Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27543012

I'm really glad that projects like this exist.

I note that they site privacy as their #1 advantage:

  * Respects your privacy 
  * Saves your battery 
  * No unexpected mobile data charges

In my opinion, people have given up caring about privacy and expect to receive an inferior experience from products that proclaim this. Therefore, again imo, products that focus on privacy and such will remain niche.

I suspect that the world is ready for paid services that provide a better Ux. I am thinking about how Netflix supposedly put a dent in piracy. People were willing to pay for content with a better Ux.

Aside from saving battery and no surprised mobile data charges, the list many other benefits:

  * No ads 
  * No annoying registration 
  * No mandatory tutorials 
  * No noisy email spam 
  * No push notifications 
  * No crapware

I wonder if a project could charge a small monthly fee if they focused on these user benefits that everyone cares about, and partially use that money to support OSM and partially use the money to support themselves?

> People were willing to pay for content with a better Ux.

If I may run with this in an irrelevant tangent for a moment, I actually feel like Netflix's UX (on their PC client) is worse (in some ways) than pirate streaming sites I've seen. The main pain point for me is that Netflix tries to optimize for engagement and in so doing, conceals a massive back catalogue of things I'll never see they have unless I try to go looking for them.

By contrast, some easily found pirate streaming sites simply have a running list of whatever new content they've acquired regardless of popularity/advertising budget/etc. When I just want to watch _something_, seeing new stuff pretty much constantly is actually a bonus even if it's not always as polished as the top stuff that sticks to the top of Netflix's recommendations for months at a time. Also, pirate sites benefit from not observing the publisher-enforced balkanization of content across Netflix/Amazon/HBO/etc.

Of course, piracy's still illegal, but my point is I think at least for a certain segment of their potential market, Netflix's UX still has room for improvement.

Spot on. Same goes for Steam/etc vs pirate game content sites. Random/latest lists are great

Why don't piracy sites share more BLM content, BIPOC, and promote causes such as universal basic income? Seems like it would be something the users would really want.

OSMAnd+ plus does exactly that.

OrganicMaps looks like it might have a better UI though.

I don't like OSMAnd+ because on Android panning and scrolling around is slow even if you have pre-downloaded a map. Other apps have a more fluid interface.

OSMAnd plus is only free on F-Droid, on an iOS device it's pretty expensive or limited.

The full version for Android was about 12 bucks. The major difference, at least to my understanding, is the unlimited download of maps.

For me that's the killer argument and absolutely worth the price.

I think it really speaks for the developers to make it available for free to F-Droid users and personally I think it's a low price for a - for me - great app.

Yeah, I guess you are right, you get a lot for those 12 euros (or whatever it is, I can't really find it, but I remember a screen with costs for extra maps, altitude data, etc).

Edit: Ah found it, unlimited maps are 12.99 eur once, OsmAnd Live (Wikipedia offline integration and Altitude lines and shades) are 7.99 euros a year. This is all free on F-Droid.

It's free on F-Droid because they haven't bothered to implement technical countermeasures to unpaid downloads. The app developers are still updating that content and providing the bandwidth.

The Play Store fees are effectively voluntary donations to the devs & the OpenStreetMap project. If you really want to pay nothing, they’re not going to stop you - F-Droid is right there.

Yeah, that's one way to put it.

Really, F-Droid is so small it's understandable that they don't do anything about it.

Wondered what expensive meant, On iOS full featured is currently 2/mo or 8/yr, no lifetime license.

The routing of OSMAnd+ is limited to a few hundred kilometers. On holidays I do do longer trips. OrganicMaps should still have the contraction-hierarchy routing which scales better for longer distance routing.

OSMAnd doesn’t always have routing limited to a few hundred kilometers. If one is cycle-touring, then the Brouter engine plugin for OSMAnd can be installed and that generates pretty quickly very long-distance routes.

But with regard to planning long car journeys, there is always the option of generating the route using one of the several OSM-based routing engines on the web, then downloading a GPX file, opening it in OSMAnd, and telling OSMAnd that is the route you want to follow.

I just add intermediary way-points for long routes. Works well enough.

Not sure why you're downvoted, it's a legit problem, especially if practically any other engine doesn't have a problem with it. In reality I think I'd just split my route to get around the problem and call it a day, but it was convenient to not think about this, when planning my 800 km drive.

I just tested, OSMAnd generates a 900 km route on my phone in one go, in about 10 seconds.

I tested it too, and ended up generating an 1000 km route without a problem. It was giving me "Ending point too far from nearest road" - until I figured out that the problem was the missing maps. As long as you have at least the road map downloaded for the whole route, it does the job.

That's what the "Donate to support" links are for I guess.

But this no-ad is hugely under-rated. The web overall is not worse place simply because of overflow of ads. And Google or big players can't do anything about it they that's their main income source.

We need a LetsEncrypt styled disruption here. The field is ripe. Waiting for some player.

right, but I'm talking full on paid, like Neeva. Such services can offer personalization because they can support themselves without selling your data. If you trust them to keep their word, they can use your usage history and data only for your own benefit.

Yeah, I'm ready to pay for an excellent maps experience

I have started using Neeva

> In my opinion, people have given up caring about privacy and expect to receive an inferior experience from products that proclaim this.

Such as Apple products?

> Organic Maps is an Android & iOS offline maps app for travelers, tourists, hikers, and cyclists based on top of crowd-sourced OpenStreetMap data […]

Good to see the source data mentioned right at the top, where it should be.

> […] and curated with love by MAPS.ME founders.

What does that mean? Not the nonsensical 'with love' part (that sounds unpleasantly sticky), but the curation; what is being curated? Is the source map data being hand-picked or modified, or is this just an opaque term for 'we built an app that gives you OSM in a handy offline format with custom rendering'?

Organic Maps is a fork of MAPS.ME, after MAPS.ME jumped the shark and pivoted to something involving cryptocurency.

I think that "curated" refers to maintenance/development of the open-source project.

By "curated ... by MAPS.ME fouders" they mean that the Organic Maps maintainers include founders of the original MAPS.ME project (e.e.g, biodrankik is Alexander Borsuk, a former co-foudner, CEO, CTO of MAPS.ME [1,2]), which suggests that they have the experience to continue updating the app.

[1]: https://github.com/biodranik [2]: https://alex.bio/

Should motorways be shown first at zoom level 3 or 4? Some countries will look cluttered with them at zoom 3, but they're useful for very long route planning.

Should railways be feint and almost invisible (like Google Maps) or dark (like the OpenStreetMap default theme)? In many countries, they're very useful even for pedestrian navigation, "turn right after the railway bridge" etc, but I assume in the USA they're considered clutter.

What points of interest should be shown first, major tourist attractions or landmarks, or large shops?

Should gardens be green (almost everyone), or do we just ignore them and leave them grey (Google Maps)?

There are a lot of decisions that go into designing a map, even using Open Street Map data.

It's a reasonable word for the many interpretive choices that go into translating data into a map. What to include, when to show it, etc.

I realize it's no small feat to take the firehose of data you get from OSM and turn it into something usable. Other apps like OsmAnd have several presets and lots of knobs you can tweak to (hopefully) display the map exactly as you want it, but most users are too lazy for that, so there is definitely a niche for an app using a single algorithm that fits most use cases...

...but "curated with love by MAPS.ME founders", with "OpenStreetMap data" right before it, definitely sounds like some kind of manual process is involved - because that's what a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curator does, and that's usually a real person, not an algorithm. So, if it's an algorithm, the text is misleading.

But it isn't "an algorithm", it's hundreds or thousands of decisions about how to interpret data.

For instance, https://cycle.travel uses different rules to interpret data in different countries, because between differences in mapping practices, differences in infrastructure and differences in laws, you need to do that to have a good experience.

Ok, then it's a complicated algorithm, "lovingly hand-tuned" to give optimal results despite of inconsistencies in the data. I'm beginning to understand what they mean - but "curated" still sounds off to me...

You're free to not use the app because you don't like the marketing.

> But it isn't "an algorithm", it's hundreds or thousands of decisions about how to interpret data.

Map style can be described as an algorithm, but it is a human made one so curation definitely is present.

I was previously a big fan of Maps.me but they recently introduced a "Wallet" feature which is just really wired for a Navigation app to offer. Just looking at the UI of this app it looks like an "OSS" version where all the extra features are tossed out.

Huge thanks to the authors of this.

Openstreetmaps provides a lot more data than you see in the OSM map. You choose which data, such as terrain and road types, the user sees and therefore you could call it curation.

> What does that mean?

Most likely it is a direct translation from Russian by a non-native English speaker. I guess "curated" should have been "developed" or some other similar word.

Unlikely, as there’s no Russian verb that directly corresponds to “curate”; the loanword курировать kurir|ovatʹ is (of course) etymologically related but refers to managing, mentoring, or otherwise overseeing people or organizations, not things, and the sense of using one’s judgment to choose and present a subset of a collection is instead usually expressed by a word (roughly) meaning “select, choose” that does not convey an implication of being in charge. Neither has much to do with the words for “code”, “program”, or “develop”.

(Source: native speaker.)

I’m somewhat surprised by the reaction here. Does “curating” a map really sound so wrong? One can curate libraries, museums, exhibitions, bibliographies, or other sorts of collections, so is sifting OSM data in order to get something presentable so different? I’d have said “lovingly curated” rather than “curated with love”, but that’s another matter.

They are balking simply because "curated" is a word that's become trendy for years in the tech/startup world and they are tired of hearing it.

I think it's rather about the amounts of data we're talking about. It's not practical to manually select OSM data for the world. An open source project of this size could maybe do it for a bigger city. But this is obviously not limited to a city.

So what does "curate" mean in that sentence?

I don’t rightly know what it means. Probably what you’d guess it does: a big ol’ pile of good-enough heuristic filters and transformations tuned on a handful of key locations, with a pinch of manual modification.

I was only surprised at the claim that the sentence doesn’t make sense in English, I never intended to imply that the sense wasn’t bullshit. (After the sellout stunt the MAPS.ME creators pulled I generally don’t view their participation as an advantage.)

OSM includes practically any mappable data collected for free, including even Wikipedia entries with a physical location. I assume curating means deciding the relevance of stuff like this and making into a map thats similar to google maps. Curate has also lost a lot of its meaning after ~5 years of ad spam. "This holiday, Lexus presents a curated grifting experience" (leaving in the autocorrect typo, sorry)

There's nothing wrong with the English word "curated". I think pp is being a little punctilious. The writer just means that they aren't giving you a random data dump, they've engaged in some activity analogous to e.g. the curator of a museum, to select which data is worth showing. Pp is asking "does this mean that they have made a specific decision about all the data that is shown?" when I think it means they've probably tweaked parameters to show information they find useful given various densities and contexts.

How good their curation is remains to be seen of course.

Yes that is what I thought. They have developed a style, icons, colour scheme etc for the app. To show you the data in a visually pleasing for that they think is good.

The standard osm app is already offline, although the ux could be improved

There is no standard osm app on iOS. Top hit is OsmAnd and it's not free.

OsmAnd has two versions on the Play Store. One free and one paid (OsmAnd+). On F-Droid OsmAnd+ is available for free.

Either way it's not a "standard OSM app", just a popular one.

You're absolutely right, I was thinking of osmAnd, maybe I should have said biggest instead of standard, whatever thanks for your correction

i cosider it the reference implementation

It isn't though. The Carto rendering style shown on openstreetmap.org is as close as we get to having a reference implementation. Osmand, while a good product, is much further removed from the OSM community.

Without getting into how official a product OSMAnd can be considered, I think it’s worth pointing out that Carto has limitations that OSMAnd improves on. Due to OSMAnd’s configurable vector drawing, it is possible to make the map show road surfaces or whether roads are lit. These are features missing from official OSM.org, which of course serves as little more than a tech demo.

Well, on iOS the app is free, but you can download a limited number of maps. Then it's either subscription or payment for individual regions. Maps.me or Google or Yandex maps have free downloads. Organic maps also claim not to track activity.

Yup... but it also helps to know that OSM is not a cheap surrogate for the above-mentioned commercial services, for hiking or cycling it's actually much better - at least as far as the map is concerned, the navigation features of the apps I tried until now are unfortunately a bit lacking.

There is a free version, but with the free version you can only download a limited number of "regions" (a "region" could be a small country or a subdivision of a larger country).

I thought a highly functional version was Magic Earth.

I've used the F-Droid fork of MAPS.ME and now have Organic Maps installed. It's much faster than anything web-based and also much faster than OsmAnd. I wish I could have OsmAnd with this renderer, since now I use both, OsmAnd is just much more feature-rich.

i use both myself. organic maps is a lot nicer for navigation and i find it more intuitive to pick the start and the end points. searching for POI's in osmAnd much better though, and it's easier to do some light osm editing as well

I'm actually pretty impressed with how responsive the UI is: it's as responsive a Apple Maps (unlike Google Maps which is sluggish on an iPhone 11 Pro).

The colour pallette is an odd choice I'll say, but that's an opinionated thing.

It does have biking directions, which Apple Maps is missing in most cities (even in cities where there's more bikes than inhabitants like Amsterdam). So I'll definitely be keeping it around!

Ah, I was going to check for biking directions after I got my city's map downloaded, glad to hear it has them! That's the one thing I've been using Google Maps for because Apple for some reason just pretends non-coastal cities don't exist for non-car-centric Maps features...

I may request the authors add the ability to use more OSM layers, such as a cycling overlay and maybe speed limit overlay (I've been told by Google that a street was safe to cycle on-road when that street had a 45mph speed limit too many times for comfort).

I really really want to move away from Google Maps but I just can't due to the reviews... The few other apps that can substitute the reviews are always focused on one specific thing(mostly restaurants). Is there any app that uses OSM data with reviews?

I think we collectively concluded some time ago that reviews are worthless, even on GMaps?

Honestly, using it for daily hotel searches for 500 days: The reviews are not worthless.

It requires a lot of sorting out and the results have to be taken with a grain of salt.

I stopped using GMaps and I still don't think they are worthless. Some companies buy fake reviews, some use shady techniques such as free drink/appetizer for a review. In my experience so far those are exceptions, not standard. I think corelation between quality and GMaps average review score is quite high - at least for restaurants.

You could check out reviews on gmaps and use Organic Maps or OSMAnd for everything else. A bit of a pain, maybe, but change is rarely trivial.

Maps.me, from which this is derived, uses third-party data (e.g. booking.com, etc), to integrate both booking and reviews into the map. I ultimately went away because maps.me is a real sinkhole of personal data, but experience is otherwise pretty good (and the tiles look better than osmand for sure).

maybe worth it to make up your own mind

are you under the impression he eats at a restaurant and then checks reviews to see if it was good?

no.

i am under the impression that he avoids going to a restaurant if the reviews are bad.

I don't find reviews helpful in making a decision for a restaurant - as long as the food isn't so bad it'll make me sick it's fine. I do like to see the menus and opening hours, though.

But a lot of people really do appreciate that kind of help, so much so I don't think any competitor will get anywhere without that kind of data.

Would you be interested in starting an open source business review project?

This already exists: https://openplacereviews.org/

There is even a plugin for OSMAnd but I have not tried it yet.

Thanks for pointing that out. I was not expecting: "Data is stored in a blockchain form"

Installed it and tried some bike route to a nearby place...

It wanted to route me via the normal roads (admittedly low-traffic ones, but still...)...

There seems to be no option for a "scenic route" or even a different one from the single, proposed one?

For finding cycle paths and quiet roads, I can highly recommend https://cycle.travel/map - it doesn't find "scenic" routes yet, but I think the author has been planning to add that :)

You might try TrailForks instead for biking and scenery. But I haven't seen a map software that does specifically curated scenic routes automatically, that sounds like a pretty hard problem to be honest. How would the map know what is scenic and what isn't?

For those kind of routes I still rely on random blogs or known good directories.

For me, switching to bike route mode froze my phone. Not going to use this I guess.

I use mapy.cz for my offline maps, also based on OpenStreetMaps data. What does this do better than mapy?

Open source, available from F-Droid, has no trackers.

+1 for mapy.cz from non-Czech user (both Androind and iOS)...

Great app, great maps (topographic maps more detailed in the forrest then Google), good route planning..

Are you from the Czech Republic? If not, what's your experience with the app?

I'm from the Czech Republic, but I live elsewhere and use Mapy.cz everywhere - in particular the "outdoor" version, which shows the contour lines, colours hiking trails, and contains a lot of interesting detail from OSM.

There are two things for which I still use Google Maps - finding businesses and getting car directions.

I am from Slovakia and also use mapy.cz. I think the main thing lacking is that in this app there aren't official hiking trails marked... maybe that's something specific to only Czech+Slovakia, but when going hiking, that is probably the first feature I look for.

That's strange. I don't use their app myself, but their Outdoor map style on their website is probably my favorite OSM map style. They even render hiking trails with the correct color from OSM data, which is unusual.

Take this area for example, it's full of what looks like hiking and biking trails, is it not? If there are trails missing, are they tagged correctly in OSM?

https://en.mapy.cz/turisticka?x=20.4205418&y=48.9352520&z=14...

Sorry I meant they are not in OrganicMaps app the article talks about.

I've been using OsmAnd primarily for a few months. Some areas that it's fallen short, and forced me back to Google: unreliable and slow public transport directions, terrible default routing engine (solvable), lack of up to date local business information, search that can't find basic street addresses, no updates on road closures.

Organic Maps looks great, I'm going to give it a try and see if it solves any of these issues.

There's an app called StreetComplete (recently discussed on HN) that allows you to easily contribute missing information like local business information to OSM. If you can find the time, you can use that to solve some of the issues you have and help others at the same time! :)

StreetComplete thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27549300

repository: https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete

I regularly contribute to OSM, but still 75% of the time, when I need a piece of essential information about a company, I can only find it in Google.

If you can't find certain business information or addresses in OSMAnd, that means it is missing from the OpenStreetMap database, so it isn't going to be in Organic Maps either.

I found the walking routes to be sub-optimal compared to Windy Maps[1] but that might be related to my location - South Africa.

[1]https://apps.apple.com/us/app/windy-maps/id1201228182

Maybe I am old-school, but I still prefer (perhaps outside tourist use) a Garmin GPS handheld, especially for cycling, hiking, and geocaching.

Benefits: (1) battery life for 15-25 hours with the screen on (for popular models such as the gpsmap or eTrex); (2) If the battery dies, I can just replace them (2 AA NiMH rechargeable batteries); (3) they are robust, dropped mine various times without any issues; (4) the models with a quad-helix antenna are usually more accurate, especially if you are not near a lot of WiFi AP or cell towers for triangulation; (5) since they have buttons, you can easily operate them with gloves on in the winter.

Of course, as with camera's, the best GPS is the one with you, which is typically a smartphone.

I used this a bit after a story about it came up a few days ago. Since then they have updated with CarPlay support, which is greatly appreciated.

I recently de-Googled, so I've been using Apple Mps. Apple is logging my location whether or not I use their first party map app, so I still end up using their first party map app because it provides traffic information and weighs that in the routing algorithm. Practically speaking, that's a big deal to me.

As amazing as OrganicMaps is, the lack of gaining much extra privacy on iOS and the lack of traffic information means I probably won't be using OrganicMaps too often.

I’ve used OsmAnd for several years as a secondary maps app. I’ve found OpenStreetMaps to have better data for walking that either Apple or Google maps. One issue with OsmAnd however is that map drawing feels somewhat sluggish, this app is however fantastic. I’ll definitely give it a try for the next few weeks. I imagine I’ll still need to use Apple Maps for transit though - whilst it seems to get the route right I can’t view step by step directions?

Sounds like a spiritual successor of MAPS.ME.

It's a fork of Maps.me, so it's an identical successor.

Indeed. I checked it out on my phone, and it works the same as MAPS.ME did, and also they state this on their github repo: "Organic Maps is a better fork of MAPS.ME, an Android & iOS offline maps app for travelers, tourists, hikers, and cyclists based on top of crowd-sourced OpenStreetMap data and curated with love by MAPS.ME founders. No ads, no tracking, no data collection, no crapware."

Although, they're still downloading the maps from mapswithme.com. It'd be nice to have an alternative ecosystem.

Disappointed in the cycling directions. I tried it in Toronto and it gave me a route the ignored a road that had a dedicated bike lane and directed me to a busy narrow road where you have to share with the cars.

Is it the routing algorithm or just OpenStreetMap not knowing about this bike lane? Latter one you could easily fix and help others too.

Maybe the road with the bike lane is a secondary road and the narrow one without is a tertiary, which might be preferred by the bike routing. Can you link us to the road in question so we can look at it in detail?

I will try this when it is out of beta TestFlight mode. Not having GPS connected sounds good, but I think that our cell carriers are already selling our location data to anyone who pays for it.

I have location turned off on all Google apps (and really, except for the Google app that feeds me interesting stories/news to read, I only use paid for services like GCP).

Both my wife and I have switched to Apple Maps. I wish that Apple provided privacy cellphone service. Right now, Apple, ProtonMail, and a few other options are my best bet for maintaining a little bit of privacy. I don’t so much care about the government having my data, but I hate large corporations having it.

It's on the App store right now: https://apps.apple.com/app/organic-maps/id1567437057 - the beta program is for testing new versions

thanks! I missed that.

Any idea how to migrate bookmark lists from maps.me to organic maps? I tried but locations seem different/unreachable.

I'm still on an old maps.me version due to this.

Can maps be loaded for an airgapped mobile device?

I think it just looks for the files on the specific location, and if they're there, it'll happily use it. I think you can download it on a connected device, or VM, and then copy them over, or maybe create your own with tools such as this: https://learnosm.org/en/osm-data/geofabrik-and-hot-export/

I would assume "offline" means exactly that, except of course, you will have to enable GPS.

The apk is ~60 MB on f-droid, so would assume does not include underlying map files. Asking if possible to load them without network access.

i think with earlier versions of android you could get the files in the 'android/data' folder. im using android 11 now so there is no access anymore, unless someone adds an option to store that data in the 'main storage' folder

I wonder what the story is of why this is a fork of maps.me? How was maps.me taken away from the founders?

Maps.me was bought by another entity [0] and not everyone liked the changes.

The forks, like Maps and now OrganicMaps, still use the map packages hosted by Mapswithme though.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25515004

Windy Maps is an earlier clone of maps.me which also works exceptionally well.

Seems great in concept, but has same issue as others: only the world map downloads, but no local map downloads on a device that doesn't run Google Play Services and with a non-default download manager.

Please file an issue on Github [0]. The developers can't keep track of every comment on Hacker News in order to find problems that need to be fixed. This fork was just launched and does still have some maturing to do.

[0] https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues

Looks great, a little bit of localisation would be good though. What are gas stations?

Localization would be a great addition.

Asking for localization and then criticizing another region’s vernacular is… kind of hilariously ironic. Gas is short for Gasoline, which, along with Petrol, came form old names of propriety oil products. Neither is a misnomer.