The concern seems to be they want a bunch of guarantees about what will be done with the project - not because there is a change happening from Organic, but because they're afraid of a change happening in the future. If such a change happens in the future, they can fork then. I mean, hell, this already happened; they had Maps.ME, it was sold, Roman forked it to Organic. If it gets sold again they can fork again. This seems like it'll hurt the community more than if they'd waited until it was necessary.
I think that the open source community is too quick to make "just fork it later" the answer to all our governance woes.
Look at the state of WordPress: the (B?)DFL actively bans people from the community for critiquing his self-described "nuclear war" waged against his biggest competitor in the hosting space, which "nuclear war" has caught thousands of members of the community in the crossfire. And yet we see no fork. Why? Because forking is hard and fragments the community, so people would rather put up with a tyrant than deal with the risk of instability. This is no different than tyrants in any other environment.
If a project has good governance established from the beginning, including a reasonably democratic process for contributors to elect the executive function, then the community can be reasonably sure that they won't feel the need to fork in the future because they have recourse if things go sour.
A difference between Wordpress and Organic Maps, though, is that Wordpress is a framework whereas Organic Maps is an application. Switching to a fork of Wordpress means a different extension marketplace, various config files that may need to be changed, etc. Switching to a fork of Organic Maps is just downloading a different app that does the same thing.
Completely irrespective of the governance structure of Organic Maps, by its nature it is much more easily forkable than something like Wordpress.
Absolutely 100% agree with your statement, Linux desktop is the perfect example of that. You get a billion different distribution that all comes from debian, arch and maybe fedora but that's all.
In my opinion, there should be 3 Linux distribution. That's all.
For instance Ubuntu: Yeah Ubuntu gnome suck, yeah canonical push snap package when flappack are better but do you really need a new distribution because of that ?
Perfection is the enemy of progress. And when things go all bad and you have used all other alternative, then and only then forking should be considered. Like a nuclear button.
Currently i feel like it's more often used by newcomer that want to get to the lead position of a project they are passionate about but didn't start, so they fork and get a fraction of the community behind. It's not much but it's still a bit.
Un(?)fortunately, us Organic Maps forkers have been with the project since Organic Maps was OMaps, and before. The only people with more commits than the senior fork member are the OM co-owners themselves. We really tried getting OM to deliver on their promises, but it seems silence is preferable to accountability for them.
> yeah canonical push snap package when flappack are better but do you really need a new distribution because of that ?
In practice yes, since Canonical is replacing essential system components to depend on snap. So you can't just "not use it", you're forced to be dependent on their upstream package hosting service that you can't rehost yourself.
If I understand correctly, there is work going in inside the WordPress community. Not sure if and when things will happen, I am not involved personally.
> If such a change happens in the future, they can fork then...
Did such a change not already happen with the addition of Kayak affiliate links without any community consultation? It seems to me that there has already been enough to justify a fork.
Not to mention, there was a promise of electing and changing boardmembers which has never happened, and hiding the use of OrganicMaps project donations for personal vacations as alleged by the initial open letter.
> If it’s the former, a vacation seems like a totally legitimate use
Imo hiding that the funds were used even in a legitimate case makes it improper. If it was intended to be paid as a salary then they should have disclosed that $x were paid out as a salary. As I understand it, the only reason we know that the funds left the project was because one of the founders revealed the use of funds by the other founders, not through a planned, transparent, or regular process. In other words, the revelation that funds were being used seemed to be an anomaly as opposed to a regular practice.
The original open letter states essentially as much: "It's fine for developers to be reimbursed for their hard work, but it should be done in a fair, transparent and accountable way."
> not because there is a change happening from Organic
They mention financial transparency. I don't know the details, but "we want to know what our donations are used for" is a reasonable request to have, I would say.
So, I guess that’s a pretty awesome business plan. Establish some open source entity, let the community develop everything for you, sell the entity, then fork it, let the community develop everything for you, sell again, then fork it, let the community …
Isn't that a valid worry?
Especially in a project that needs user contribution the eventual horizon does matter.
Would you shovel dirt in a community garden project if you know the guy on top will eventually turn it into a commercial business? That means your work wasn't going towards a nice community garden as you thought, but it was going towards one guy being too stingy to actually pay labour. Sure maybe that guy didn't know he would do that from the beginning, but what difference would it make?
I'd have agreed with you a year ago, but the WordPress debacle shows that the BDFL concept really hangs on the "benevolent" part of the job description. If your BDFL goes rancid your only option is to fork, and hostile forks are very difficult to pull off because it almost invariably forks the community.
The BDFL archetype is basically Plato's philosopher king. It's a nice and appealing idea in theory, and works well if you get a good one (Matz for Ruby, by all accounts). But it's risky, and it's hard to be sure yours is actually benevolent and will stay benevolent.
There is none because forking the code doesn't automatically bring the community along with you, and so no one wants to risk the instability that would inevitably come from forking. When a project needs a fork it usually much more closely resembles a civil war than it does a succession, and the whole system becomes weaker because of it.
Why would we start with a model that we know will permanently weaken our community when we inevitably need to trigger a succession?
There's no fork because there's no need for a fork.
If the WordPress idiot was like "I'm going to make WordPress worse, and I don't care what anyone thinks", there would be a fork. But that's not what's happening. What's happening is that one WordPress host (the official one) is miffed that other hosts aren't paying a tax for the use of (100% open source) software.
That makes the guy in charge an idiot who doesn't understand OSS, and his idiocy is helping to destroy his entire company ... but he's just being a bully: he's not hurting anyone's use of the software.
BDFL is a good concept. As long as money stays out of it. If the DFL collects money in a for profit Organisation and isn't transparent about usage, this is unsatisfactory to other contributors.
I am not sure there is a huge market for selling the company, though, given the track record of the owners for taking the money and then forking away and trying to pull the users over.
There is a Smile of Love
And there is a Smile of Deceit
And there is a Smile of Smiles
In which these two Smiles meet
And there is a Frown of Hate
And there is a Frown of disdain
And there is a Frown of Frowns
Which you strive to forget in vain
-- William Blake, The Smile of Smiles
I'm not trying to imply anything with that other than that it seems the original fork seems to have failed in its stated goals of being the community-led, non-commercialized version.
Neovim is a fork of VIM which was a fork of Stevie which was a fork of vi which was a fork of ed, and it's the piece of software I use probably more than anything.
I mean... Yeah, why not? That's one of the reasons FOSS is nice: people who are willing to maintain/contribute don't have to put up with a project going rogue.
Sad to see the current state of mobile OSM-based apps. Maps.me becoming OrganicMaps, now this. Lot of development effort, great work going into it, but somehow, after years, the apps don't feel more user-friendly.
I was pushing hard to replace Google Maps, but eventually, I gave up. OsmAnd is great if you need that "swiss army knife of OSM apps" on your phone, but I rarely do. Same with Maps.me/Organic Maps, try to search for something, mistype only one letter (surprise, surprise, that happens a lot on mobile), and you have no chance to get results. Alternative path for your bike route? Forget about it. Rendering is awful, either ugly, or slow, or both.
I am trying to switch to Mapy.com (Mapy.cz before), it's a surprisingly user friendly app, however, not sure how they are going to monetize soon. So far the best on phone, I hope they will push and really become a Maps-replacement. They recently switched from a Czech-focused concept to a proper world-wide map (mapy.com); both web and mobile is great so far. (I am not Czech, and have no relation to mapy, simply really like their app)
If OsmAnd got a new rendering engine (no, not that "3D" sluggish thing it has for a couple years now), like streetcomplete has (or the Strava-built-in mapbox renderer), it would be possibly the best.
OSMAnd and OrganicMaps both have the limitation (and big advantage) of functioning offline by default. The routing will be much more powerful (with alternatives on by default) and faster if you enable an online routing service. For OSMAnd this is possible with e.g. GraphHopper: https://www.graphhopper.com/blog/2024/02/27/osmand-with-grap...
The same is true for address search. If you have an online address search like photon the search can be more user friendly. We've put together photon and GraphHopper routing on GraphHopper Maps: https://graphhopper.com/maps/ which you could self-host on your own (i.e. also use offline): https://github.com/karussell/local-maps
GraphHopper Maps is also available on fdroid store or you can install the website as PWA in iOS.
> (and big advantage) of functioning offline by default.
I don't know about others but that's the main reason I use it. My day to day mapping app is still Google Maps but I always keep a copy of Organic Maps with downloaded maps of wherever I'm going as a backup. While I do not use it often, it's gotten me out of a couple of sticky situations while camping and roadtripping.
Organic Maps (and other offline mapping providers) are far from perfect and the UX is just not the same as it is on Google Maps for example. But with it being a backup app, if I need to open it I don't really care about the limitations, I just need an offline map.
I know this probably doesn't solve the same issue, but google maps has a offline feature. Click your profile picture (on mobile), pick offline maps, ....
It has a huge limitation in that it only allows you to pick a certain area to download and those maps "expire" after a period of time. The key advantage that Organic Maps (and other OSM providers) has is that I can download an entire state, province or even country and that data will never "expire".
I think this is less Organic vs Google than OpenStreetMap's data set vs Google's. I don't know why Google does so much worse with trails than OSM, but it really does.
> I don't know why Google does so much worse with trails than OSM, but it really does.
I expect that Google never saw a market in trail mapping. I also assume no Google employee took an interest in trails as a 10% project. Google Maps doesn't really do much for topography either.
Google Earth can be good for trail mapping, but that has basically atrophied since it was acquired from Keyhole.
Yeah, but the thing is that I don't think any of this data is "self-collected". I suspect that OSM gets most of its US trail data (or at least western state trail data) from the National Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. I also suspect that incorporating such a data source into Google Maps is relatively trivial, but they just seemed to have done so.
I map many trails on osm from personal site surveys and a combination of sat imagery and my gpx files. No way google is doing that because there is no one to steal the data from. It was me, the enthusiast that put it in osm directly. That’s just me and the trails I load tho. Example - Latest was short one at monkeyface falls. https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/34.098058/-116.955639
I hike on trails in New Mexico, and I find the existing trail data on osmand/OSM to be astoundingly accurate. I had concluded that NSF/BLM must have data.
So few people hike these trails that I do not believe they were entered one by one. The one "trail" I hiked that was entered by someone I deleted later that day, because it should not have been shown as a trail.
I happened to work for a car navigation software development company 15+y ago. Cool stuff, Windows CE / PDAs as devices, android and ios nowhere. These were totally offline devices (map updates through usb / sdcard).
Even then, this offline navigation was super fast, across countries. Today I managed to wait a whole minute for a 5km bike navigation in OsmAnd. Then I uninstalled (after years of hoping for improvement. Yes, I was regularly donating money.)
In my experience, OsmAnd is mostly slow for very long routes.
Maybe it is a matter of quality. Because of course you can find routes fast if they are not the fastest or best routes.
But there is room for improvement.
brouter could be integrated even better. Or a router like that could be used directly in OsmAnd.
And long routes could be handled more flexible.
E.g., when I go from Copenhagen to Barcelona, it is not super important at first to find the optimal way into Barcelona, or shortcuts in France using regional roads. It will take several days, but I would like to start with a reasonable route giving me an estimate of distance and time. At first I just need a good route to the Great Belt Bridge or the Rødby ferry -- Copenhagen is on an island.
When I drive long distances, I sometimes use several devices.
The Xzent system is much faster for longer distances, but the map is not as good, especially it is missing may POI's.
Often they disagree, especially if one is optimizing for distance and other for fuel or time. Then if there is an obstacle or a bad road, I instantly have a good alternative at an intersection.
Just that comparing Google and OSMAnd/OrganicMaps in terms of routing alternatives & speed and powerful address search is not 100% fair (even when they'd use the same data source which they don't)
> The routing will be much more powerful (with alternatives on by default) and faster if you enable an online routing service.
What is the essential reason that online routing has an advantage over local routing, if the data is all available locally anyway? Is it that you need an index, and that index is large and/or very time-consuming to produce, and hence not viable to store/generate on-device after each map data update?
At least for bycicle routing, Brouter also runs offline and is much more performant than both OSMAnd and OrganicMaps (and can be integrated into OSMAnd).
To me it feels like OSMAnd heavily prioritizes feature develompent over performance, which is fair enough but still annoying.
And their choices in features they wish to develop confuses. 50% of the time I still have to translate an address into GPS coordinates before I can find a place, and yet I have an OBD-II plugin that allows me to monitor my car's performance?
Offline navigation is really nice. The fact that I can use maps and find routes regardless of where I am and what connection I have, is great.
It would be nice to have slightly smarter search, though. That definitely requires improvement. Even just the ordering of the results is terrible sometimes.
> try to search for something, mistype only one letter
Photon is quite good at this, coming with english/french/german plug-and-play. But it's online, so very hard to implement on each user's phone, which is the limitation of Organic and Osmand.
Once you're using Photon or an equivalent project, you need to do a lot more to provide Google's experience :
- itinerary suggestions like "from london to winchester"
- coordinates detection
- handle abbreviations like blvd, in all the languages (Nominatim does it better than Photon, from what I know)
- handle category search, e.g. typing "coffee in Marais" -> a full-text-search won't work taking only the features' name, you need to do some semantic separation of terms
- etc.
> Alternative path for your bike route? Forget about it.
Same pb : offline routing is harder. BRouter is excellent, with lots of alternatives, but online (can be installed on OSMand but it's nerdy).
Disclaimer : I'm working on https://cartes.app, a Web map app. We're using Photon and Brouter, but lots need to be done, including i18n to english, soon I hope !
Wow, thanks for mentioning https://streetcomplete.app! This looks very intuitive to use for edits on openstreetmaps.
Would someone here know a similiar tool for iOS or MacOS? Or any recommendations to edit roads.
We are currently driving with a 4.5 tonne motorhome in Europe and the road weight and height limits are usually marked properly in osmand+ but when they are not we waste multiple hours rerouting in the alps and I would really want to help the next person in similar situation.
Mentioning it just in case, but openstreetmap.org's web editor (iD) is a good start on Desktop.
There's also EveryDoor [1] which is very nice to edit OSM and they do seem to have an iOS version. Depending on what you want to edit, it can be very handy.
I have not tried the numerous other, more advanced options [2].
Agreed. I use organic maps for hiking, because its just simple offline trail mapping. I want a mapping program in my car to easily be offline, have map overlays that are easy to read like more pronounced lane/route arrows and can re route if there is a road shut down or a backup on the expressway and I go to get off.
But my biggest gripe with using organic maps with driving is its search function. I couldnt care if it doesnt have all the online social features like google maps and come up with the police/safety warnings and restaurant ratings. I just want its seach to actually find the place I want to go.
Most of the time I try and avoid using google maps, but then I go back and try organic maps. Notice it doesnt have where i want to go listed in its search, so i google the address to plug in. I can enter in the exact address and it wont find it and then go back to google maps.
> Notice it doesnt have where i want to go listed in its search
I live in an area where OSM is really good with that (just because people contributed the data). If your area is less complete, it feels like it's a good opportunity to contribute!
There are many apps that will help you contribute to the map, or you can do it directly from the website: https://www.openstreetmap.org.
It doesn't mean you need to spend tons of time on it: I contribute data a few times a year. It's better than nothing :-).
It's not only about being tagged in Openstreetmap, it's about the search algorithm finding the relevant entry from ambiguous entry. Dealing with cases where things are spelled slightly differently (abbreviations etc.) or finding the relevant entry when common terms are used in names or search just by category.
Another alternative to mapy.com you could try is Here WeGo. I prefer it to any other Google Maps alternative I have tried. And there are some things, like the car navigation, that I prefer on it over Google Maps. I don't find their privacy policy creepy, and the most creepy parts are opt-in and the toggle clearly explains what you'd be opting into and what feature you are missing out on by not opting in. Mapy's privacy policy is less creepy than Here's in some aspects, but some of the creepiness that's opt-in in Here, like location data sharing for traffic, it's on with no opting-out on Mapy.
I'd prefer an open-source alternative, but as you said, there isn't any that currently fits my needs.
Plus one for everything you said! I've been using WeGo in place of Google maps for a good few months and it's been an easy drop in swap without any compromises for me.
It would be immense for an open source project to exist, but I'll happily settle for a non-google one.
The biggest for me is definitely the lack of public transportation. This is something even gnome-maps support. Global search (eg. things that are not downloaded yet) only works for some bigger entities, that are part of the world map (although I understand that this would need some server-side support). Not having a satellite map is also a bummer.
Point-to-point navigation at places where you already downloaded maps is alright (same with osmand), but for exploration, or public trasnport, I would need to use moovit, mapy, osmand (wikipedia overlay is awesome), or google maps.
Oh that's a great callout. I did some quick research and it appears Gnome's public transport feature is powered by https://transitous.org/ - I wonder how much work it would be to add this to Organic Maps?
They seem to have some sort of experimental support for GTFS [1], and one important part of Transitous is being a GTFS aggregator, so maybe they are not too far away from being able to use that part of Transitous.
Although it'd probably be good to be able to query Transitous itself when online.
There is a lot one could do offline. Highlight close by stations, have overlays/styles for transport focus (they got an overlay for "Subway", which in some areas includes commuter trains but not for bus/tram/light rail/...)
And in theory one could add bundles of data based on GTFS data which many transport organisations these days publish and do routing at least based on schedule times.
Question is what it's for. A proper transport layer on the map would be valuable to me. Even without timetable data. That's even in relations on openstreetmap already.
Next improvement might be to highlight lines based on frequency of service. Still possible to precalculate with little need on device.
We'd love to have your input for improved transit in CoMaps! I agree it's an important priority. Last GSoC there was a project for ingesting GTFS feeds against OSM data, since local agencies are often much better about their details than OSM is, but as a student project it was slow and limited in scope.
Not an UX thing, but I find myself going back to Google Maps to find restaurants, reviews and reliable opening hours all the time. Neither Apple Maps nor Organic Maps offers the same level of quality (not to say that Google Maps reviews can be problematic in themselves).
It's almost impossible for anything to compete with Google Maps on business information because they have built such a vast commercial ecosystem around it with advertising, Maps users etc.
And at least back when I tried it a long time ago, it wouldn't pull in updates from OSM in a timely manner. Like I updated something in OSM and a month later it still wasn't available in organic maps. Maybe it is better now?
Search. I've wanted to like Organic Maps, but the search function is the absolute pits and forces me to still use Google Maps. Without good search, there's next to no point in me using it.
I'm working on https://github.com/styluslabs/maps/ including a new 3D map engine (based on Tangram-ES) and JS plugin support, so while there is no offline routing yet, support for additional online routing services can be added by users.
> I am trying to switch to Mapy.com (Mapy.cz before), it's a surprisingly user friendly app, however, not sure how they are going to monetize soon
They now sell premium. Presumably some features (offline maps? or offline navigation? suggest a hike?) will be locked behind premium :-/ They do have great UX though
> If OsmAnd got a new rendering engine (no, not that "3D" sluggish thing it has for a couple years now), like streetcomplete has (or the Strava-built-in mapbox renderer), it would be possibly the best.
Edit : sorry, I read Organic. Indeed OSMand is sluggish for me as well. I don't know why they went for something other than MapLibre. It's probably in-house and entangled in their code :/
Streetcomplete is amazing; I understand it provides less polygons to render but it does an absolutely amazing job at it, even when there are thousands of quests.
It most likely involves a lot more than "just swapping the maps engine". Everything is built on top of their stack. It would basically mean rewriting an app from scratch.
I started using osmand a lot more lately while biking and I agree route calculation on the phone (hi Pixel 4a :) ) are super slow but for that reason you can configure alternative (online) routing engines in the settings https://osmand.net/docs/user/navigation/routing/online-routi.... I use https://openrouteservice.org/ which generates long routes in seconds and works great in general.
There's a lot of discussion about bicycle routing improvements, as well as displaying alternate routes. I expect these conversations to be continued in CoMaps, so your input is valued and welcome there! https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/9748
Slightly off topic but I would really want to see DuckDB based alternative of https://pgrouting.org.
It's so easy to embed duckdb anywhere. Current smartphones already have enough CPU juice to handle almost anything and duckdb can query and cache geoparquet files eg from the Overture maps.
I'm not that worried about Mapy.cz/.com becoming useless unless you pay, to be honest. (Maybe they'll make me look foolish for that.) The developer is Seznam, which is kind of like the Czech homegrown equivalent of Google/Craigslist/Zillow. I assume they monetize in pretty much the same way: ads, enterprise, API fees.
I've been using a do-googled LineagoOS fan for the last few months with Organic maps, and not only do I find it super user friendly, I actively like it more than Google Maps. It works offline so much better.
For Android, I have used Locus Maps for many years. It has a somewhat confusing, but very powerful, interface. And I feel the team behind it is committed and engaged. Very worthwhile to try if you haven't.
I'm Czech, and a long time user of Mapy.cz / Mapy.com. Monetization of Mapy.com has been a question for some time. It's part of the Seznam conglomerate, which makes most of its money through various news sites (including a TV channel) and an ad platform. Other "side projects" of Seznam, like their e-mail service, serve as drivers for their homepage and stay completely free. Mapy.cz contained affiliate Booking.com links for some time, but recently they added a paid subscription and moved the ability to download offline maps for more than two countries at a time behind a paywall. It seems that they are just now trying to figure out a more sustainable way to monetize, and everyone is hoping they won't destroy the great app in the process.
Mapy.cz was profitable before, they have practical monopoly on Czech market due shop data (opening hours, menus, user reviews). Recent monetization is just squeeze.
Btw hiking data are a bit obsolete for other countries. They have fork from OSM that is a few years behind.
That's not my experience at all, for shops and restaurants (opening hours, menus, photos, ratings) I always need to use Google Maps. And even then, a "practical monopoly" does not mean anything unless you monetize it...
Other map apps offer different routes between two points, showing the trade-off in time. Organic Maps calculates one route, and it doesn't matter if it's through a deadly car-congested highway.
My example is going from Zürich West to Downtown. Here is my experience:
* Organic maps: calculates fast, although through a street with a lot of traffic, no alternatives offered.
* OsmAnd: takes 5 seconds on a flagship phone to RENDER the current view. I try to avoid zoom and pan. What the hell. Calculating the navigation is either a couple seconds or a minute. The whole UX is totally broken, however, at least you can select to prefer byways / bicycle routes.
* Mapy: fast rendering, fast pathfinding, alternatives offered, configurable to use bike paths.
* Google Maps: totally random what happens, it's a combination of the above (I guess it tries to use live traffic data, too?)
Now the funny thing is that there is an actual signaled bicycle path (which I prefer, since it avoids traffic), and OSM does have this data. None of the app would prefer that path, unfortunately (it's maybe 20 minutes instead of 18 minutes, but much safer).
It feels like most of the apps are hyperfocused on one type of navigation / exploration / feature set (being offline is huge, though), and nothing comes close to Google Maps' "not the best, but delivers alright UX across all these features" approach.
Yeah, getting a nice bike route on OrganicMaps indeed involves some manual app convincing when an obvious bike route exists, I had the exact same thing last week, I agree this could be improved especially given the data is already present in OSM.
Inflexible routing is the reason I'm not using an Organic maps derivative. On OSMAnd I have tweaked the routing algorithm to my taste and it's hard to beat.
There is often construction or other temporary issues, so having on-the-fly rerouting that I can trust is key.
Thanks - that's really interesting. Which route would you personally recommend?
(My interest is that I run cycle.travel, which currently finds this route: https://cycle.travel/map?from=&to=&fromLL=47.390987,8.478737... . I'm not entirely happy with it in this case though - for example, it's not routing onto the cycle path south of the railway on Aargauerstrasse, I think perhaps some of the paths leading onto/off it are rather fussily mapped.)
Organic Maps is a way to distribute OSM data, but it also has a lot more than just the OSM maps it uses (code to curate and collect those maps into downloadable packs, code to display them, code to do routing, design assets and resources for the app, documentation, etc.)
You're correct that the maps are OSM though, you can always contribute to OSM and that will also help Organic Maps (or whatever new community based map project comes out!)
You need both: the map data (OSM project), and software for viewing/using it.
Ideally any app using OSM data would enable contributing to the underlaying map data. But that's probably not how it works.
For what it's worth: I like Organic Maps for being more lightweight, quicker rendering & simpler configuration than OSMand. But it (still? haven't used in a while) does lack some useful features like points of interest (supermarkets, gas stations & such).
Would be nice if it were easy to share (offline) map data between apps. Download in app A, backup on sd card , use from app B, C, D, or on other device by swap/copy sd card. Maybe it's possible, but I haven't figured out how (on Android). At least it's not easy/obvious/automatic.
> Would be nice if it were easy to share (offline) map data between apps. Download in app A, backup on sd card , use from app B, C, D, or on other device by swap/copy sd card. Maybe it's possible, but I haven't figured out how (on Android).
I'm also really hoping for that. Some kind of local OSM map server that all apps in the ecosystem call to provide geodata.
I run OSMand, StreetComplete, Organic Maps and Magic Earth on my phone. I need all of them to download the exact same geo data. And for convenience reasons, I usually load entire countries. It's so annoying having to download a country in app #3...
I agree, the issue is that the map data is highly customized. I believe StreetComplete uses online map tiles so that's less of a concern, but i.e. with Organic Maps the map data is highly tied to the app version: support for a data entry needs both app/rendering/logic support and presence in the data structure, and full forwards/backwards compatibility isn't always possible. The map files also need to be optimized for Organic Maps' speed/usability improvements over apps like OsmAnd: pre-indexing, etc. Maybe someday there's one standard format for it, but for now each app makes its own map files.
Also, mobile apps often have strict privacy lately around what files they can access: they're not just sitting on the filesystem, they're in access-controlled app-specific folders. That's good for privacy/security, but a dealbreaker for first-class sharing of information between apps.
> For what it's worth: I like Organic Maps for being more lightweight, quicker rendering & simpler configuration than OSMand. But it (still? haven't used in a while) does lack some useful features like points of interest (supermarkets, gas stations & such).
Am I misinterpreting something? This is because of the underlying OSM data. So one should add these places to OSM so downstream apps will show the places you want, right?
Navigation apps such as OrganicMaps and OsmAnd filter OSM data, and package it in way that takes up less space.
I.e., it will omit individual trees, manholes, etc.
It also omits tags from OSM objects that it does keep.
This is all to to make it possible to fit enough maps on a phone and also there have code that can use that data (for searching and displaying)
Take for example Motorhome stopovers (I have edited at lot of those).
OsmAnd has name, opening, hours, power_supply, fees, dump_stations, toilets, showers, phone numbers, website, and a few more tags. But not water_point (although it has drinking_water which is not used much for stopovers).
OrganicMap has much fewer tags for motorhome stopovers.
FYI the OSM foundation will probably always be reluctant to sponsor or appear to prefer a certain end-user app. I don't know exactly why, but they really do see themselves as a vendor agnostic database, and don't want to make a popular website or mobile app that actually gets traction any time soon.
Do you mean 'contribute' or 'donate'? Contributing fixes, bug reports, and code to FOSS projects using OpenStreetMap data makes sense to me, if they do something you appreciate.
OSM is the database containing all the data. Navigation is not exactly "data" that is stored in a database, it's the result of computing a path between two locations based on the data stored in OSM.
Maybe a comparison would be this: if you want to hike somewhere the "old school" way, with a compass and a paper map. You will buy a paper map made by someone else, you will localise yourself on this map, and then you will trace a path between where you are and where you want to go. As you hike, you will update your location on the map (by using e.g. your compass) and choose your next steps accordingly.
In this example, the paper map is not doing any navigation. It doesn't know what GPS is, it doesn't have a compass. It's just map data printed on paper. You are the one making the navigation, right?
- OSM is the paper map.
- Organic Maps, or OSMAnd, or whatever app you use as a frontend to OSM is "the navigator" (you).
Thanks for the rec, I had somehow never really considered osmand being content with organicmaps. But it "is an independent app not endorsed by the OpenStreetMap Foundation" so not really relevant to the GPs point, right?
OSMand isn't an official OSM app any more than Organic Maps is. It's just that they founded the app before the OSM Foundation got round to thinking about a trademark policy.
I've contributed a few trivial fixes to OrganicMaps and I found them to be pretty responsive and reasonable in their opinions. That doesn't mean I agreed with all the decisions or priorities they make but that's to be expected. Their leadership seemed sane enough to me. It certainly felt like close enough to a BDFL situation to me.
In the research I did, OrganicMaps was the only viable open alternative to something like Gaia and it wasn't particularly close. It does a pretty good job of that, though their map styles leave some things to be desired and meter only topo lines is a bummer.
My limited experience playing around with the codebase made me appreciate that this isn't a small or simple project. It is a huge mixed codebase
of C/Java/etc to share rendering across platforms and even just the map file generation is no small thing.
Color me skeptical that a fork will get off the ground, this seems more likely to me that both projects will struggle for a good while longer. Announcing a fork is easy, delivering something with enough value beyond rhetoric that will draw users over is another.
The good news is that the fork team is a majority of the top contributors outside of the owners, and the owners have been burnt out and embroiled in conflict for months, so I expect the experience to be roughly the same or better going forward. Drawing users is a gradual process no matter what, but isn't really the #1 metric of a FOSS project... active contribution by diverse contributors is, next to usability and popularity.
> Color me skeptical that a fork will get off the ground
Could be, time will tell us. But it works as expected: people can fork if they want to, users can choose which app they use. Users can even use both OrganicMaps and CoMaps if that's better for them!
I currently use OrganicMaps and OSMAnd in parallel, depending on what I do. Works great!
I'm increasingly disaffected by the idea of BDFL-run projects.
The concept is appealing—it's essentially Plato's philosopher king. The BDFL can unstick decision making and ensure the project moves forward without having to litigate every decision in committee, they maintain context and vision throughout the life of the project, and because they're not accountable to anyone they can make the right call for the project rather than having to make complicated political trade-offs. It's all the perks of a monarchy.
Unfortunately, we've seen over and over again that the BDFL model also has all the problems of monarchy. If you get a good one it's the most effective form of government, but people are fickle things. Frequently we see things like this, where the BDFL turns out to have been malevolent after all or decided that they are the project and are entitled to the sole profit from it. WordPress comes to mind.
A good BDFL is worth keeping, but I think we'll find that drawing inspiration for our community structures from real-world democracies/republics will be more stable and reliable in the long term and more generalizable across new projects. Democracies aren't perfect, but by design they smooth out the variance of the individual humans in the community, giving you much more predictable results over time than monarchies do.
Forks introduce chaos and are sometimes impossible. If WordPress had a different government structure from the beginning Matt would not be in power anymore, but because it's a dictator for life he's still there and the community has decided to put up with him rather than risk the chaos of a fork.
No one is happy about it, but collective action is hard when it's not baked into the system.
Worth noting the distinction between a BDFL-project and a community project.
A community project's aim is loosey-goosey. The mission, values, governance, ownership/control, etc can change. While there is input from the community, they are often led by one or two dominant personalities. The project can often be pressured into making changes that are actually worse, or don't reflect the views of a collective of contributors and users. (I don't personally know of any community projects that are required to do what a majority opinion from the community asks for. In this sense it is more like a typical "democratic" government where a few powerful leaders are really in charge, rather than "the masses")
A BDFL project is, by definition, one person's project. There is no secret agenda, because there's no need for it to be secret. There's no pressure from anyone, the project just does what the leader wants. This means there usually isn't "controversy" because if you don't like it you can lump it.
Organic Maps is, apparently, not a BDFL project. It is a project represented by a corporation with 3 shareholders: Roman (project founder), Viktor, and Alexander (who is not a shareholder but Viktor supposedly holds his share). The concern in this case is that since it's not a BDFL project, the contributors don't know wtf is going to happen when the shareholders disagree and the "majority" decides to sell the company or something. If it were a BDFL project, the owner could still decide to sell it, but in this case, the project founder actually is on the side of the community.
Personally I'm not aware of true BDFL projects working against the aims of its own community, and BDFLs don't really change what they do. The exception is when money is involved. If somebody's just getting paid to write open source, the project is safe; if somebody's selling the project as a Product, beware. "Money is a motive with a universal adaptor on it."
>A community project's aim is loosey-goosey. The mission, values, governance, ownership/control, etc can change. While there is input from the community, they are often led by one or two dominant personalities.
Project direction can change in any case. Even against user's wishes.
The difference: in a community-led project, it's usually >1 person at the helm. And those leaders can put themselves at risk of being replaced by their community. Which at least puts a cap on how much they can push through their own decisions.
A benevolent dictator doesn't have this problem. And therefore can move easier.
But it's a fine line, and very easy to run foul of the "benevolent" part @ some point. Few DFLs manage this long-term.
Not to mention that over time, a community's desired project direction may simple diverge from project leader's vision. Pet project with a handful like-minded contributors != big project with many users & contributors.
* Organic Maps devs are from Belarus, company is registered in Estonia. This is very difficult setup already, and I can imagine authors just want simplest setup possible. Perhaps they do not want to waste energy on nonprofit that is very very difficult and expensive to do internationally!
* If they sell the company so what? Create another fork and move on. It is opensource, but that does not mean authors can not get some money!
* Biggest expense for Organic Maps is hosting and mirroring map data. Is this fork going to use (and pay) their own servers?
* Is there list of developers and contributors behind this fork? I only found "us" and "we" and "community"!
The thing is that there is an ongoing conflict between owners of Organic Maps OU itself. Due to ownership structure this leads to block of development etc for a long time already, so some existing contributors (that are not a part of OM OU business entity) started a fork.
> If they sell the company so what? Create another fork and move on. It is opensource, but that does not mean authors can not get some money!
Sure, but I think this is what's happening now. Not because they are selling the company, but apparently one issue is that nobody in the community knows where the donations are going.
They (CoMaps) complain about transparency regarding finances. I believe this would be a good reason to fork.
Donations are going to Organic Maps company. They have 10+ years of history. Most likely to pay for map server traffic.
Non-profit does not guarantee transparency, look at Mozilla as an example.
This fork is just a bunch of anonymous dudes on internet, who setup PayPal and replaced donate button. Until they do map data hosting, there is not much credibility!
Edit: there are 3th party mirrors for manual download, so I guess they can use those.
What I am saying is that CoMaps seem to believe that Organic-Maps-the-Company is not transparent about what they do with the donations. They have a bunch of other reasons, but this is the one that I can understand.
I can understand that they don't want to donate money to Organic-Maps-the-Company if it then uses it to write proprietary code and later sell it. Not that they necessarily do that, but that's apparently a criticism from the CoMaps dudes.
Also with mobile apps, app store users are the most "valuable" thing -- much like Maps.Me, the "app" could be sold tomorrow and what really happens is the FOSS code is thrown away or sunsetted and the users wake up to an update where their map app is now a crypto scam, or whatever. The source code can be forked, but Organic Maps "owns" millions of app store users, and can "sell" that, in a way that violates users' trust. Us volunteer developers are very against that, but unable to stop it besides protesting.
Happened with Firefox. Mozilla now has unlimited rights to use and publish, anything you see, type or upload in Firefox. And it is still marketed as "privacy" friendly. Even Micro$ft has better license in their browser!
Something I often wonder about forks, just as good practice...
Is anyone from the Organic Maps and OSM contributor communities familiar with the people forking this, and can vouch for their intentions and the necessity of forking?
Most of the activity is public, so look at the usernames of the fork leaders vs their activity on the upstream project... It's most of the recent top contributors who've been around for a long time and made their perspectives pretty clear.
Good point. I wonder whether it would be good for forks to come with a page that makes a case for the legitimacy of the fork and who will be controlling it and/or setting the founding rules for the governance. With links back to supporting raw evidence in repos and forums, so people can verify.
The thing being forked could also respond to these clear assertion, which could be a check against confusing forks that are bad-faith, ill-conceived, not necessarily aligned, etc.
(Of course, when I hear of a fork, I instantly assume that there was probably a good reason, and there usually is, but always assuming that is a mistake, which exposes us another way to bad actor risk.)
Most of the top 16 signers of the open letter are well-known names in Organic Maps, and the Updates to the letter try to fairly characterize the (lack of) response from OM. It's hard to link directly to raw evidence for the general public to review, since the most concerning topics (what will owners do in the future, what have they done with donation money) were in chat rooms that don't have public links and are exactly what the letter is asking for OM "owners" to provide. https://openletter.earth/open-letter-to-organic-maps-shareho...
We've got some FAQs up about legitimacy and plans but the website was literally coming together over the weekend, so there's more work to be done for sure. https://www.comaps.app/support/ -- one thing we're also trying to do is focus on the future rather than rehash issues that haven't seen resolution in chat channels in over a month and don't seem to be getting resolved any time soon. The community and users deserve an actively-developed app, and the CoMaps founders don't want to continue contributing to a for-profit app, so in absence of a timely satisfactory resolution all our energy is going into the fork!
The "updates" link is for news and the "download" page has buttons that are inactive, are you seeing anything "Organic" remaining on the site? We've been trying to clean things up but may have missed something.
Sad how much good stuff gets destroyed by non-benevolent dictators and/or greed.
Let's hope a community-led fork does so well that OM becomes a footnote in history. Or it causes OM owners to make a U-turn (but who cares @ this point. Just go ahead with community-led effort).
Would need a new name though. How about a public-is-invited contest?
Originally Alexander said that it was just too hard to register a nonprofit. I think the real answer is that he always intended to use it as an investment and sell it off (open source, but basically selling the userbase, just like Maps.ME.) Hopefully we can prove all that wrong and get a not-for-profit organization assembled and sustainable!
funny, I had to abandon open maps,yesterday, for a fork, as they no longer have an english language version, that used to be hidden under "tranport",which is now reduced to purple and green andessentialy no map info.
OSMAnd has more advanced features and settings and things you can configure, but at the expense of a nice user friendly out of the box experience. Organic Maps (and thus this project) aimed to produce a more user friendly and streamlined app focusing on usability over lots of features.
I would be sceptical to this initiative too, as they never mentioned in their timeline on the co maps website that the reason the original Maps with me project was forked because the original one was sold. And not just sold, but sold to Russians, the infamous Mail ru group. Which is basically the KGB spying project led by a greasy oligarch.
Honestly just feels like every new fork is more drama packed onto old drama and nothing ever really gets fixed. You ever wonder if all this splitting and fighting actually makes stuff better or just burns everyone out?
A few people are talking about multiple issues in the open mapping space.
Today (bear with me), I was looking at a tool called SwiftWave it lets you run your own Platform as a Service. The only reason I mention it is that I found interesting how they’ve really broken the problem domain into a series of smaller open source projects.
I’d love some folk riffing on how this may help, surely nice interfaces for cycling vs driving vs public transport don’t need to be reinvented across projects. How can diff apps work as an ecosystem to allow the brining together of more sophisticated apps that mirror the feature set of the large funded maps apps?
The concern seems to be they want a bunch of guarantees about what will be done with the project - not because there is a change happening from Organic, but because they're afraid of a change happening in the future. If such a change happens in the future, they can fork then. I mean, hell, this already happened; they had Maps.ME, it was sold, Roman forked it to Organic. If it gets sold again they can fork again. This seems like it'll hurt the community more than if they'd waited until it was necessary.
I think that the open source community is too quick to make "just fork it later" the answer to all our governance woes.
Look at the state of WordPress: the (B?)DFL actively bans people from the community for critiquing his self-described "nuclear war" waged against his biggest competitor in the hosting space, which "nuclear war" has caught thousands of members of the community in the crossfire. And yet we see no fork. Why? Because forking is hard and fragments the community, so people would rather put up with a tyrant than deal with the risk of instability. This is no different than tyrants in any other environment.
If a project has good governance established from the beginning, including a reasonably democratic process for contributors to elect the executive function, then the community can be reasonably sure that they won't feel the need to fork in the future because they have recourse if things go sour.
A difference between Wordpress and Organic Maps, though, is that Wordpress is a framework whereas Organic Maps is an application. Switching to a fork of Wordpress means a different extension marketplace, various config files that may need to be changed, etc. Switching to a fork of Organic Maps is just downloading a different app that does the same thing.
Completely irrespective of the governance structure of Organic Maps, by its nature it is much more easily forkable than something like Wordpress.
There needs to be a server generating up to date map files. Which isn't complicated in comparison, but it's a decent bit of resources.
Forkability is an underused metric when evaluating an open source tool.
> Apes Together Strong
Absolutely 100% agree with your statement, Linux desktop is the perfect example of that. You get a billion different distribution that all comes from debian, arch and maybe fedora but that's all.
In my opinion, there should be 3 Linux distribution. That's all.
For instance Ubuntu: Yeah Ubuntu gnome suck, yeah canonical push snap package when flappack are better but do you really need a new distribution because of that ?
Perfection is the enemy of progress. And when things go all bad and you have used all other alternative, then and only then forking should be considered. Like a nuclear button.
Currently i feel like it's more often used by newcomer that want to get to the lead position of a project they are passionate about but didn't start, so they fork and get a fraction of the community behind. It's not much but it's still a bit.
Un(?)fortunately, us Organic Maps forkers have been with the project since Organic Maps was OMaps, and before. The only people with more commits than the senior fork member are the OM co-owners themselves. We really tried getting OM to deliver on their promises, but it seems silence is preferable to accountability for them.
>In my opinion, there should be 3 Linux distribution. That's all.
Initially I instinctively agreed with you - certainly there's too many fragmentation in the Linux distro space!
Then I recalled I use NixOs, and it probably didn't make it to your top 3...
Couldn't nixos main feature be implemented in a mainstream distribution ?
Technically you can install nix package manager on Debian, and what is nixos main interest without it's package manager ?
It manages the entire, immutable, OS with it. That's a completely different paradigm, you cannot simply mix them!
> yeah canonical push snap package when flappack are better but do you really need a new distribution because of that ?
In practice yes, since Canonical is replacing essential system components to depend on snap. So you can't just "not use it", you're forced to be dependent on their upstream package hosting service that you can't rehost yourself.
If I understand correctly, there is work going in inside the WordPress community. Not sure if and when things will happen, I am not involved personally.
> If such a change happens in the future, they can fork then...
Did such a change not already happen with the addition of Kayak affiliate links without any community consultation? It seems to me that there has already been enough to justify a fork.
Not to mention, there was a promise of electing and changing boardmembers which has never happened, and hiding the use of OrganicMaps project donations for personal vacations as alleged by the initial open letter.
> hiding the use of OrganicMaps project donations for personal vacations as alleged by the initial open letter
Were those donations intended to support the core developers generally? Or were they specifically intended to pay for servers, equipment, etc.?
If it’s the former, a vacation seems like a totally legitimate use. If the latter, not so much.
> If it’s the former, a vacation seems like a totally legitimate use
Imo hiding that the funds were used even in a legitimate case makes it improper. If it was intended to be paid as a salary then they should have disclosed that $x were paid out as a salary. As I understand it, the only reason we know that the funds left the project was because one of the founders revealed the use of funds by the other founders, not through a planned, transparent, or regular process. In other words, the revelation that funds were being used seemed to be an anomaly as opposed to a regular practice.
The original open letter states essentially as much: "It's fine for developers to be reimbursed for their hard work, but it should be done in a fair, transparent and accountable way."
> not because there is a change happening from Organic
They mention financial transparency. I don't know the details, but "we want to know what our donations are used for" is a reasonable request to have, I would say.
There seems to be a bit of drama about part of the server software being closed source: https://github.com/orgs/organicmaps/discussions/9837
So, I guess that’s a pretty awesome business plan. Establish some open source entity, let the community develop everything for you, sell the entity, then fork it, let the community develop everything for you, sell again, then fork it, let the community …
Isn't that a valid worry? Especially in a project that needs user contribution the eventual horizon does matter.
Would you shovel dirt in a community garden project if you know the guy on top will eventually turn it into a commercial business? That means your work wasn't going towards a nice community garden as you thought, but it was going towards one guy being too stingy to actually pay labour. Sure maybe that guy didn't know he would do that from the beginning, but what difference would it make?
Governance does matter.
this appears to be an offshoot of the hidden MIT code snafu from a bit back
What’s the backstory?
> There was no real progress in negotiations with Organic Maps shareholders.
> It appears that Viktor is only open to a guarantee not to sell the project, however besides that he wants to retain full control of Organic Maps.
> And Organic Maps future is uncertain still, as the disagreement between shareholders (Viktor and Roman) has not been resolved.
Looks like this is the backstory: https://www.comaps.app/news/2025-04-16/1/
I'm more partial to a BDFL than a committee, so I'm not sure why I'd prefer this fork. Community management is not a de facto improvement.
I'd have agreed with you a year ago, but the WordPress debacle shows that the BDFL concept really hangs on the "benevolent" part of the job description. If your BDFL goes rancid your only option is to fork, and hostile forks are very difficult to pull off because it almost invariably forks the community.
The BDFL archetype is basically Plato's philosopher king. It's a nice and appealing idea in theory, and works well if you get a good one (Matz for Ruby, by all accounts). But it's risky, and it's hard to be sure yours is actually benevolent and will stay benevolent.
The philosopher king analogy doesn’t hold water because forking is an option.
Where is the WordPress fork?
There is none because forking the code doesn't automatically bring the community along with you, and so no one wants to risk the instability that would inevitably come from forking. When a project needs a fork it usually much more closely resembles a civil war than it does a succession, and the whole system becomes weaker because of it.
Why would we start with a model that we know will permanently weaken our community when we inevitably need to trigger a succession?
https://www.classicpress.net/
https://whitelabelpress.org/
There's no fork because there's no need for a fork.
If the WordPress idiot was like "I'm going to make WordPress worse, and I don't care what anyone thinks", there would be a fork. But that's not what's happening. What's happening is that one WordPress host (the official one) is miffed that other hosts aren't paying a tax for the use of (100% open source) software.
That makes the guy in charge an idiot who doesn't understand OSS, and his idiocy is helping to destroy his entire company ... but he's just being a bully: he's not hurting anyone's use of the software.
Ergo, no fork.
Who cares, I think everyone for the point.
And forking is like civil war.
BDFL is a good concept. As long as money stays out of it. If the DFL collects money in a for profit Organisation and isn't transparent about usage, this is unsatisfactory to other contributors.
I am not sure there is a huge market for selling the company, though, given the track record of the owners for taking the money and then forking away and trying to pull the users over.
It sounds like the problem is that they don't trust the BDFL to be B, since they're asking for more financial transparency and a bunch of other stuff.
I could have been a BDFL for a project that I authored, but chose against that.
I often say that the best thing that I ever did for the project, was walk away from it. The team that took it over, has made it extremely successful.
Again?
Wasn't the whole thing about Organic Maps to be a community-led fork of maps.me?
So now we're at a fork of a fork?
> So now we're at a fork of a fork?
This history is full of such "forks of forks" (whatever you're trying to imply with that):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix#/media/File:Un...
I'm not trying to imply anything with that other than that it seems the original fork seems to have failed in its stated goals of being the community-led, non-commercialized version.
Yeah it's unfortunate. Allegedly Roman wrote those goals but the other co-founders never really went along with them.
Neovim is a fork of VIM which was a fork of Stevie which was a fork of vi which was a fork of ed, and it's the piece of software I use probably more than anything.
Vim was not a fork, neither were other things on your list apart from neovim.
How not? it literally took the source from Stevie and applied changes to it.
Stevie?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevie_(text_editor)
I mean... Yeah, why not? That's one of the reasons FOSS is nice: people who are willing to maintain/contribute don't have to put up with a project going rogue.
oh boy wait until he hears about biology
Sad to see the current state of mobile OSM-based apps. Maps.me becoming OrganicMaps, now this. Lot of development effort, great work going into it, but somehow, after years, the apps don't feel more user-friendly.
I was pushing hard to replace Google Maps, but eventually, I gave up. OsmAnd is great if you need that "swiss army knife of OSM apps" on your phone, but I rarely do. Same with Maps.me/Organic Maps, try to search for something, mistype only one letter (surprise, surprise, that happens a lot on mobile), and you have no chance to get results. Alternative path for your bike route? Forget about it. Rendering is awful, either ugly, or slow, or both.
I am trying to switch to Mapy.com (Mapy.cz before), it's a surprisingly user friendly app, however, not sure how they are going to monetize soon. So far the best on phone, I hope they will push and really become a Maps-replacement. They recently switched from a Czech-focused concept to a proper world-wide map (mapy.com); both web and mobile is great so far. (I am not Czech, and have no relation to mapy, simply really like their app)
If OsmAnd got a new rendering engine (no, not that "3D" sluggish thing it has for a couple years now), like streetcomplete has (or the Strava-built-in mapbox renderer), it would be possibly the best.
OSMAnd and OrganicMaps both have the limitation (and big advantage) of functioning offline by default. The routing will be much more powerful (with alternatives on by default) and faster if you enable an online routing service. For OSMAnd this is possible with e.g. GraphHopper: https://www.graphhopper.com/blog/2024/02/27/osmand-with-grap...
The same is true for address search. If you have an online address search like photon the search can be more user friendly. We've put together photon and GraphHopper routing on GraphHopper Maps: https://graphhopper.com/maps/ which you could self-host on your own (i.e. also use offline): https://github.com/karussell/local-maps
GraphHopper Maps is also available on fdroid store or you can install the website as PWA in iOS.
Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of GraphHopper.
> (and big advantage) of functioning offline by default.
I don't know about others but that's the main reason I use it. My day to day mapping app is still Google Maps but I always keep a copy of Organic Maps with downloaded maps of wherever I'm going as a backup. While I do not use it often, it's gotten me out of a couple of sticky situations while camping and roadtripping.
Organic Maps (and other offline mapping providers) are far from perfect and the UX is just not the same as it is on Google Maps for example. But with it being a backup app, if I need to open it I don't really care about the limitations, I just need an offline map.
I know this probably doesn't solve the same issue, but google maps has a offline feature. Click your profile picture (on mobile), pick offline maps, ....
It has a huge limitation in that it only allows you to pick a certain area to download and those maps "expire" after a period of time. The key advantage that Organic Maps (and other OSM providers) has is that I can download an entire state, province or even country and that data will never "expire".
same same. and I often find Organic Maps has hiking trails etc fairly well indicated where Google does not (even if I have cell service)
I think this is less Organic vs Google than OpenStreetMap's data set vs Google's. I don't know why Google does so much worse with trails than OSM, but it really does.
> I don't know why Google does so much worse with trails than OSM, but it really does.
I expect that Google never saw a market in trail mapping. I also assume no Google employee took an interest in trails as a 10% project. Google Maps doesn't really do much for topography either.
Google Earth can be good for trail mapping, but that has basically atrophied since it was acquired from Keyhole.
Yeah, but the thing is that I don't think any of this data is "self-collected". I suspect that OSM gets most of its US trail data (or at least western state trail data) from the National Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. I also suspect that incorporating such a data source into Google Maps is relatively trivial, but they just seemed to have done so.
I map many trails on osm from personal site surveys and a combination of sat imagery and my gpx files. No way google is doing that because there is no one to steal the data from. It was me, the enthusiast that put it in osm directly. That’s just me and the trails I load tho. Example - Latest was short one at monkeyface falls. https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/34.098058/-116.955639
I hike on trails in New Mexico, and I find the existing trail data on osmand/OSM to be astoundingly accurate. I had concluded that NSF/BLM must have data.
So few people hike these trails that I do not believe they were entered one by one. The one "trail" I hiked that was entered by someone I deleted later that day, because it should not have been shown as a trail.
And, one doesn’t have crap being pushed at you while you’re trying to find your way, or businesses filtered out because…
Thanks for the input.
I happened to work for a car navigation software development company 15+y ago. Cool stuff, Windows CE / PDAs as devices, android and ios nowhere. These were totally offline devices (map updates through usb / sdcard).
Even then, this offline navigation was super fast, across countries. Today I managed to wait a whole minute for a 5km bike navigation in OsmAnd. Then I uninstalled (after years of hoping for improvement. Yes, I was regularly donating money.)
In my experience, OsmAnd is mostly slow for very long routes.
Maybe it is a matter of quality. Because of course you can find routes fast if they are not the fastest or best routes.
But there is room for improvement. brouter could be integrated even better. Or a router like that could be used directly in OsmAnd.
And long routes could be handled more flexible. E.g., when I go from Copenhagen to Barcelona, it is not super important at first to find the optimal way into Barcelona, or shortcuts in France using regional roads. It will take several days, but I would like to start with a reasonable route giving me an estimate of distance and time. At first I just need a good route to the Great Belt Bridge or the Rødby ferry -- Copenhagen is on an island.
When I drive long distances, I sometimes use several devices. The Xzent system is much faster for longer distances, but the map is not as good, especially it is missing may POI's.
Often they disagree, especially if one is optimizing for distance and other for fuel or time. Then if there is an obstacle or a bad road, I instantly have a good alternative at an intersection.
I'm not saying that they cannot improve :)
Just that comparing Google and OSMAnd/OrganicMaps in terms of routing alternatives & speed and powerful address search is not 100% fair (even when they'd use the same data source which they don't)
> The routing will be much more powerful (with alternatives on by default) and faster if you enable an online routing service.
What is the essential reason that online routing has an advantage over local routing, if the data is all available locally anyway? Is it that you need an index, and that index is large and/or very time-consuming to produce, and hence not viable to store/generate on-device after each map data update?
At least for bycicle routing, Brouter also runs offline and is much more performant than both OSMAnd and OrganicMaps (and can be integrated into OSMAnd).
To me it feels like OSMAnd heavily prioritizes feature develompent over performance, which is fair enough but still annoying.
And their choices in features they wish to develop confuses. 50% of the time I still have to translate an address into GPS coordinates before I can find a place, and yet I have an OBD-II plugin that allows me to monitor my car's performance?
Offline navigation is really nice. The fact that I can use maps and find routes regardless of where I am and what connection I have, is great.
It would be nice to have slightly smarter search, though. That definitely requires improvement. Even just the ordering of the results is terrible sometimes.
> try to search for something, mistype only one letter
Photon is quite good at this, coming with english/french/german plug-and-play. But it's online, so very hard to implement on each user's phone, which is the limitation of Organic and Osmand.
Once you're using Photon or an equivalent project, you need to do a lot more to provide Google's experience : - itinerary suggestions like "from london to winchester" - coordinates detection - handle abbreviations like blvd, in all the languages (Nominatim does it better than Photon, from what I know) - handle category search, e.g. typing "coffee in Marais" -> a full-text-search won't work taking only the features' name, you need to do some semantic separation of terms - etc.
> Alternative path for your bike route? Forget about it.
Same pb : offline routing is harder. BRouter is excellent, with lots of alternatives, but online (can be installed on OSMand but it's nerdy).
Disclaimer : I'm working on https://cartes.app, a Web map app. We're using Photon and Brouter, but lots need to be done, including i18n to english, soon I hope !
this looks promising, thanks for sharing :-)
Wow, thanks for mentioning https://streetcomplete.app! This looks very intuitive to use for edits on openstreetmaps.
Would someone here know a similiar tool for iOS or MacOS? Or any recommendations to edit roads.
We are currently driving with a 4.5 tonne motorhome in Europe and the road weight and height limits are usually marked properly in osmand+ but when they are not we waste multiple hours rerouting in the alps and I would really want to help the next person in similar situation.
There’s been work put in to making this happen, but now EU have also given funding for it to making it Multiplatform: https://nlnet.nl/project/StreetComplete-multiplatform/
Mentioning it just in case, but openstreetmap.org's web editor (iD) is a good start on Desktop.
There's also EveryDoor [1] which is very nice to edit OSM and they do seem to have an iOS version. Depending on what you want to edit, it can be very handy.
I have not tried the numerous other, more advanced options [2].
[1] https://every-door.app/
[2] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Editors
Go Map, or just make bookmarks in OsmAnd and go back later
"Go Map!!" was indeed pretty easy to use. Thanks!
Another vote for Go Map!! Developer is ex Microsoft sysinternals guy. I have been a beta tester for years. Love the app for quick edits in the field.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Go_Map!!
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/go-map/id592990211
Agreed. I use organic maps for hiking, because its just simple offline trail mapping. I want a mapping program in my car to easily be offline, have map overlays that are easy to read like more pronounced lane/route arrows and can re route if there is a road shut down or a backup on the expressway and I go to get off.
But my biggest gripe with using organic maps with driving is its search function. I couldnt care if it doesnt have all the online social features like google maps and come up with the police/safety warnings and restaurant ratings. I just want its seach to actually find the place I want to go.
Most of the time I try and avoid using google maps, but then I go back and try organic maps. Notice it doesnt have where i want to go listed in its search, so i google the address to plug in. I can enter in the exact address and it wont find it and then go back to google maps.
> Notice it doesnt have where i want to go listed in its search
I live in an area where OSM is really good with that (just because people contributed the data). If your area is less complete, it feels like it's a good opportunity to contribute!
There are many apps that will help you contribute to the map, or you can do it directly from the website: https://www.openstreetmap.org.
It doesn't mean you need to spend tons of time on it: I contribute data a few times a year. It's better than nothing :-).
It's not only about being tagged in Openstreetmap, it's about the search algorithm finding the relevant entry from ambiguous entry. Dealing with cases where things are spelled slightly differently (abbreviations etc.) or finding the relevant entry when common terms are used in names or search just by category.
> map overlays that are easy to read like more pronounced lane/route arrows
Try Magic Earth https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.generalmag...
Are you sure the address actually exists on OpenStreetMap? You can add it with StreetComplete (Android) or Go Map (iOS).
Another alternative to mapy.com you could try is Here WeGo. I prefer it to any other Google Maps alternative I have tried. And there are some things, like the car navigation, that I prefer on it over Google Maps. I don't find their privacy policy creepy, and the most creepy parts are opt-in and the toggle clearly explains what you'd be opting into and what feature you are missing out on by not opting in. Mapy's privacy policy is less creepy than Here's in some aspects, but some of the creepiness that's opt-in in Here, like location data sharing for traffic, it's on with no opting-out on Mapy.
I'd prefer an open-source alternative, but as you said, there isn't any that currently fits my needs.
Plus one for everything you said! I've been using WeGo in place of Google maps for a good few months and it's been an easy drop in swap without any compromises for me.
It would be immense for an open source project to exist, but I'll happily settle for a non-google one.
What do you think is the biggest UX issue with maps.me/organic maps/comaps/whatever?
The biggest for me is definitely the lack of public transportation. This is something even gnome-maps support. Global search (eg. things that are not downloaded yet) only works for some bigger entities, that are part of the world map (although I understand that this would need some server-side support). Not having a satellite map is also a bummer.
Point-to-point navigation at places where you already downloaded maps is alright (same with osmand), but for exploration, or public trasnport, I would need to use moovit, mapy, osmand (wikipedia overlay is awesome), or google maps.
Oh that's a great callout. I did some quick research and it appears Gnome's public transport feature is powered by https://transitous.org/ - I wonder how much work it would be to add this to Organic Maps?
They seem to have some sort of experimental support for GTFS [1], and one important part of Transitous is being a GTFS aggregator, so maybe they are not too far away from being able to use that part of Transitous.
Although it'd probably be good to be able to query Transitous itself when online.
[1] https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/blob/master/docs/...
Impossible in the medium term, unless Organic goes online.
There is a lot one could do offline. Highlight close by stations, have overlays/styles for transport focus (they got an overlay for "Subway", which in some areas includes commuter trains but not for bus/tram/light rail/...)
And in theory one could add bundles of data based on GTFS data which many transport organisations these days publish and do routing at least based on schedule times.
Yes, but that would be miles behind G/A maps, on top of being hard to implement.
E.g. Motis needs walk routing data that weights hundred of gigas.
Question is what it's for. A proper transport layer on the map would be valuable to me. Even without timetable data. That's even in relations on openstreetmap already.
Next improvement might be to highlight lines based on frequency of service. Still possible to precalculate with little need on device.
Routing ain't easy. That's true.
We'd love to have your input for improved transit in CoMaps! I agree it's an important priority. Last GSoC there was a project for ingesting GTFS feeds against OSM data, since local agencies are often much better about their details than OSM is, but as a student project it was slow and limited in scope.
> The biggest for me is definitely the lack of public transportation.
I tend to use the official app of the public transports wherever I am. Turns out many of them actually use OSM as a backend :-).
Not an UX thing, but I find myself going back to Google Maps to find restaurants, reviews and reliable opening hours all the time. Neither Apple Maps nor Organic Maps offers the same level of quality (not to say that Google Maps reviews can be problematic in themselves).
The OsmAnd guys tried launching OpenPlaceReviews.
https://2019.stateofthemap.org/sessions/LBGPCD/
Unfortunately it didn't take off, was discountinued in 2023.
https://github.com/OpenPlaceReviews
Really sad, but understandable. Everybody’s going to Google because it’s where the most reviews are... because everybody’s going to Google.
It's almost impossible for anything to compete with Google Maps on business information because they have built such a vast commercial ecosystem around it with advertising, Maps users etc.
And at least back when I tried it a long time ago, it wouldn't pull in updates from OSM in a timely manner. Like I updated something in OSM and a month later it still wasn't available in organic maps. Maybe it is better now?
Search. I've wanted to like Organic Maps, but the search function is the absolute pits and forces me to still use Google Maps. Without good search, there's next to no point in me using it.
I'm working on https://github.com/styluslabs/maps/ including a new 3D map engine (based on Tangram-ES) and JS plugin support, so while there is no offline routing yet, support for additional online routing services can be added by users.
> I am trying to switch to Mapy.com (Mapy.cz before), it's a surprisingly user friendly app, however, not sure how they are going to monetize soon
They now sell premium. Presumably some features (offline maps? or offline navigation? suggest a hike?) will be locked behind premium :-/ They do have great UX though
> If OsmAnd got a new rendering engine (no, not that "3D" sluggish thing it has for a couple years now), like streetcomplete has (or the Strava-built-in mapbox renderer), it would be possibly the best.
What "3D sluggish thing" are talking about ? Streetcomplete, like most OSM vector 3D maps use MapLibre, for a few months now https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/pull/5693
Edit : sorry, I read Organic. Indeed OSMand is sluggish for me as well. I don't know why they went for something other than MapLibre. It's probably in-house and entangled in their code :/
Yes :-)
Streetcomplete is amazing; I understand it provides less polygons to render but it does an absolutely amazing job at it, even when there are thousands of quests.
Yes, zooming in is so fast. I'd love to have this experience on mobile Web, we're not quite there yet. I suppose WebGPU is needed ?
It also uses online tiles afaik.
> I don't know why they went for something other than MapLibre.
OSMAnd existed looong before MapLibre :-).
Sorry, what I wanted to say is I don't know why they stick with their stack, instead of doing like Streetcomplete.
It most likely involves a lot more than "just swapping the maps engine". Everything is built on top of their stack. It would basically mean rewriting an app from scratch.
I started using osmand a lot more lately while biking and I agree route calculation on the phone (hi Pixel 4a :) ) are super slow but for that reason you can configure alternative (online) routing engines in the settings https://osmand.net/docs/user/navigation/routing/online-routi.... I use https://openrouteservice.org/ which generates long routes in seconds and works great in general.
There's a lot of discussion about bicycle routing improvements, as well as displaying alternate routes. I expect these conversations to be continued in CoMaps, so your input is valued and welcome there! https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/9748
Slightly off topic but I would really want to see DuckDB based alternative of https://pgrouting.org.
It's so easy to embed duckdb anywhere. Current smartphones already have enough CPU juice to handle almost anything and duckdb can query and cache geoparquet files eg from the Overture maps.
I'm not that worried about Mapy.cz/.com becoming useless unless you pay, to be honest. (Maybe they'll make me look foolish for that.) The developer is Seznam, which is kind of like the Czech homegrown equivalent of Google/Craigslist/Zillow. I assume they monetize in pretty much the same way: ads, enterprise, API fees.
They're monetising by requiring payment to download maps for more than one country at a time.
I've been using a do-googled LineagoOS fan for the last few months with Organic maps, and not only do I find it super user friendly, I actively like it more than Google Maps. It works offline so much better.
For Android, I have used Locus Maps for many years. It has a somewhat confusing, but very powerful, interface. And I feel the team behind it is committed and engaged. Very worthwhile to try if you haven't.
I'm Czech, and a long time user of Mapy.cz / Mapy.com. Monetization of Mapy.com has been a question for some time. It's part of the Seznam conglomerate, which makes most of its money through various news sites (including a TV channel) and an ad platform. Other "side projects" of Seznam, like their e-mail service, serve as drivers for their homepage and stay completely free. Mapy.cz contained affiliate Booking.com links for some time, but recently they added a paid subscription and moved the ability to download offline maps for more than two countries at a time behind a paywall. It seems that they are just now trying to figure out a more sustainable way to monetize, and everyone is hoping they won't destroy the great app in the process.
Mapy.cz was profitable before, they have practical monopoly on Czech market due shop data (opening hours, menus, user reviews). Recent monetization is just squeeze.
Btw hiking data are a bit obsolete for other countries. They have fork from OSM that is a few years behind.
That's not my experience at all, for shops and restaurants (opening hours, menus, photos, ratings) I always need to use Google Maps. And even then, a "practical monopoly" does not mean anything unless you monetize it...
> Alternative path for your bike route? Forget about it.
What do you mean? It's possible to add intermediate stops to shape your route. Or do you mean something else?
With you on the search not being forgiving enough.
Other map apps offer different routes between two points, showing the trade-off in time. Organic Maps calculates one route, and it doesn't matter if it's through a deadly car-congested highway.
My example is going from Zürich West to Downtown. Here is my experience:
* Organic maps: calculates fast, although through a street with a lot of traffic, no alternatives offered.
* OsmAnd: takes 5 seconds on a flagship phone to RENDER the current view. I try to avoid zoom and pan. What the hell. Calculating the navigation is either a couple seconds or a minute. The whole UX is totally broken, however, at least you can select to prefer byways / bicycle routes.
* Mapy: fast rendering, fast pathfinding, alternatives offered, configurable to use bike paths.
* Google Maps: totally random what happens, it's a combination of the above (I guess it tries to use live traffic data, too?)
Now the funny thing is that there is an actual signaled bicycle path (which I prefer, since it avoids traffic), and OSM does have this data. None of the app would prefer that path, unfortunately (it's maybe 20 minutes instead of 18 minutes, but much safer).
It feels like most of the apps are hyperfocused on one type of navigation / exploration / feature set (being offline is huge, though), and nothing comes close to Google Maps' "not the best, but delivers alright UX across all these features" approach.
Oh, ok, makes sense!
Yeah, getting a nice bike route on OrganicMaps indeed involves some manual app convincing when an obvious bike route exists, I had the exact same thing last week, I agree this could be improved especially given the data is already present in OSM.
Inflexible routing is the reason I'm not using an Organic maps derivative. On OSMAnd I have tweaked the routing algorithm to my taste and it's hard to beat.
There is often construction or other temporary issues, so having on-the-fly rerouting that I can trust is key.
> On OSMAnd I have tweaked the routing algorithm to my taste and it's hard to beat.
How do you do this? Is there something I can read or watch about this? Are you using BRouter?
Here are two sources that you may find useful:
[0] https://osmand.net/docs/technical/osmand-file-formats/osmand...
[1] https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd-resources/blob/master/ro...
Nice, thanks!
How are you tweaking it? Would love to hear more about it since I am a have osmand user.
Here are two sources that you may find useful:
[0] https://osmand.net/docs/technical/osmand-file-formats/osmand...
[1] https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd-resources/blob/master/ro...
Out of interest, can you share more accurate start/end points?
Farbhof => Altstadt.
Example: https://mapy.com/en/zakladni?planovani-trasy&rc=98FWsxKe1G98...
Thanks - that's really interesting. Which route would you personally recommend?
(My interest is that I run cycle.travel, which currently finds this route: https://cycle.travel/map?from=&to=&fromLL=47.390987,8.478737... . I'm not entirely happy with it in this case though - for example, it's not routing onto the cycle path south of the railway on Aargauerstrasse, I think perhaps some of the paths leading onto/off it are rather fussily mapped.)
This would more or less follow the brown-signaled bike path at Letziground:
https://cycle.travel/map?from=&to=&fromLL=47.390987,8.478737...
(I can't tell by heart how it is beyond that, I just follow the signs :-) )
But cycle.travel seems truly amazing! It's super fast to add detours.
Care to try brouter for this route ?
I just did, and liked that there are alternatives.
> it's maybe 20 minutes instead of 18 minutes, but much safer).
I can't see how a bike would ever be safer than a car when looking at stats.
Choosing the bike path for bike navigation would be, although slower, much safer than what the apps propose
Why do people contribute to Organic Maps and not to OSM?
I always assumed that Organic Maps was a sophisticated way to distribute OSM data, nothing more.
Organic Maps is a way to distribute OSM data, but it also has a lot more than just the OSM maps it uses (code to curate and collect those maps into downloadable packs, code to display them, code to do routing, design assets and resources for the app, documentation, etc.)
You're correct that the maps are OSM though, you can always contribute to OSM and that will also help Organic Maps (or whatever new community based map project comes out!)
You need both: the map data (OSM project), and software for viewing/using it.
Ideally any app using OSM data would enable contributing to the underlaying map data. But that's probably not how it works.
For what it's worth: I like Organic Maps for being more lightweight, quicker rendering & simpler configuration than OSMand. But it (still? haven't used in a while) does lack some useful features like points of interest (supermarkets, gas stations & such).
Would be nice if it were easy to share (offline) map data between apps. Download in app A, backup on sd card , use from app B, C, D, or on other device by swap/copy sd card. Maybe it's possible, but I haven't figured out how (on Android). At least it's not easy/obvious/automatic.
> Would be nice if it were easy to share (offline) map data between apps. Download in app A, backup on sd card , use from app B, C, D, or on other device by swap/copy sd card. Maybe it's possible, but I haven't figured out how (on Android).
I'm also really hoping for that. Some kind of local OSM map server that all apps in the ecosystem call to provide geodata.
I run OSMand, StreetComplete, Organic Maps and Magic Earth on my phone. I need all of them to download the exact same geo data. And for convenience reasons, I usually load entire countries. It's so annoying having to download a country in app #3...
I agree, the issue is that the map data is highly customized. I believe StreetComplete uses online map tiles so that's less of a concern, but i.e. with Organic Maps the map data is highly tied to the app version: support for a data entry needs both app/rendering/logic support and presence in the data structure, and full forwards/backwards compatibility isn't always possible. The map files also need to be optimized for Organic Maps' speed/usability improvements over apps like OsmAnd: pre-indexing, etc. Maybe someday there's one standard format for it, but for now each app makes its own map files.
Also, mobile apps often have strict privacy lately around what files they can access: they're not just sitting on the filesystem, they're in access-controlled app-specific folders. That's good for privacy/security, but a dealbreaker for first-class sharing of information between apps.
> For what it's worth: I like Organic Maps for being more lightweight, quicker rendering & simpler configuration than OSMand. But it (still? haven't used in a while) does lack some useful features like points of interest (supermarkets, gas stations & such).
Am I misinterpreting something? This is because of the underlying OSM data. So one should add these places to OSM so downstream apps will show the places you want, right?
It it not just because of underlying OSM data.
Navigation apps such as OrganicMaps and OsmAnd filter OSM data, and package it in way that takes up less space. I.e., it will omit individual trees, manholes, etc. It also omits tags from OSM objects that it does keep.
This is all to to make it possible to fit enough maps on a phone and also there have code that can use that data (for searching and displaying)
Take for example Motorhome stopovers (I have edited at lot of those). OsmAnd has name, opening, hours, power_supply, fees, dump_stations, toilets, showers, phone numbers, website, and a few more tags. But not water_point (although it has drinking_water which is not used much for stopovers).
OrganicMap has much fewer tags for motorhome stopovers.
Keep a list of those missing tags, it's worth filing an issue for adding support in the future!
Thanks for clarifying!
OSM-the-database needs a general public app where contribution is possible to finally be popular.
Organic was seen by many as this app, despite its specific choices like being offline.
Contributing to this app is hence very important for OSM to exist given Google & Apple Maps.
FYI the OSM foundation will probably always be reluctant to sponsor or appear to prefer a certain end-user app. I don't know exactly why, but they really do see themselves as a vendor agnostic database, and don't want to make a popular website or mobile app that actually gets traction any time soon.
But yes I agree with you.
I would say that current situation is an example of some risks that would appear in case of officially endorsing specific project
Option to contribute & offline-first is not mutually exclusive:
Use map data offline, user makes a correction/addition, upload that when app has internet access.
In fact, Organic already works like that.
> I always assumed that Organic Maps was a sophisticated way to distribute OSM data, nothing more.
sophisticated way to distribute OSM data also needs development efforts
this is not an easy or trivial project
there are also numerous other FOSS projects in OSM ecosystem
mapping itself and improving map data is also very welcome, obviously!
Do you mean 'contribute' or 'donate'? Contributing fixes, bug reports, and code to FOSS projects using OpenStreetMap data makes sense to me, if they do something you appreciate.
You cannot use OSM by itself for gps navigation on your phone, right?
OSM is the database containing all the data. Navigation is not exactly "data" that is stored in a database, it's the result of computing a path between two locations based on the data stored in OSM.
Maybe a comparison would be this: if you want to hike somewhere the "old school" way, with a compass and a paper map. You will buy a paper map made by someone else, you will localise yourself on this map, and then you will trace a path between where you are and where you want to go. As you hike, you will update your location on the map (by using e.g. your compass) and choose your next steps accordingly.
In this example, the paper map is not doing any navigation. It doesn't know what GPS is, it doesn't have a compass. It's just map data printed on paper. You are the one making the navigation, right?
- OSM is the paper map.
- Organic Maps, or OSMAnd, or whatever app you use as a frontend to OSM is "the navigator" (you).
Does that help?
Thanks for the effort but I already understood all of that perfectly fine tbh :p
OSMand works fine for navigation and has for a decade.
Thanks for the rec, I had somehow never really considered osmand being content with organicmaps. But it "is an independent app not endorsed by the OpenStreetMap Foundation" so not really relevant to the GPs point, right?
OSMand isn't an official OSM app any more than Organic Maps is. It's just that they founded the app before the OSM Foundation got round to thinking about a trademark policy.
I've contributed a few trivial fixes to OrganicMaps and I found them to be pretty responsive and reasonable in their opinions. That doesn't mean I agreed with all the decisions or priorities they make but that's to be expected. Their leadership seemed sane enough to me. It certainly felt like close enough to a BDFL situation to me.
In the research I did, OrganicMaps was the only viable open alternative to something like Gaia and it wasn't particularly close. It does a pretty good job of that, though their map styles leave some things to be desired and meter only topo lines is a bummer.
My limited experience playing around with the codebase made me appreciate that this isn't a small or simple project. It is a huge mixed codebase of C/Java/etc to share rendering across platforms and even just the map file generation is no small thing.
Color me skeptical that a fork will get off the ground, this seems more likely to me that both projects will struggle for a good while longer. Announcing a fork is easy, delivering something with enough value beyond rhetoric that will draw users over is another.
The good news is that the fork team is a majority of the top contributors outside of the owners, and the owners have been burnt out and embroiled in conflict for months, so I expect the experience to be roughly the same or better going forward. Drawing users is a gradual process no matter what, but isn't really the #1 metric of a FOSS project... active contribution by diverse contributors is, next to usability and popularity.
> Color me skeptical that a fork will get off the ground
Could be, time will tell us. But it works as expected: people can fork if they want to, users can choose which app they use. Users can even use both OrganicMaps and CoMaps if that's better for them!
I currently use OrganicMaps and OSMAnd in parallel, depending on what I do. Works great!
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43705631
I'm increasingly disaffected by the idea of BDFL-run projects.
The concept is appealing—it's essentially Plato's philosopher king. The BDFL can unstick decision making and ensure the project moves forward without having to litigate every decision in committee, they maintain context and vision throughout the life of the project, and because they're not accountable to anyone they can make the right call for the project rather than having to make complicated political trade-offs. It's all the perks of a monarchy.
Unfortunately, we've seen over and over again that the BDFL model also has all the problems of monarchy. If you get a good one it's the most effective form of government, but people are fickle things. Frequently we see things like this, where the BDFL turns out to have been malevolent after all or decided that they are the project and are entitled to the sole profit from it. WordPress comes to mind.
A good BDFL is worth keeping, but I think we'll find that drawing inspiration for our community structures from real-world democracies/republics will be more stable and reliable in the long term and more generalizable across new projects. Democracies aren't perfect, but by design they smooth out the variance of the individual humans in the community, giving you much more predictable results over time than monarchies do.
You can't fork a country, but you can fork a open source project. Remember to not sign an CLA that gives superpowers to the current BDFL.
So it's more like herding cats instead of nuking everyone that decides to ignore the presidencial orders or not paying taxes.
Forks introduce chaos and are sometimes impossible. If WordPress had a different government structure from the beginning Matt would not be in power anymore, but because it's a dictator for life he's still there and the community has decided to put up with him rather than risk the chaos of a fork.
No one is happy about it, but collective action is hard when it's not baked into the system.
Worth noting the distinction between a BDFL-project and a community project.
A community project's aim is loosey-goosey. The mission, values, governance, ownership/control, etc can change. While there is input from the community, they are often led by one or two dominant personalities. The project can often be pressured into making changes that are actually worse, or don't reflect the views of a collective of contributors and users. (I don't personally know of any community projects that are required to do what a majority opinion from the community asks for. In this sense it is more like a typical "democratic" government where a few powerful leaders are really in charge, rather than "the masses")
A BDFL project is, by definition, one person's project. There is no secret agenda, because there's no need for it to be secret. There's no pressure from anyone, the project just does what the leader wants. This means there usually isn't "controversy" because if you don't like it you can lump it.
Organic Maps is, apparently, not a BDFL project. It is a project represented by a corporation with 3 shareholders: Roman (project founder), Viktor, and Alexander (who is not a shareholder but Viktor supposedly holds his share). The concern in this case is that since it's not a BDFL project, the contributors don't know wtf is going to happen when the shareholders disagree and the "majority" decides to sell the company or something. If it were a BDFL project, the owner could still decide to sell it, but in this case, the project founder actually is on the side of the community.
Personally I'm not aware of true BDFL projects working against the aims of its own community, and BDFLs don't really change what they do. The exception is when money is involved. If somebody's just getting paid to write open source, the project is safe; if somebody's selling the project as a Product, beware. "Money is a motive with a universal adaptor on it."
>A community project's aim is loosey-goosey. The mission, values, governance, ownership/control, etc can change. While there is input from the community, they are often led by one or two dominant personalities.
Project direction can change in any case. Even against user's wishes.
The difference: in a community-led project, it's usually >1 person at the helm. And those leaders can put themselves at risk of being replaced by their community. Which at least puts a cap on how much they can push through their own decisions.
A benevolent dictator doesn't have this problem. And therefore can move easier.
But it's a fine line, and very easy to run foul of the "benevolent" part @ some point. Few DFLs manage this long-term.
Not to mention that over time, a community's desired project direction may simple diverge from project leader's vision. Pet project with a handful like-minded contributors != big project with many users & contributors.
OrganicMaps is such a great app. I did not know it was owned by this type of organisation. I hope they sort it out.
I would add a few points:
* Organic Maps devs are from Belarus, company is registered in Estonia. This is very difficult setup already, and I can imagine authors just want simplest setup possible. Perhaps they do not want to waste energy on nonprofit that is very very difficult and expensive to do internationally!
* If they sell the company so what? Create another fork and move on. It is opensource, but that does not mean authors can not get some money!
* Biggest expense for Organic Maps is hosting and mirroring map data. Is this fork going to use (and pay) their own servers?
* Is there list of developers and contributors behind this fork? I only found "us" and "we" and "community"!
The thing is that there is an ongoing conflict between owners of Organic Maps OU itself. Due to ownership structure this leads to block of development etc for a long time already, so some existing contributors (that are not a part of OM OU business entity) started a fork.
Hi biodranik! Hope you're well.
> If they sell the company so what? Create another fork and move on. It is opensource, but that does not mean authors can not get some money!
Sure, but I think this is what's happening now. Not because they are selling the company, but apparently one issue is that nobody in the community knows where the donations are going.
They (CoMaps) complain about transparency regarding finances. I believe this would be a good reason to fork.
Donations are going to Organic Maps company. They have 10+ years of history. Most likely to pay for map server traffic.
Non-profit does not guarantee transparency, look at Mozilla as an example.
This fork is just a bunch of anonymous dudes on internet, who setup PayPal and replaced donate button. Until they do map data hosting, there is not much credibility!
Edit: there are 3th party mirrors for manual download, so I guess they can use those.
Sure, that's all fine.
What I am saying is that CoMaps seem to believe that Organic-Maps-the-Company is not transparent about what they do with the donations. They have a bunch of other reasons, but this is the one that I can understand.
I can understand that they don't want to donate money to Organic-Maps-the-Company if it then uses it to write proprietary code and later sell it. Not that they necessarily do that, but that's apparently a criticism from the CoMaps dudes.
Also with mobile apps, app store users are the most "valuable" thing -- much like Maps.Me, the "app" could be sold tomorrow and what really happens is the FOSS code is thrown away or sunsetted and the users wake up to an update where their map app is now a crypto scam, or whatever. The source code can be forked, but Organic Maps "owns" millions of app store users, and can "sell" that, in a way that violates users' trust. Us volunteer developers are very against that, but unable to stop it besides protesting.
Happened with Firefox. Mozilla now has unlimited rights to use and publish, anything you see, type or upload in Firefox. And it is still marketed as "privacy" friendly. Even Micro$ft has better license in their browser!
A fork of a fork I guess, Organic Maps was originally `maps.me`, and I suppose we're forking it again
Yep... but I don't see it as a problem. Maybe CoMaps become the new thing, maybe Organic Maps changes and stays...
The very fact that a fork can be made is good for the users. It doesn't mean that users have to follow the latest fork, though.
Something I often wonder about forks, just as good practice...
Is anyone from the Organic Maps and OSM contributor communities familiar with the people forking this, and can vouch for their intentions and the necessity of forking?
How do we get confidence in that?
Most of the activity is public, so look at the usernames of the fork leaders vs their activity on the upstream project... It's most of the recent top contributors who've been around for a long time and made their perspectives pretty clear.
Good point. I wonder whether it would be good for forks to come with a page that makes a case for the legitimacy of the fork and who will be controlling it and/or setting the founding rules for the governance. With links back to supporting raw evidence in repos and forums, so people can verify.
The thing being forked could also respond to these clear assertion, which could be a check against confusing forks that are bad-faith, ill-conceived, not necessarily aligned, etc.
(Of course, when I hear of a fork, I instantly assume that there was probably a good reason, and there usually is, but always assuming that is a mistake, which exposes us another way to bad actor risk.)
Most of the top 16 signers of the open letter are well-known names in Organic Maps, and the Updates to the letter try to fairly characterize the (lack of) response from OM. It's hard to link directly to raw evidence for the general public to review, since the most concerning topics (what will owners do in the future, what have they done with donation money) were in chat rooms that don't have public links and are exactly what the letter is asking for OM "owners" to provide. https://openletter.earth/open-letter-to-organic-maps-shareho...
Here's the CoMaps governance repo for deciding on decisionmaking: https://codeberg.org/comaps/Governance/ and the leadership here https://codeberg.org/org/comaps/members vs top contributors to OM since the Maps.me fork: https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/graphs/contributo...
We've got some FAQs up about legitimacy and plans but the website was literally coming together over the weekend, so there's more work to be done for sure. https://www.comaps.app/support/ -- one thing we're also trying to do is focus on the future rather than rehash issues that haven't seen resolution in chat channels in over a month and don't seem to be getting resolved any time soon. The community and users deserve an actively-developed app, and the CoMaps founders don't want to continue contributing to a for-profit app, so in absence of a timely satisfactory resolution all our energy is going into the fork!
I don't know why your comment was dead, so I vouched and upvoted it.
Thanks for those helpful comments about this particular fork. It's a good example for a question about best practices for our field.
Site still prompts to install organic maps app on mobile.
Indeed no working download buttons on https://www.comaps.app/download/
It's mentioned in their code forge[0] that they're working on getting the first release out. So there's not yet anything to download.
[0] https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps
The "updates" link is for news and the "download" page has buttons that are inactive, are you seeing anything "Organic" remaining on the site? We've been trying to clean things up but may have missed something.
Sad how much good stuff gets destroyed by non-benevolent dictators and/or greed.
Let's hope a community-led fork does so well that OM becomes a footnote in history. Or it causes OM owners to make a U-turn (but who cares @ this point. Just go ahead with community-led effort).
Would need a new name though. How about a public-is-invited contest?
> Would need a new name though. How about a public-is-invited contest?
Like the one linked to in the article?
https://codeberg.org/comaps/Governance/issues/34
I'm not sure I understand why an open source maps app needs shareholders in the first place?
Originally Alexander said that it was just too hard to register a nonprofit. I think the real answer is that he always intended to use it as an investment and sell it off (open source, but basically selling the userbase, just like Maps.ME.) Hopefully we can prove all that wrong and get a not-for-profit organization assembled and sustainable!
funny, I had to abandon open maps,yesterday, for a fork, as they no longer have an english language version, that used to be hidden under "tranport",which is now reduced to purple and green andessentialy no map info.
What's the difference between Organic Maps/this and OSMAnd?
OSMAnd has more advanced features and settings and things you can configure, but at the expense of a nice user friendly out of the box experience. Organic Maps (and thus this project) aimed to produce a more user friendly and streamlined app focusing on usability over lots of features.
The thing that keeps on Organic Maps instead of OSMAnd is how slow it is.
I would be sceptical to this initiative too, as they never mentioned in their timeline on the co maps website that the reason the original Maps with me project was forked because the original one was sold. And not just sold, but sold to Russians, the infamous Mail ru group. Which is basically the KGB spying project led by a greasy oligarch.
Wait, what, again? I thought Organic Maps was the "good"/BDFL-led/actually open fork of Maps.me that was bought and turned into malware?
Yes, it is fork of a fork.
Honestly just feels like every new fork is more drama packed onto old drama and nothing ever really gets fixed. You ever wonder if all this splitting and fighting actually makes stuff better or just burns everyone out?
A few people are talking about multiple issues in the open mapping space.
Today (bear with me), I was looking at a tool called SwiftWave it lets you run your own Platform as a Service. The only reason I mention it is that I found interesting how they’ve really broken the problem domain into a series of smaller open source projects.
https://swiftwave.org/docs/contribution_guideline
I’d love some folk riffing on how this may help, surely nice interfaces for cycling vs driving vs public transport don’t need to be reinvented across projects. How can diff apps work as an ecosystem to allow the brining together of more sophisticated apps that mirror the feature set of the large funded maps apps?