffic lights have a button to request a walk signal? - What's the height of the curb at this crossing? - Is this place wheelchair accessible?
If you want to do more advanced accessibility mapping, also have a look at https://mapcomplete.org/onwheels - same concept, but different implementation. Also OpenStreetMap based, so data you add there is shared amongst CoMaps, StreetComplete, ...
Disclaimer: I make this
This is great, I'm working on a project called AccessPath for detailed accessibility review of a place. Currently the prototype[1] is using Google Maps but I will be moving on to OpenStreet Maps for obvious reasons.
Thanks to you folks, Street Complete will also come handy to make places more accessible.
[1]https://accesspath.world/
Yes! If you want to you could even select to show only accessibility related "quests".
yes, there are questions like that (steps, ramp, etc). Also questions about road surfaces, pavement/sidewalk, etc
Are you aware of any app comparable to StreetComplete for iOS?
No, but: https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/5421
A massive effort has been underway for a while to get an iOS build of the app: https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/5421
Open source software often moves comparatively slowly, of course, but I believe they're making decent progress.
Doh already linked below, sorry
You can use a different, webbased one: https://mapcomplete.org
I have been suspicious that streetcomplete is funded by intelligence agencies who want to increase the amount of OSINT avalible.
any OS INT we contribute can be by definition used by intel agencies. such is the way of the world.
That sounds like an actually socially useful use of their budgets.
Exactly, this theory is absurd because they would never help society, they could just use Google Maps/ other proprietary data.
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?
But intellegency agencies would like an edge, not that everyone has the same info as them...
Do be useful, can you help us understand why you think this?
I've read both Organic Maps thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48794446 (as it's my favorite map app I use for years around the world, and I'm an active OSM contributor as well) which quickly became overrun with CoMaps followers trash-talking about OM, now this thread appears.
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.
> made by... "community"? We don't even know who that is, original developers and people with experience are not involved.
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).
Well, after you intentionally leaked the map generation code (which was not intended to be published) before creating the fork, it's not surprising that OM banned you. How do your actions align with governance, transparency, community and values?
What do you mean, leaked? Isn't this a FOSS project? Why would it have secret code?
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.
Not involved in OM or CoMaps at all; but involved in OpenStreetMap.
> 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.
Hmm, keeping the server-side code proprietary is rather underhanded. Was the license of the "leaked" code actually proprietary? Anyway, sounds like the "leak" was in the public interest.
The code in question was in Apache 2.0 repo and DCO signed agreeing its a public contribution.
Please see my post above for details.
I have a vague reminescence that maps.me (the predecessor of organic maps) was bragging about super-duper efficient maps format back in the day.
I guess the secrecy comes from that time.
> you intentionally leaked the map generation code (which was not intended to be published)
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...
Also me and other CoMaps contributors had been actually banned several months later after they've started their accusations, so the ban is not directly because of the accusations.
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.
Petty bureaucrats misusing their privileges to ban key contributors from FOSS projects is a recurring tale I'm afraid. I've seen this happen with Thunderbird, and later also with LibreOffice (well, The Document Foundation to be exact). It is ridiculous and frustrating, especially since most other contributors and users remain passive and let these things just happen (even when they don't agree), typically because they don't want to put in the effort, or to risk their cordial relations with those in power. I very much sympathize with your predicament.
damn, that's an unintentionally amazing advertisement for comaps. downloading now! X-D
I don't really think it's primarily the CoMaps devs and contributors warning others about OrganicMaps. It's mostly OpenStreetMap contributors (e.g., mappers) like myself who followed the relevant discussions and events and decided that the community is better off routing around the problem.
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.
> it not only seems to be mostly written not by a regular users, but by people who contribute to CoMaps
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.
About evaluation - you are right, they don’t say they are contributors in their comments explicitly (which they probably should do), but it was quite telling in one case, when a person trash-talked about OM clearly without proof, but then if you go to its profile and visit a personal website from there - turns out that they are a contributor.
I totally expect that’s is also the case with other commenters, but it’s fair to say it’s mostly a guess on my side as for most people you can’t say for sure as they don’t have GitHubs linked to the profile. But I’m 100% sure there are several contributors commenting there, especially taking into account how many CoMaps comments and mentions are there and overall popularity of this app, which is not very big.
> 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.
I don't think you read enough, I saw plenty of real problems with Organic maps described.
> I saw plenty of real problems with Organic maps described.
What problems exactly?
Affiliate links being included in the app, despite community objections? The lead dev using donations to pay for holidays? Those are a couple that come to mind.
> lead dev using donations to pay for holidays
What's wrong with that?
If the donation is framed as a single developer benefitting it should be fine, but at least when I was donating that was framed as donations to the project which suggests something else.
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).
Guys in OM core dev team paying for hosting, app accounts, legal questions, etc(AFAIK, they subsidize all that from their own money because donations are not enough).
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).
Hosting etc. expenses are a minor fraction compared to OM's donations inflow. And its enough to hire devs, the first dev was hired more than two years ago, but they have been hiding this fact to look more poor and attract more donations.
Even long-term active contributors have been denied even totals information about donations and got to know about first hire by chance about a year since the fact.
>Hosting etc. expenses are a minor fraction compared to OM's donations inflow.
How do you know that if they are not disclosing this info?
Because we have similar costs in CoMaps, e.g. the most expensive part is the map generation server and both OM and CoMaps rent the same model from the same provider and its less than 250 eur/month.
And according to https://ariregister.rik.ee/eng/company/16225385/Organic-Maps... in 2025 they got ~120k eur and this figure likely doesn't include all the donation sources (in addition to the main Stripe channel they also have OpenCollective, LiberaPay, crypto...)
That's fair, however 120k is peanuts for company of developers. I still think it is fair to use that money at dev's disposal.
I got map generator concerns which is totally valid - but that OM trashtalking for things that was never stated(i.e. purpose of donations) is just wrong - even if you like CoMaps, why not be grateful for all awesome work done by OM team which is the foundation of CoMaps?
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Because he can estimate based on typical hosting costs for similar websites, on one hand, and a lower-bound estimate of the number and amount of donations, on the other.
I’m an Organic Maps user and from a cursory glance I can see no reason to use CoMaps instead, it looks like the same app and I’d wish they’d make an attempt to clearer differentiate themselves since this will be an obvious question.
Given the nature of the problems with OM, this makes sense. The dispute is about governance and money, which is something that only the people involved in development will deeply care about. It makes sense they're the main people talking about it.
I dont know anything about this app besides your framing of "out-of-nowhere community builds an app" but am sometimes suspicious of nation states building these types of open source project forks. It's so easy now, and the cost seems incredibly low, to get into very intimate workflows (of very specific types of people).
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
> We've already seen attackers simulate whole communities for attacks on individuals
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.
> sometimes suspicious of nation states building these types of open source project forks
Is there an example of this? To what end?
To what end? I can think of 10 reasons immediately off the top of my head, but it’s far easier to fill existing open source projects with agent contributors for most of them.
Do you really need someone to rhyme out why state actors do what they do?
An example would be very interesting and yes explaining what they’re up to would be interesting as well.
Otherwise it sounds like a made up conspiracy theory….
Your accusatory ignorance is not mine to relieve.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor
That doesn’t seem to fit the scenario described earlier.
You don’t have to explain anything… that’s your call. A claim with nothing to support it doesn’t change either.
You need to work on your reading comprehension. I am not the parent.
For someone worried about other people being “accusatory” you seem to be that way a lot.
When something is only a few thousand dollars away from us in "the adjacent possible", I hardly think one needs to be a conspiracy theorist to suggest we consider it...?
I don't have the means to research, but certainly there would be ample resources for such an attack in certain spaces??? Manufacturing social signal is hugely valuable
I feel like governments have so many options for hacking that forking open source and dealing with all that is likely more work than whatever outcome they hope for.
I was the same, but did end up switching due to features. I'm not sure I remember which sealed the deal, but I remember at least being able to remove/change the left-most button that just points to an About screen IIRC, and updating maps without going through the app store? And just the fact that improvements to Organic Maps also seem to make it to CoMaps, whereas I don't think they flow in the other direction.
Long time OM user, just installed CoMaps. Basically the same app, except a few additional features. Increased label size is very nice! I struggle to read street names in OM while on bike.
> make app barely eat any battery
> 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 have no stake in the game other than that I have donated to both projects, but CoMaps seems to have a more sustainable path forward as true FOSS, no need for more drama. Having read some of the discussions I understand that there's also at least one of the original developers on board, so reference to an abstract community without experience seems to be a bit misleading.
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.
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Relevant thread from yesterday's thread on the original project this was forked from
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.
To clarify - this quote pertains to the Organic Maps situation
> 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.
Nitpick: Organic Map is not original project. It's a fork of Maps.me.
Another nitpick: at least OM is made by people who made MapsMe. CoMaps is not - developed by a community, whatever it means.
You can look up who the contributors are, e.g. in their open-source repo: https://codeberg.org/comaps There are also issues and projects with lots of discussions about what to prioritize, etc. So, bashing that “community” is too fuzzy is perhaps not very warranted. (Although I guess they should add a section “Who makes CoMaps?” to the FAQs or so.)
The fact that OM leadership pulled the same open-closed game twice is telling. Many open source contributors who donated their private time and effort to the project just didn't want to do that any more when OM leadership started the game again.
That's the main reason they forked and started a new project.
Also forked for similar governance concerns :))
Interesting, I didn't realize Maps.me used to be open-source! I suppose this is the code (from five years ago): https://github.com/mapsme/omim
One of the main things that keeps me from using essentially all OSM-based mapping apps as my primary is that search seems incredibly bad. I can't blend city and name, road and category, can't usually filter by features or open time, and results are almost always something like:
Are there any apps that do this better? Android and desktop (e.g. linux) ideally. I'd love to use them more, but I've had endless problems using them. Good map data is kinda useless if it can't be retrieved, and trying to work around it by panning around and manually saving a hundred or so favorites really kinda sucks.True, although I do also have a lot of problems with Google Maps. Particularly, when I search for a small town 100km away, and instead it brings up a medium sized down in the USA. Or even more ridiculous cases, like I slightly got the name of a business wrong, so it went with a different business in the USA.
Yeah, it really loves to suggest US options.
Could you try https://cartes.app and share your search terms and expectations ? We're using Photon, an OpenSearch search engine. We've build a dictionary of place categories to help in-browser with FuseJS.
Also thinking about using embeddings to complement this.
Cartes search and user experience was surprisingly good! Well done. I was caught off guard by having the requirement for a Bluesky account for reviews instead of something open source/federated but wasn't able to read the explanation page as it was french only, but I think the international version is still work in progress, so I'll gladly return in the future.
Thanks !
We're not using Bluesky, but Atproto ;) So place reviews is federated and open-source : we use Eurosky/Mu.social daily for our social accounts. Also, Bluesky itself is open-source.
> but I think the international version is still work in progress, so I'll gladly return in the future.
Yes sorry, we're working on it, daily !
Initial attempts and results:
https://cartes.app/#8.61/37.5261/-121.7338 constant up and down movement at any middle zoom level, e.g. this one. zoomed far out or far in (<20km or so visible) it's stable, e.g. https://cartes.app/?allez=San+Francisco+Bay%7Cr9451753%7C-12... moves most of the screen up and down, while https://cartes.app/?allez=San+Francisco+Bay%7Cr9451753%7C-12... is stable. (this appears to be the case roughly anywhere, this is just an example) https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/orfhap34liecdon618wkv/Screenc... for a screen recording.
for below, all have "here" selected (not "everywhere") and this same view: https://cartes.app/#12.41/43.0435/-87.89962
"coffee": shows city names in other states, and two places in Iraq.
"valentine": shows... house icons? and a business icon in other states and countries. (top result is apparently a "commune" in France. not sure I'd use a house icon for that tbh)
"valentine coffee": good substring matches for the business name (3 results) and two results in other countries.
"val coffee" (exploring substring behavior): finds one good match from the previous search... but it also shows "Stone Creek Coffee"? what part of that node matches "val" but not "coffee" on its own? https://cartes.app/?allez=Stone+Creek+Coffee%7Cn5066972575%7... -> https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/5066972575
"vendetta": finds 3 good results, e.g. https://cartes.app/?allez=Vendetta+Coffee+Bar%7Cn11268671206... , but why does this work when "valentine" does not?
so... pretty normal results for open-source OSM apps afaict. maybe slightly better than average.
Thanks a lot for your report !
The shaking is probably caused by an aggressive option in Firefox : see this issue https://codeberg.org/cartes/web/issues/2095.
We can't really act on this, it appears to break a lot of websites :/ Maybe we should try to auto-detect it and show a dialog to the user.
> for below, all have "here" selected (not "everywhere") and this same view: https://cartes.app/#12.41/43.0435/-87.89962
Thanks, it lets me understand the bugs that make coffees impossible to be found for you. The first problem is that for performance reasons, we don't enable category discovery and search at high zoom. They only appear at zoom 13 (https://cartes.app/#13.7/43.04398/-87.911), and your link was at zoom 12.41. This category suggestion would have let you show all coffee places on the map. But not yet filter your searches to this category only, that will be a game-changer feature we're working on.
The zoom limitation is a known problem, but probably worse in the US where cities are less dense than in Europe. I'll prioritize it, thanks.
2nd problem is that the "coffee" word doesn't trigger the coffee category. It should, I'll investigate too.
On your link, two Valentine coffee are shown on the map with the query "valentine", but none are in the search results list, and they're on the edges of the map. Interesting bug : probably a side effect of adding address search last week, I'll investigate.
You're probably our first US-user test, thanks again :)
I do have resist-fingerprinting on, thanks! I'll have to poke at that, I'm curious about the technical reasons. A dialog would help, this is the first I've heard of it and I don't mind exceptions for sites that aren't injecting javascript on billions of unrelated pages.
>and they're on the edges of the map
I don't think they were very edge-y from what I remember... but I'll double check. And will get a screenshot if I disagree - maybe it's something about window size or display density.
>we don't enable category discovery and search at high zoom.
Yeah, I've seen that in a few apps. It's kinda fine when zoomed far out as it's not like you'd be getting a representative distribution, and it might flood more specific (and intended) results out. It broadly makes sense, though I mostly see people confused and frustrated by it in-person (there's rarely any way to tell it has happened). Some of that is just them being overly familiar with only Google though.
But if that category search is not enabled, why doesn't it find business name matches? And why are the results far outside the viewing window?
Also I think that zoom level is almost certainly worth allowing (not necessarily defaulting to) category search. In a dense city it'll overwhelm things, but in much of the USA that might find 2-3 things, if any at all. Maybe it's worth blending in the number of results you'd get if it was enabled when deciding? Like "<10, use category". Or do you also do that?
Prioritisation on search behaviors is super hard, I definitely understand that... but that's why user-controlled options are useful. OSM apps nigh-universally seem to be removing that as the years go by, and the end result is that it's almost unusable because it doesn't let you find things you know exist. Google mitigates it with enormous amounts of ad money and hundreds/thousands of engineers feeding recommendation systems to show 10 decent results out of 100,000 matches (and a lot of learned helplessness by their users), but I don't think that's worth emulating, and they still have a ton of optional controls for filtering. OSM data is convoluted and messy and hard to make convenient, but not having any control at all seems obviously worse to me. Even a `raw-field-name:"value"` seems better, it's passively learnable and fairly easy when tokenized.
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Lest this all seem like ranting / an upset user: I just have lots of opinions about mapping! And I'm broadly rather unhappy with existing apps. I'm literally always glad to see new attempts, and I don't expect everything to be built for me, so thank you for trying things :) I'm entirely happy to say a ton more or just not be your target audience and stick to technical stuff.
> I don't think they were very edge-y from what I remember... but I'll double check. And will get a screenshot if I disagree - maybe it's something about window size or display density.
For some reasons, the results drawn on the map are more numerous than the ones we show in the result list. I've raised an issue to investigate this. https://codeberg.org/cartes/web/issues/2480
> But if that category search is not enabled, why doesn't it find business name matches? And why are the results far outside the viewing window?
Good question. It's a Photon (our search API) problem as far as I know. We probably did set a local search ponderation too low for this use case.
In case the user chose the (default) "search here" option, we could also add a proximity ranking.
I do agree with your last big paragraph : we don't have Google's budget, hence the "search here" option which already solved lots of dead ends. Thanks a lot for this discussion !
Does it just use "here" / viewing box as a bias, not a hard cutoff? Personally I definitely expect "here" to mean "absolutely no results outside my window under any circumstances" (with some room for fuzziness with different screen aspect ratios, though even then I expect fewer results, not more). I'm not familiar with what Photon does tho, and it's not particularly clear from a quick skim of the site/readme.
Search is a really tough problem in OSM for a few reasons, but I think a lot it stems from bad address parsing.
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 :)
https://mailwoman.sister.software/
Is this referring to the difficulty of figuring out what "123 w dhuwdaodks plk" means? I can certainly see that (especially internationally - model-based parsing makes a lot of sense there, assuming enough good training data exists), but like I reliably can't even find precise matches in dedicated fields like "business name" or "city". Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and no open source app I've found yet seems to offer any way to select or filter on fields that definitely exist across locations that definitely exist (I've checked the data by hand). It feels extremely strange, like they're all trying to copy each other without stepping back and figuring out if any of it makes any sense at all to their stated audience.
(as I can no longer edit)
concretely, here's an example search session: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48825127
I mean it when I say that's "maybe slightly better than average". When it gets extra weird I generally go check the OSM node data out of curiosity, and fairly often I find searches returning things where literally no field at all matches any word I searched for, across many different apps. I don't really think that's an address parsing issue, though I have definitely noticed many apps being picky (but completely unspecified) about search formatting when looking for addresses.
> Good map data is kinda useless if it can't be retrieved, and trying to work around it by panning around and manually saving a hundred or so favorites really kinda sucks.
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.
Open source? Not that I've found. I use HERE WeGo for searching and driving, and CoMaps for walking around.
Anyone here has been using coMaps and care to share their experience, especially in comparison to OrganicMaps?
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 and organic maps are very similar (they forked very recently). The only difference I can think of from the top of my mind is that organic maps is not fully open source (map files and generator are proprietary) and has some kayak sponsored suggestions/reviews
> organic maps is not fully open source
Organic Maps is a for-profit venture that accepts donations. That's sketchy. Management also seems to have prior Kremlin links. Which is sketchy.
> Management also seems to have prior Kremlin links
You mind sharing links / sources / etc. ?
> Organic Maps is a for-profit venture that accepts donations. That's sketchy.
I don’t understand why it is “sketchy”. Also do you have any proof on “Kremlin links”?
My biggest issue with OrganicMaps is that the search isn't very good. It really struggles to find my destination sometimes. That's the one thing I'm afraid Google will always be better at.
It doesn't take so much to enable a good server search on top of OSM + openaddresses.
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.
> What is very hard to reproduce is Google's place review data.
fake anyways (quite easy to get negative comments deleted), and even for bad reviews.
Best look elsewhere or not at all.
I'm not talking about stars, we don't care about stars for search engines.
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 just checked (in CoMaps): A restaurant around the corner is listed as "Pizza, Vegan, no wheelchair access, outdoor seating". No opening hours, though (but other places have).
It's not like Google reviews can be trusted.
I have the same grippe.
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 )
For good (server) search, one needs many layers (Photon, Pelias with OpenAdresses, Overpass, in-house pmtiles, etc.) using many DBs, each needing server ressources or expensive paid APIs.
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 ?
This can be due to missing address information in OSM. I also find the grouping sometimes odd, e.g. searching for a street, the place names are from one level higher.
I prefer CoMaps' tile styling, they did a bunch of updates to it early on to differentiate it from OrganicMaps, IMO it's much nicer.
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.
Been using Comaps for a while, mainly for cycling, and it works very well. Before that I used also organicmaps and it was fine as well but I think made a few more mistakes in routing. That said, obviously this is not a parallel test but rather successive. Of course the split happened with drama, but I just like the Comaps vibe and am happy with it.
I used to use OrganicMaps. When coMaps forked, I changed to it. From my perspective there were no negatives. If anything, coMaps looked to be under more active development.
Probably posted because of related recent discussion on OrganicMaps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48794446
Which was in turn probably posted because I mentioned it on the same day under another submission
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48793684
What FOSS maps need is user generated content. For example, having "swimming spot" on my map is not really that useful - it needs photos, some description, additional information of what it actually is and how to reach it as bare minimum to be actually competitive.
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.
You can already add photos to OSM database. Eg. via wikimedia_commons tag.
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
Thanks! The wikimedia_commons tag is very useful - I'll start contributing there. Though my point still stands that UGC integration could and should be much better.
I strongly disagree. Open maps don't have to compete in this space and it would make them worse.
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 ;)
> shift into being a social media and their biggest effort would be content moderation.
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?
> what's an extra field?
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.
To be fair there are examples of freeform text tags in OpenStreetMap already, e.g. “description”.
Which is hard to get to, doesn't even render on some apps at all, it's easier to automatically or manually moderate as it has a more defined purpose and it's pure text (not meant for personal feelings towards the place, not meant for rating etc).
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.
"Just let users expand the dataset with more information, it's almost never a bad idea"
Thanks for the laugh.
The big difference is visibility and scale.
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, ...
I don't really need a tag saying how to reach the place, but better public transport support would go a long way. I also have this issue with places marked as parkings, to determine whether they're public, open or even reachable.
The OSM foundation strictly keeps it with 'map data'. There are however many other, small projects that fill in the gap; for example 'Panoramax' for streetview imagery or lib.reviews for reviews. I've made a webapp that ties those services together (https://mapcomplete.org)
Keep in mind that Google Maps has a >1 billion yearly budget (citation needed, but other global maps have similar budgets)
Yeah a lot of these features exist, they're just very fragmented, which given that the OSM community is already pretty small makes it almost impossible for them to reach the critical mass necessary to actually be useful.
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.
This is the only app that allows you to easily add stops and permanently save paths for biking. Honestly a life changer.
As great as Waze and Google Maps are for dynamic routing and responsive path-finding, I am using rental scooters now, and at this point I really need to design some bicycle routes with intention and purpose, and Maps simply refuses to save any "dragged" or "pinned" route in any meaningful way, and I suppose this is deliberate, because A.I. knows best, kids!
Even for driving the major apps are crappy about routes. I was on Foothills Parkway a while ago and wanted to keep Apple Maps running just as a "miles/time remaining" indicator. It can't do anything other than fastest route, with the option to ignore highways.
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 had the same issue planning roadtrips where the journey is the destination. I’ve paid for apps like InRoute despite poor UX, inability to access my routes from desktop, and zero collaboration support
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
Very cool! That solves creating and saving a route with extra navigation waypoints, so the other thing I'd want out of it is a native app with CarPlay where I can get total time/distance remaining, time/distance to next stop, and the option to pick which waypoints count as "stops" (versus just being there to control the route). I see there's a GPX export but I'm sure that won't handle the waypoints how I want it to. Guessing native apps are out of scope though?
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...
thanks for trying it out! I actually happen to have a trip planned for next month in Shenandoah and Blue Ridge Pkwy, looks like that loop is a little out of reach for us this trip but I want to go back to hit Tail of the Dragon and others
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!
CarPlay support can run in the simulator, obviously you'll need to fake the GPS location too for this to be useful. And you need to get special permission from Apple before you can even use the simulator, they keep CarPlay even more locked down than everything else.
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!
thanks for the tips about CarPlay development. I'll definitely target parity with the web app at first so hopefully it'll be something I can get access to eventually
regarding (1), yes, you keep the routes you made even after your subscription ends. the limits revert to the free tier so if it had more waypoints or was longer than that then you just can't add or move waypoints. removing waypoints to get back down below the limit works and you still export your trip to formats included in your tier (e.g. google/apple/waze)
you could absolutely pay for a month just to plan and export all your trips for the year, bookmarking them with google maps or saving the files for your GPS for instance -- not a problem. I am currently exploring alternatives to monthly & annual subscription schedules to further support seasonal usage, too
per your 2nd question, that's correct, only the creator needs to pay to have 2+ collaborators. you can try it out on the free tier with 1 person at first to see if it works for you. if you just want to share maps publicly you can do that without subscribing, too
Had a feature idea, what if you could assign names/colors to sections between waypoints? For example, say between waypoints 2-4 in my map is Foothills Parkway, and color it red on the map and the elevation diagram?
Especially on the elevation view would be neat to see it color coded by which parts are which road.
Might help incentivize premium upgrades too because there's a benefit to putting waypoints at actual meaningful locations instead of playing "how can I maximize the route control with 8 points." Or heck that's enough of a cosmetic thing that you could just make the color editing part of the premium plans.
A minor bug report - the verification email said the link was good for 24 hours but when I tried to click it yesterday evening it was already dead.
That was incredibly frustrating when I had some driving restrictions on a learner's license - not every road was available for me and after planning it all out in detail, I realized there's no way for me to move it over to my phone.
Similarly, on a motorbike I'd choose some particular roads for more fun, but that also requires committing the route to memory.
Anything other than cars I believe google maps/waze is nearly unuseable for navigation, yah. I think they even removed "bike" pathing too. Public transport is pretty alright, but very inaccurate vs local app when they use the same data and routing is lacking intelligence sometimes.
Sorry for the slight off-topic:
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.
This is all OSM-based. OSM is one big pile of data - we don't do layers.
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
This is incredibly helpful. Thank you!
If by layers you mean tiles, you can make a server providing ZXY tile images. Some OSM clients (e.g. BRouter) allow adding custom tile servers for baselayer and overlays.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_servers
This is what I use in my main GrapheneOS profile. I still have a dedicated profile for Google Maps though as I still have not been able to give up their greater datasets (i.e. traffic) in all cases.
Decent app though. I saw someone here mention proprietary code but I wouldn't worry about it, just install the F-Droid version. That's why I use F-Droid - to guarantee I don't get proprietary blobs.
Proprietary parts had been mentioned in the context of Organic Maps - their map generator is partially closed source, and even OM F-Droid build includes some proprietary assets.
In CoMaps we are serious about being 100% FOSS and this is one of the reasons we've forked from OM.
Don't worry, we have no proprietary code in all builds of CoMaps, not just F-Droid one :)
To be honest, I use Organic Maps over CoMaps simply because Organic Maps is available in Accrescent (which is in turn provided by the GrapheneOS App Store), and CoMaps is not. Both Google Play and F‐Droid are just enough of a hassle (and I mildly dislike both of them) to keep me on the map app that doesn’t require either one.
Magic Earth is fairly decent at traffic and dynamic routing. Worth the small subscription fee to keep them going, in my opinion.
HERE WeGo does traffic, if you want to ditch Google Maps.
Tangential, but does anyone know if an app exists that that the video feed of your phone with the GPS loc and reads the signs from the road and compare it to OSM to update it if necessary?
Let’s be clear, in the end I use Waze for routing due to the traffic updates, but I see sometimes outdated speed limits and know OSM is one of its sources.
I remember seeing something like this where it could identify signs and things, but the quality from what I recall was not great (could be way off and have many duplicates). I might be remembering Mapillary, which has a Map data button at the top left and seems to show signs [0]. I don't think it auto-updates OSM based on these data.
[0] https://www.mapillary.com/app/?lat=52.4758193487485&lng=-1.8...
Oh I don't have a link but there was a project just like this someone hacked together a while back. I think it used Gemini live or something and as you walked and scanned things it would suggest changed to the map. It was a rough demo but seemed promising.
I've been wanting to do something similar but just by taking photos of menus and updating the POI with new hours/website/phone etc
Looks like a glue-together narrow-purpose kind of app that AI is relatively good at producing.
Seems like a minimal OsmAnd.
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.
I assumed the metro layer was specifically for underground lines, as they won't show up in the normal layer. I just checked for London and the tram lines and stops show up as expected in the standard view.
Tried it today. Works fine for navigation. I am missing live traffic info. This is the one thing keeping me in Google Maps the past years.
Same. Apparently there's ongoing work to integrate live traffic: https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/projects/21877
CoMaps is great!
I'm still mostly using Organic Maps though, and from time to time I switch to Comaps to see the differences.
In general I like the colors of CoMaps more than OrganicMaps (light theme, dark is so-so), but I still use OM because:
- OM shows colors for marked trails. Pretty recent feature and not as good as in Mapy.com, but at least I don't need to switch to Mapy.com just for this feature.
- recently OM added public transport routes. UX is quite bad, but it's much better that having nothing! It was quite useful at my last trip.
The nicest feature that CoMaps added recently are map updates that are independent to an app update, and they try to update maps like once a week. So it's much more probable that you will have more up to date data there than on OM. So I started using it more too :)
I use CoMaps, it works like a charm on GrapheneOS + Android Auto.
I have also contributed to the OpenStreetMap by adding POI and requesting logic to be changed.
The only major issue which I got used to but sucks, is the search when it does not involved famous places or streets or both.
Streets will be shown as minor or major and alike, I do need to use Google Maps Browser version to find the place, and the on CoMaps manually navigate to said place.
But the fact that I get a map update a week, sometimes two maps update a week which other apps will take months and subscription, that alone is worth hustle.
Stop shilling graphene. We can tell.
Every time GrapheneOS "just works" should be mentioned, because some ecosystems are straight hostile to user-controlled systems.
what is the issue with graphene?
There's a ton of sock puppet accounts here and on other sites shilling it.
yeah shilling a non profit open source OS.
Does anyone know how fresh the business data is? like opening, closure, phone, address of businesses?
i think one thing that's going for google is the network effects and what it's able to do.
Depends a lot on where you live. My village is pretty fresh cuz I update it lol. My impression is that it's quite good in western Europe, might take a month in major US cities, and probably years old in most other places. I think Indonesia, Israel, and Japan are decent as well.
Agreed, same here. But I don't update shops I don't support, such as tobacco, big chains.
It's as fresh as OSM databse : it depends.
You can take the initiative here.
Honestly in my experience is that in some parts of the world, or even particular neighborhoods even google maps is useless.
Even for routing google maps still fail with some one way streets directions.
While I do use mapping programs for directions, I more often use them for a more accurate estimate of time and traffic density. I haven't looked very hard, but I haven't seen any OpenStreetMap data or equivalent that shows "Real" travel times and traffic density.
Indeed, because gleaning telemetry data from millions of active users isn't a map applications normal intended use-case.
CoMaps project celebrated its first birthday recently!
https://www.comaps.app/news/2026-05-12/celebrating-the-first...
OSM is great as a map, but the biggest thing keeping me from switching from Google Maps to any OSM solution is the "white pages". My most common use case for a maps app is location-based search.
Having a complete and updated registry of businesses with operating hours is the bare minimum, and OSM apps already struggle with that. I also want pictures of the establishment, pictures of the menu for restaurants, and price estimates for fuel and hotels.
I understand the cost of hosting and moderating that stuff is enormous, but that's what it will take for me to finally convert.
CoMaps starts maximally zoomed out (showing the whole world). Organic Map starts showing my neighbourhood.
That‘s the simple reason I‘m using Organic Maps and not taking a fifth look at CoMaps (and I downloaded CoMaps yesterday after the HN thread).
CoMaps remembers the zoom and position of your last session and returns there on launch
Which isn't particularly helpful if you're moving around a lot.
Would be nice for a preference.
I just opened CoMaps. The first thing that happened was that it zoomed out from my previous location in another city, and then zoomed in on my current position.
How does this compare with the F-Droid version of OsmAnd?
[Edit: To answer my own question a little bit, I found a post from September 2025 that compares OsmAnd and Organic Maps (which this project forked from): https://blog.firedrake.org/archive/2025/09/OSMAnd_vs_Organic... .
I can't find anything more recent or for CoMaps specifically, other than auto-created "alternatives" pages. I would absolutely love to hear from anybody who has tried both!]
Think of it as a very stripped down and opinionated version of OsmAnd. It lacks a lot of power features, but is extremely fast and all of the options are easily available and work out of the box. So it's great for everyday use (especially in cities with a lot of POIs) but not as good for in depth travel and route planning.
For example, I've used F-Droid OsmAnd extensively when planning my trip to Japan, because its guides, WikiData and Wikipedia integration are godsend for finding interesting places to visit, but used CoMaps when I was there to look things up and build routes. I'm also exclusively using OsmAnd for writing GNSS tracks because I can fine tune the parameters of measurements it captures.
I used to use wikiloc, but most of the things that offer which were the most interesting things were by paying, so I think that it could be some opportunity for using these maps and vibe coding for creating something spectacular!
Is it possible to change the maps' colors and contrasts now? Last time I checked I thought the lower contrast and washed-out colors compared to Organic Maps were a poor choice so I switched back to OM.
There is an outdoor map style which is more contrast to the general/default style, if that helps.
Just used it the other day while I was back-country hiking. Set some markers for some landmarks and calculated hiking distance/duration between them. CoMaps is awesome! It's also the reason I contributed to OpenStreetMaps for the first time a while ago, contributing the name of a landmark/structure up in a local mountain.
CoMaps is my daily. From time to time I also use it's share my location, add place or record track functionality.
Very good for trails
How does it compare to AllTrails in America?
Unless I’m mistaken they both ultimately use OpenStreetMap data. So, effectively the same coverage of trails.
AllTrails has its whole review system sitting on top of course.
This is correct. Tools might however display them slightly different, have different update schedules or make different cartographic choices (e.g. not showing node networks or something)
I understand this is an Organic Maps fork without the PE rugpull.
Is there a .dmg for macOS outside of the App Store? (I'm trying to avoid the App Store as much as I can).
Do CoMaps somehow support overlays, like bus routes? OSMAnd does that, but I see no such option in CoMaps anywhere (a map layer, a separate map, etc).
There is a subway overlay. And there is marked hiking routes overlay being in development. There is a also an outdoor-focused map style (some people call it a layer too).
Does it work on iOS app integration and does it has support for building application layer stuff like how MapBox sdk enables?
CoMaps an end-user app, not an SDK.
Would love to see a Windows desktop version.
I would love to switch to this, but the dark map is basically unusable due to the lack of contrast.
Can you connect CoMaps to your car's navigation, like you can with OsmAnd?
How is this different from OpenStreetMaps? Or does it just use OSM as its underlying engine?
OSM is mostly a db with an old website for contributors, osm.org.
Its a renderer. It bakes live OSM data once very few weeks.
Since a few weeks CoMaps updates its map data roughly every week, so maps are a lot fresher now (also compared to Organic Maps :))
perfect timing. i was using OpenStreetMap for my ios running app and I found out that there is a cap so I ended up switching to a paid solution and have been trying to build something like comaps by downloading all the tiles
> I found out that there is a cap
A cap for downloading rendered tiles from osm.org? That exists, but is quite generous.
Other (free) options are https://openfreemap.org/ or https://versatiles.org/ to generate your own tiles.
Don't download all the tiles, that is useless.
Look into protomaps instead. One ~100GB archive for the entire world
Great for hiking and sharing path.
So nice to be able to do that locally and just send a .gpx file
Mapy.com does that really well [0] (not affiliated). Not open source though. It uses mix of sources - OSM included - to render map (best render imo - especially the "outdoor" layer) and they are pretty large contributor to OSM in Europe. In free tier you can have one country downloaded for offline use. Sharing .gpx is no problem. Traffic data only in Central Europe.
[0]: https://mapy.com
Traffic info is for Central Europe plus favorite vacation destinations like Croatia and Italy. I don't know how reliable though.
I agree that the outdoor layer render is probably the best there is!
I tried a TON of hiking apps and this is the best free one hands down.
Being able to download maps, tap to set destination, and see elevation all for free makes it top tier.
Does anybody know of a feasible alternative to Google Timeline?
Half of the solution at least on Android is https://gpslogger.app. Then you need to find a way to render the data to a map, such as with https://dawarich.app. Looks like the last time I looked at that project (and wasn't quite sold on it) was 1.5 years ago, so time for a second look.
I have set up Owntracks with a self-hosted server, and the android app reports my location to it periodically over MQTT. I would prefer to use https://dawarich.app/ but last time I tried it it was clearly very beta-quality and not ready for reliable usage.
Hi, what were the issues you have encountered in Dawarich? Any feedback appreciated!
I tried it for family location sharing a few months back and, I don't remember exactly, but I remember the UI/UX feeling a bit slow/clunky in general, eventhough setting things up was user-friendly. Definitely potential there, though.
Tried today, I like the record track feature
See also:
https://gurumaps.app/
protomaps is also great for that. open source and straightforward
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