"In November 2014, Maps.me was acquired by Mail.Ru Group for 542 million Russian rubles"
"On November 2, 2020, Daegu Limited bought Maps.me for 1.56 Billion Russian rubles. Daegu Limited is announced to be part of Parity.com Group"
"Parity.com Group is privately held and is headquartered in Zug, Switzerland. It was founded by Viktor Mangazeev and Alex Grebnev in 2018. "
https://markets.ft.com/data/announce/detail?dockey=1323-1473...
If you like Maps.me, you should move to Organic Maps. It's a fork, just strictly better.
I'll just add that for me OrganicMaps is much better than current Maps.me which is getting worse and worse after it was sold to some Korean (or Chinese, don't remember now) company.
The UI is much simpler and in recent months you can really start to see that OrganicMaps is becoming more detailed. I used to check from time to time the difference between Maps.me and OM and and it used to not be much of a difference, but now you have: more POIs (point of interests, like physiotherapist, specific kind of shops, etc.), better rendering of walls, fences, cliffs, embankments, hedges, better rendering of parking places (very recent update!), and more!
OsmAnd is free-as-in-beer if you want it to be, though imo that's not fair to the developers unless you truly can't afford a few euros (which can be, no judgement, especially in countries with lower incomes or high income disparity).
On their github README.md.
If anyone knows android dev maybe you can checkout one of these smaller issues they're having.
- OsmAnd's flags feel more ephemeral, whereas in Organic Maps I'm just adding them as regular bookmarks under "My places", which make them harder to distinguish from bookmarks I want to keep long-term.
- Bus lines and stops are pretty useful if you're taking the bus somewhere unfamiliar.
But those are pretty minor; I've still switched to Organic Maps just because it's so much easier to use (ironically, that probably is because it has fewer features).
Also, I just keep both installed just in case, so I can always fall back to OsmAnd :)
You can manually export it but it gives me a little stress that one day I'll just lose my phone after not having exported for a while.
At the very minimum it would be great to auto export the file every X days to a specified location so I can auto sync it with syncthing or something.
But a nice setup would also be supporting webdav (nextcloud) to just drop the file there automatically.
This is the related issue but doesn't have too much traction. https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/622
- Configurable POIs. In Organic Maps I can show POIs for a few common categories, but many are missing (for example EV charging stations). And I can only show one type of POI at once on the map. In OSMand, I can show POIs for "drinking water, EV charging stations and public bathrooms" at the same time.
- Track recording and especially live tracking (OSMand has a very nice plugin for that, which works with services like Traccar).
Which is fine. I love both, I just use the one that fits the use-case at hand :-)
https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/issues/15058
Organic Maps does not, and should be supported instead.
And even if it sounds harsh, their initial suggestion is always valid: use another software, or fork it and maintain your own version. It's GPLv3.
I agree with you 100%. The issue of client tracking is completely orthogonal, as a client-generated and client-reported identifier does nothing to avoid these abuses. All it does is allow them to track users of the software.
> It appears that this spyware tracking feature was added by @vshcherb (Victor Shcherb) back in 2015 and has been leaking users' data and travel history (via client IP geolocation) to the OSMAnd index server ever since.
but to be honest there was a hidden tracking feature for many years and he only called it by its name and didn't get aggressive in any form.
The original author didn't acknowledge a problem and all his messages were hidden (or are it at least now) to logged out users. This doesn't seem like a healthy discussion, but I disagree that not the reporter, but the other users/developers seem to be aggressive. They deny any problem and don't appear to understand or care to understand the "allegations" brought forward.
He insinuates that this is a feature to track users and acts in this respect in "bad faith", but assuming the worst (it saved a unique identifier and time of use and ips...) which is understandable in this situation.
For everyone reading my reply until now, but didn't read the github thread - the issue is fixed and you can now disable the identifier in the settings.
Thanks for reading, sorry for the rant, have a nice day :)
The alleged "calling by its name" is the whole point. You are already judging something as ill-intended from minute 0. That's pretty aggressive in my book.
I was too, at first, but then I saw that this person refused to acknowledge any misunderstanding on their part or engage with any of the clarifications provided, and continued to spout their one-dimensional rhetoric. There's no "misinformation" marker on Github afaik, so unfortunately the "abusive" marker seems to be the tool available to fade those out.
I'd absolutely find this excessive if this was about a proprietary product, but I'm in support of FOSS developers standing up for themselves and drawing a boundary on how much mental energy they're willing spend on people like this.