StreetComplete is an easy to use editor of OpenStreetMap data available for Android. It can be used without any OpenStreetMap-specific knowledge. It asks simple questions, with answers directly used to edit and improve OpenStreetMap data. The app is aimed at users who do not know anything about OSM tagging schemes but still want to contribute to OpenStreetMap.
StreetComplete automatically looks for nearby places where a survey is needed and shows them as quest markers on its map. Each of these quests can then be solved on site by answering a simple question. For example, tapping on a marker may show the question "What is the name of this road?", with a text field to answer it. More examples are shown in the screenshots below.
The user's answer is automatically processed and uploaded directly into the OSM database. Edits are done in meaningful changesets using the user's OSM account. Since the app is meant to be used on a survey, it can be used offline and is economic with data usage.
This is great! I wish more knowledge bases realized their barrier to entry. Eg even Wikipedia can be scary to edit the first time, if you want to present things like citations the right way.
Wikipedia is fine. Just make sure the content itself is good and appropriate for Wikipedia (such as no original research) and formatting citations is really least of your worries. When you do it wrong, some other editor will come and fix it.
> Within the frame of Prototype Fund round 15 (March 2024 to August 2024), the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research sponsored Tobias Zwick to work on StreetComplete for iOS (see progress report)
The current demo doesn't seem to cover many places worldwide, but what is there is really neat! To me this already looks better than modern city sim games, because they never seem to get the scale right, among other things.
Not sure what's stopping them from covering more places, since the idea presumably is to generate these tiles from existing OSM data. And in fact one of the easiest things to do with StreetComplete is add the height and type of a building.
I wonder if it's by design. TestFlight apps have a hard user install limit, I remember waiting around for someone to leave previous betas to try them out.
StreetComplete is regularly cited whenever OpenStreetMap is mentioned on HN, and with excellent reason (this is a really good introduction to mapping with OSM). Congratulations to the team for the beta!
Indeed, I've been following the issue since it was mentioned here last time and was positively surprised about how quickly they progressed and got the first version shipped.
Every Door has a very confusing UI (lots of unlabeled buttons with unclear icons), unfortunately. I would love to use it, but even the web-based iD editor is so much easier to figure out!
You can choose the type of questions you want to get asked about in StreetComplete. If you want to only enter store names and timings, then go into Settings and pick those.
The name probably just references the street in OpenStreetMap (OSM) as StreetComplete doesn't only collect street data as the sibling comment already noted.
I have been using StreetComplete on Android thanks to a comment here some weeks ago. This is a really great tool, the barrier to contribute is brought to nearly zero.
The only one thing missing for me is a small history of my past contributions. At some point, I made a mistake and entered the wrong information (nothing terrible, the surface of a walkway, it was 30% one surface, 70% another, I gave the 30% value instead of what I think 70% would be better). I would have been glad to be able to quickly "revert" this contribution.
As someone who has enjoyed playing GeoGuessr-like games in the past, I find it a bit fun to enter/guess a completely random username and see what edits it has made. Interestingly, quite a few of them are concentrated in the Germany/Switzerland/Austria region (the US is popular too)
Edit: I had no idea that https://www.openstreetmap.org/history shows a list of the most recent changes in a sidebar, and there seems to be a similar trend too in terms of where OpenStreetMap is edited most often.
You can actually split the road into multiple segments and answer each separately if you don't mind the extra effort. I think there should be something like "differs along the way" button which then asks you to pick a point where to cut.
OSM editor Go Map!! also has a "Quests" overlay that is very similar to Street Complete (even uses the same icons). And you can also define custom quests for data you want to easily gather.
However, it's lacking the nice example pictures for each option - so, with Go Map!! you need to know what you're doing.
Yes, to be more specific, every tool like this has benefits offered and then taxes to be considered. For example, what's the tax for:
- Maintaining a significant new moving part in the dev process. KMP updates, management, integration, futures awareness, this all takes non-zero time.
- If an iOS dev wants to work on a KMP project what's the ramp up time? How much less efficiently can they contribute compared to a pure native app?
- How much time is spent on problems, bugs, issues, related to KMP. This is guaranteed non-zero for any tool.
- Is there less benefit to KMP with coding agents? Previously with two native apps, a bug fix had to be done twice. Currently, say a fix in done on Android, it's quite easy to say "propose an equivalent fix for the iOS repo". I do not claim this removes all benefits of a single code base, just that some things are not as bad now.
Overall, my experience has been pretty smooth. Just look at how little platform specific code is found in the streetcomplete repo and how straightforward these connect with the common code.
Or maybe I have been using it too long so that I don't notice the awkward bits anymore.
Maybe I don’t understand how it’s supposed to work, but the very first question I was given had three choices and none of them were correct. What are you supposed to do then?
No, there’s only the listed options (street has a sidewalk, or it doesn’t - no option for “sidewalk extends for half the street but not the other half”).
I don’t know if that counts as it does or it doesn’t.
First-time StreetComplete user here. I just answered a few of these "street has a sidewalk" questions myself. Upon first clicking on one of them, I was able to answer this question for each side of the street individually. The visual selection that you mentioned only applies to one side.
I can tell for sure the current version of StreetComplete for Android does allow specifying that only one side of the road has a side walk. I solved a few of these quests just last week. No idea what's the state on iOS though.
Aha. If you click 'Uh' exactly on its text, it works. If you click even one pixel away from the actual text, you get the chooser with not enough options.
That's when you hit "uh..." and leave a note with details. In an effort to keep things simple on a small screen it doesn't include every possible option. You can read the wiki to find the best way to tag it. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/
StreetComplete is great. For me it made Openstreetmap much more approachable and now thanks to me there are a few more public toilets and one small road in osm. Especially with the road it was really interesting to see how quickly Google maps also took in this path. But they still also have the old road in the app. So it's linked but not 100%
It's a great app, been using it on Android for years. It has a really low barrier of entry (except maybe OSM account creation) and makes improving OpenStreetMap really easy even for people that have no experience with map editing. There's simple questions, e.g. about road surface or accessibility, with illustrated multiple-choice answers.
That's Apple's native way of going back across macOS and iOS no? I'm not an Apple user and even I've come across this when handling a family member's device for a few minutes
Maybe Android's visual ←back button is the way to go after all instead of hoping someone will accidentally discover implicit gestures
I'd like to see native Apple sign-in, as opposed to via a WebView. When I used the WebView, the password text box was obscured and fiddly to fill in.
There should be an easier way to dismiss something I've clicked on, than having to tap "uh..." and then dismiss two dialog boxes.
Things that I've submitted (e.g. house numbers) should be visible on the map, to visually show my contribution progress (even if pending review or whatever). At present my contributions just disappear into the void.
Satellite overlay would be very useful to correlate houses.
Seeing some indication of other recent local contributions would be nice, to make the app feel more alive.
nice to see StreetComplete coming to iOS. Its question-based approach makes contributing to OpenStreetMap feel approachable even if you’re not familiar with the underlying data model
OpenStreetMap is a database, not a map application. The map on the official openstreetmap website is more of a demo to show some of the data. There are many different map apps that use OpenStreetMap data though.
It's a... mix. I can see all the shapes of the roads and areas i mapped in my area, but they seem not to trust OSM naming so they either have no name or the name TomTom gave to the equivalent street.
I can see most POIs i added with the exact name i gave to them, but the reviews and opening hours are pulled from Tripadvisor.
It's explicitly advertised for driving, not walking, so it's optimized to get you to places. CoMaps and even OSMand are much better for walking around.
And there's a simple reason for the search being so bad in most OSM apps: offline search.
The focus of all these apps seems to be a self-imposed "the app should never touch a server, ever, because what if the user is on a 100$/GB roaming plan in Africa", but indexing the maps is not easy.
I run a local Nominatim database (search engine for OSM) for Italy and it's ~57gb of data and indexes for one country only, and it barely supports fuzzy search.
I tried the TomTom app (on iOS) recently but found it incredibly buggy, especially when connected to CarPlay. The speed indicator would often just show 1mph, the dark mode would work about 20% of the time, and searches would show results from other countries ahead of a place 4 miles up the road.
From the README:
StreetComplete is an easy to use editor of OpenStreetMap data available for Android. It can be used without any OpenStreetMap-specific knowledge. It asks simple questions, with answers directly used to edit and improve OpenStreetMap data. The app is aimed at users who do not know anything about OSM tagging schemes but still want to contribute to OpenStreetMap.
StreetComplete automatically looks for nearby places where a survey is needed and shows them as quest markers on its map. Each of these quests can then be solved on site by answering a simple question. For example, tapping on a marker may show the question "What is the name of this road?", with a text field to answer it. More examples are shown in the screenshots below.
The user's answer is automatically processed and uploaded directly into the OSM database. Edits are done in meaningful changesets using the user's OSM account. Since the app is meant to be used on a survey, it can be used offline and is economic with data usage.
This is great! I wish more knowledge bases realized their barrier to entry. Eg even Wikipedia can be scary to edit the first time, if you want to present things like citations the right way.
Wikipedia is fine. Just make sure the content itself is good and appropriate for Wikipedia (such as no original research) and formatting citations is really least of your worries. When you do it wrong, some other editor will come and fix it.
Thank you, German government:
> Within the frame of Prototype Fund round 15 (March 2024 to August 2024), the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research sponsored Tobias Zwick to work on StreetComplete for iOS (see progress report)
And NLnet.
I was curious what they're currently sponsoring; here's another neat OSM project: https://osm2world.org/demo/?lat=52.5239396&lon=13.4104859&ra...
The current demo doesn't seem to cover many places worldwide, but what is there is really neat! To me this already looks better than modern city sim games, because they never seem to get the scale right, among other things.
Not sure what's stopping them from covering more places, since the idea presumably is to generate these tiles from existing OSM data. And in fact one of the easiest things to do with StreetComplete is add the height and type of a building.
Link to the actual TestFlight beta invite, since it wasn’t easily found on the linked page:
https://testflight.apple.com/join/K1u3eUU5
Thanks. If anyone from StreetComplete is watching - please put the TestFlight link prominently on your page!
I wonder if it's by design. TestFlight apps have a hard user install limit, I remember waiting around for someone to leave previous betas to try them out.
10,000.
I suspect one day at the top of HN's front page, will exhaust that.
That's a big reason I never mention my apps, here.
You should probably link to the relevant post
https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/5421...
StreetComplete is regularly cited whenever OpenStreetMap is mentioned on HN, and with excellent reason (this is a really good introduction to mapping with OSM). Congratulations to the team for the beta!
Indeed, I've been following the issue since it was mentioned here last time and was positively surprised about how quickly they progressed and got the first version shipped.
Go mapp!! For ios is free and very good alternative as well. made by bryce cogswell previous developer on sysinternals. https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/go-map/id592990211
I tried both StreetComplete and EveryDoor on my Android for a while.
I prefer EveryDoor. It's oriented more towards stores and things I'm interested in on the map.
EveryDoor exist on the Apple store too.
Every Door has a very confusing UI (lots of unlabeled buttons with unclear icons), unfortunately. I would love to use it, but even the web-based iD editor is so much easier to figure out!
You can choose the type of questions you want to get asked about in StreetComplete. If you want to only enter store names and timings, then go into Settings and pick those.
Have you tried out the Things or Places overlay? Second button from the right at the top, looks like a cake.
StreetComplete, as indicated by it's name, is about street data. Both are for contributing to OSM, but they are for different parts of OSM
The name probably just references the street in OpenStreetMap (OSM) as StreetComplete doesn't only collect street data as the sibling comment already noted.
StreetComplete asks about things other than street data as well. For example, I get queries about operating hours of businesses.
I have been using StreetComplete on Android thanks to a comment here some weeks ago. This is a really great tool, the barrier to contribute is brought to nearly zero.
The only one thing missing for me is a small history of my past contributions. At some point, I made a mistake and entered the wrong information (nothing terrible, the surface of a walkway, it was 30% one surface, 70% another, I gave the 30% value instead of what I think 70% would be better). I would have been glad to be able to quickly "revert" this contribution.
But else, a really great tool.
If you go to the OSM website, you can sort of get list of all your modification by date in your profile: https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/YOUR_USERNAME
As someone who has enjoyed playing GeoGuessr-like games in the past, I find it a bit fun to enter/guess a completely random username and see what edits it has made. Interestingly, quite a few of them are concentrated in the Germany/Switzerland/Austria region (the US is popular too)
Edit: I had no idea that https://www.openstreetmap.org/history shows a list of the most recent changes in a sidebar, and there seems to be a similar trend too in terms of where OpenStreetMap is edited most often.
There is an undo button on the lower left corner of the screen. Try it!
(It only shows edits made in the last 24 hours IIRC, but this limit is chosen quite arbitrarily. If there is a use case for it, it can be extended.)
> I think 70% would be better
You can actually split the road into multiple segments and answer each separately if you don't mind the extra effort. I think there should be something like "differs along the way" button which then asks you to pick a point where to cut.
you can revert immediately in bottom left corner of StreetComplete, click on little revert arrow
I'm trying to get off of Apple Maps and into OSM (using Magic Earth as my navigation app) - seeing more OSM work is exciting.
Now I need to figure out if it's possible to merge my navigation maps with the deflock maps..
OSM editor Go Map!! also has a "Quests" overlay that is very similar to Street Complete (even uses the same icons). And you can also define custom quests for data you want to easily gather.
However, it's lacking the nice example pictures for each option - so, with Go Map!! you need to know what you're doing.
I'd like to hear more about people's experiences with Kotlin Multiplatform
Yes, to be more specific, every tool like this has benefits offered and then taxes to be considered. For example, what's the tax for:
- Maintaining a significant new moving part in the dev process. KMP updates, management, integration, futures awareness, this all takes non-zero time.
- If an iOS dev wants to work on a KMP project what's the ramp up time? How much less efficiently can they contribute compared to a pure native app?
- How much time is spent on problems, bugs, issues, related to KMP. This is guaranteed non-zero for any tool.
- Is there less benefit to KMP with coding agents? Previously with two native apps, a bug fix had to be done twice. Currently, say a fix in done on Android, it's quite easy to say "propose an equivalent fix for the iOS repo". I do not claim this removes all benefits of a single code base, just that some things are not as bad now.
Overall, my experience has been pretty smooth. Just look at how little platform specific code is found in the streetcomplete repo and how straightforward these connect with the common code.
Or maybe I have been using it too long so that I don't notice the awkward bits anymore.
Any specific parts you are after?
Maybe I don’t understand how it’s supposed to work, but the very first question I was given had three choices and none of them were correct. What are you supposed to do then?
Most of the time you can leave a note. Do you get an "Uh..." option?
No, there’s only the listed options (street has a sidewalk, or it doesn’t - no option for “sidewalk extends for half the street but not the other half”).
I don’t know if that counts as it does or it doesn’t.
First-time StreetComplete user here. I just answered a few of these "street has a sidewalk" questions myself. Upon first clicking on one of them, I was able to answer this question for each side of the street individually. The visual selection that you mentioned only applies to one side.
On android there's a "differs along the way" option which let's you split the way.
There is a limit to the type of quest you can fit into the mobile app. It also should have a fall back "leave a note" option.
I can tell for sure the current version of StreetComplete for Android does allow specifying that only one side of the road has a side walk. I solved a few of these quests just last week. No idea what's the state on iOS though.
In this case, the intended flow is that you tap "Uh..." -> "Differs along the way..."
You will then be led to another UI in which you can split the road into several sections.
Aha. If you click 'Uh' exactly on its text, it works. If you click even one pixel away from the actual text, you get the chooser with not enough options.
That's when you hit "uh..." and leave a note with details. In an effort to keep things simple on a small screen it doesn't include every possible option. You can read the wiki to find the best way to tag it. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/
StreetComplete is great. For me it made Openstreetmap much more approachable and now thanks to me there are a few more public toilets and one small road in osm. Especially with the road it was really interesting to see how quickly Google maps also took in this path. But they still also have the old road in the app. So it's linked but not 100%
It's a great app, been using it on Android for years. It has a really low barrier of entry (except maybe OSM account creation) and makes improving OpenStreetMap really easy even for people that have no experience with map editing. There's simple questions, e.g. about road surface or accessibility, with illustrated multiple-choice answers.
>Known caveats (we are working on it):
>forms can only be canceled with the back gesture rather than clicking anywhere on the map
Well for me not even the back gesture works, I just have to force close the app if I don't want to answer a survey lol
It takes a bit of practice, but I got it to work after a few tries.
I might be dense, but what's the back gesture exactly?
EDIT: Got it, swiping from left to right, starting from the very border of the screen. Not super intuitive but simple enough
That's Apple's native way of going back across macOS and iOS no? I'm not an Apple user and even I've come across this when handling a family member's device for a few minutes
Maybe Android's visual ←back button is the way to go after all instead of hoping someone will accidentally discover implicit gestures
I've been on iOS for like seven years and have never done this. But... hey, it works!
Good app. Some feedback -
I'd like to see native Apple sign-in, as opposed to via a WebView. When I used the WebView, the password text box was obscured and fiddly to fill in.
There should be an easier way to dismiss something I've clicked on, than having to tap "uh..." and then dismiss two dialog boxes.
Things that I've submitted (e.g. house numbers) should be visible on the map, to visually show my contribution progress (even if pending review or whatever). At present my contributions just disappear into the void.
Satellite overlay would be very useful to correlate houses.
Seeing some indication of other recent local contributions would be nice, to make the app feel more alive.
Yeah, dismissing a question I don't see an answer for right now easily is the worst. I think swiping the app closed is the easiest way out.
I feel I must warn you. It is a gateway to more heavy map editing using the online editor or tools like Vespucci.
There is actually an edit history, the little arrow icon on the map pulls up your recent edits and lets you undo them.
That's legitimately a good idea. I just contributed more to open street map in 5 minute than I have in 15 years.
nice to see StreetComplete coming to iOS. Its question-based approach makes contributing to OpenStreetMap feel approachable even if you’re not familiar with the underlying data model
I’ve been using EveryDoor so far, excited about trying this one out!
OH long overdue, glad it finally came out
Can you use OpenStreetMap like Google Maps?
I tried to use it to list restaurants but the UI reacted like nobody had ever tried that before
OpenStreetMap is a database, not a map application. The map on the official openstreetmap website is more of a demo to show some of the data. There are many different map apps that use OpenStreetMap data though.
https://cartes.app is trying to do this. OsmAnd is quite usable as well.
For navigation there's Magic Earth (can route around traffic jams), TomTom, and Scenic. OsmAnd can also do routing.
Partly, with Organic Maps or CoMaps.
However, in my opinion TomTom (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tomtom.spe... or https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tomtom-maps-traffic/id14381065...) is still the best way to use OpenStreetMap for navigation since it combines OSM data with their own real time traffic information without dark patterns or asking for an account like Waze or Maps do.
Is TomTom's basemap entirely OpenStreetMap? Or do they add their own proprietary layer of map data on top?
It's a... mix. I can see all the shapes of the roads and areas i mapped in my area, but they seem not to trust OSM naming so they either have no name or the name TomTom gave to the equivalent street.
I can see most POIs i added with the exact name i gave to them, but the reviews and opening hours are pulled from Tripadvisor.
It's explicitly advertised for driving, not walking, so it's optimized to get you to places. CoMaps and even OSMand are much better for walking around.
And there's a simple reason for the search being so bad in most OSM apps: offline search.
The focus of all these apps seems to be a self-imposed "the app should never touch a server, ever, because what if the user is on a 100$/GB roaming plan in Africa", but indexing the maps is not easy.
I run a local Nominatim database (search engine for OSM) for Italy and it's ~57gb of data and indexes for one country only, and it barely supports fuzzy search.
I tried the TomTom app (on iOS) recently but found it incredibly buggy, especially when connected to CarPlay. The speed indicator would often just show 1mph, the dark mode would work about 20% of the time, and searches would show results from other countries ahead of a place 4 miles up the road.
For the web, I personally like https://osmapp.org
https://cartes.app I can also recommend.
Both projects have a similar goal, to offer a more useful UI around using an OSM based map.
It's https://osmapp.org - as in OsmAPP. Not to be confused with https://osmaps.org, the Ordnance Survey Maps.