[HN Gopher] Organic Maps
___________________________________________________________________
Organic Maps
Author : LeoPanthera
Score : 1295 points
Date : 2023-09-01 06:16 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (organicmaps.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (organicmaps.app)
| Leo_Verto wrote:
| Organic Maps really nails the use case for a minimalistic, no-
| nonsense mapping app with great UX design. Whereas OsmAnd tries
| to accommodate all use cases with full configurability, which
| results in a mess of nested options menus, OM goes for reasonable
| defaults and short menu paths.
|
| Unfortunately that minimalism comes with some downsides. While OM
| has a great metro map, it doesn't show bus lines (which would
| probably blot the map size quite a bit), making it unfortunately
| unusable for my use case.
| gaazoh wrote:
| I agree, including other guided transit (trams, urban
| gondolas...) on the metro layer would greatly improve public
| transit routing.
|
| But bus routes are a harder problem to integrate, especially in
| larger cities. In Paris, there are more than 200 bus routes
| (more than 1000 including the greater suburbs), map readability
| would take a probably big hit if they were displayed on the
| map, or at least it would require a lot of care to do it right.
| A some larger cities also have a night service for busses, with
| routes differing from the day busses, handling those properly
| is also an issue.
| Vinnl wrote:
| That's actually one of the few areas where I really like the
| way OsmAnd approached the UI. When you tap a bus stop, it
| shows you which bus lines stop there, and only after you tap
| one of the lines do you actually see the route for that
| particular line, and it has buttons to focus the next and
| previous stops.
| palata wrote:
| I use both Organic Maps and OsmAnd, I see both your
| descriptions as features:
|
| - Organic Maps is minimalistic, easy, great for what it does.
|
| - OsmAnd does everything. Whenever I want to do something more
| advanced that is not in Organic Maps (typically I like the GPX
| stuff for hiking, or the ski maps, etc), I turn to OsmAnd.
|
| I just need both.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| I use both as well, we are lucky to have such great options
| for both use cases!
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Same here. Although I also keep both around from the
| perspective of an OpenStreetMap contributor and mapper.
| OrganicMaps is a bit spartan at times, but it has its place.
| devit wrote:
| OsmAnd, while a bit harder to use (but not that much), is much
| better than Organic Maps: it can show satellite imagery from
| both Google and Microsoft (and download it for offline use!),
| has a 3D map view, supports coloring slopes, has a bunch of
| specialized functionality for hiking, cycling, skiing, maritime
| navigation, can record trails, can route according to vehicle
| dimensions and in general can do everything (except for things
| that require access to Google's data like routing based on live
| traffic data and showing data like opening hours that
| businesses put in Google Maps).
| lxgr wrote:
| OSMand definitely has more features, but whether that makes
| it better depends on the use case. I like it in principle and
| try it every once in a while but could never really warm up
| to it, and every time I just end up going back to Organic
| Maps.
| ihatehn wrote:
| OsmAnd does more, but I recommend Organic Maps to my family
| and friends. Unless one of my friends is an avid hiker/biker
| or map nerd
| biodranik wrote:
| OSM Public Transport schemes support for buses and trams is not
| implemented yet, and it's not an easy task. Any volunteers to
| lead the development are welcome!
|
| Here is the entry point to the current subways validator with
| wiki links at the bottom: https://cdn.organicmaps.app/subway/
| nerdponx wrote:
| Is there any corporate funding for this work?
| biodranik wrote:
| The original subway validator was created by the original
| (before the second sale) maps.me team. Now it is supported
| voluntarily.
| ajuc wrote:
| I love OSMand but I can't figure out why it announces speed
| bumps when I'm in walking and biking mode but not when in car
| mode :) But it's still the best navigation app I've used.
| ihatehn wrote:
| That's a good bug to report to OsmAnd. It used to be they
| announced a turn every time the road hit a slight angle too
| which was absolute insanity lol
| hkt wrote:
| I used this app to navigate around Italy on a cycling holiday. It
| was marvellous and I'd recommend it to anyone. Donated afterwards
| as a thank you for making such excellent software.
| LifeDesigner wrote:
| Hey guys! So happy to vote for Organic Maps. As a part of the
| team (when it was MAPS.ME) I'm very happy to see new life of
| MAPS.ME in Organic Maps. Good luck and all the best for you guys!
| Use your product with a pleasure. Alex Matveenko
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| Organic Maps is super awesome. The routing feature is really
| good, too. It even works on Apple CarPlay! There are some
| glitches to be aware of though: Routing across region borders is
| often broken.
|
| Also, a warning about OSM in general: Do not blindly trust it.
| Map data can be _very_ out of date in some places, especially on
| remote-ish hiking trails.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Instead of trusting or not trusting _any_ map by default, try
| understanding how they 're made, then you'll have a good idea
| what could go wrong with it.
|
| OSM in particular doesn't use third party registries and
| surveys due to the licensing issues, relying on volunteer work
| instead, and has a participation-based culture (aka "if you
| want to have a map of something, make it yourself"). Armchair
| mappers are using satellite photos and publicly available info,
| while field volunteers map everything that cannot be seen from
| above. Both are important. Obviously your trails have to be
| visited by someone participating in the community for them to
| appear or be updated on the map. You could be the one, for
| example.
|
| OSM is also highly chaotic like Wikipedia, and the quality
| heavily depends on the local community, so always research the
| situation in the area you intend to visit. For example there's
| _a lot_ of unreliable poor quality machine work in Latin
| America in OSM, even in populated areas. No idea why Portuguese
| /Spanish-speaking communities are letting this fly.
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| I agree with what you're saying. I just find myself lulled by
| OSM's ridiculously high quality in the places I usually go.
| And I suspect many others feel the same.
| janc_ wrote:
| Depends on the country also; some have their own official
| mapping data available in the public domain...
| ricardobayes wrote:
| I threw some pretty hard challenges at it - small unknown local
| beach with unpaved road access. And took them brillantly. Noted
| all the road hazards and even knew where best to park - even
| with local knowledge there is no better parking around.
|
| Amazing work, loving this app
| izacus wrote:
| > Do not blindly trust it. Map data can be very out of date in
| some places, especially on remote-ish hiking trails.
|
| Also, for the love of everything that's holy, do the same with
| Apple/Google Maps. They can be horribly wrong to the point of
| being actively dangerous.
| wds wrote:
| Can't trust Apple/Google, can't trust OSM, can't trust paper
| maps...
|
| What's the right answer here?
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > What's the right answer here?
|
| Do not ignore reality.
|
| Do not drive around signs announcing that bridge is closed,
| for an example.
| izacus wrote:
| > What's the right answer here?
|
| Essentially, check before hand and if possible, use maps
| fit for purpose.
|
| (E.g. Switzerland has nice public topo maps which are
| usually more accurate than Maps/OSM. They're available in
| SwissTopo app. The dedicated app also tends to show closed
| routes more accurately.)
|
| And double check with local info boards about current state
| (many regions have websites or dedicated meterological
| organizations that will post recommendations and closed
| routes).
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| Trust but verify
| et-al wrote:
| To use a cliche, _the map is not the territory_.
| whywhywouldyou wrote:
| Be aware that all maps be untrustworthy. Be aware of your
| environment. Don't blindly follow instructions. Have a
| backup plan.
| ihatehn wrote:
| It highly depends on what you're doing (a road trip vs a
| grocery run vs hiking mountainous back country) but the
| first step is to do a sanity check of the route. It's very
| easy for many GPS apps to route people to the center of an
| airport for example (i.e. the middle of the runway) instead
| of the main terminal, and only recently have a few apps
| managed to do better about that. Other times you can just
| easily spot that it's not a great route by reviewing it for
| ten seconds.
| IshKebab wrote:
| For roads though they generally hook into official sources
| (e.g. Ordnance Survey in the UK) so they are guaranteed to
| get updated when the layout changes. That's not true for OSM.
| (Though obviously in the UK there are enough map nerds that
| it's _very_ unlikely to be an issue.)
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Official sources also may have outdated maps.
|
| Especially when for example bridge was destroyed hours/days
| ago.
| ihatehn wrote:
| Apple and Google are _not_ guaranteed to be updated when
| government road data changes. They do their best and they
| have tons of money and user-reported data (like live GPS
| traces from users ' devices) to do decent work, but there
| are many times that OSM map nerds do a better job. The real
| issue with OSM is in remote areas where not a lot of people
| are around on the ground to realize that it's broken or
| care: the first user in an area often has some volunteer
| work to do. But fortunately it's easy and you _can_ do it.
| Any random person can make a better map of their area than
| Google, instead of having to beg them for it.
| izacus wrote:
| I don't know for UK, but in Swiss Alps the data is
| extremely scarce, which paths outright missing and Maps
| showing paths that can be closed or extremely dangerous.
| acec wrote:
| No not trust it google maps either. There is a crossroads that
| is wrong in Google near my house and it is right in OSM. In
| fact... I did fix it but I will not report about the error to
| Google ;-)
| gniv wrote:
| > I did fix it but I will not report about the error to
| Google
|
| Why not? That seems like a weird stance. Is your desire to
| hurt Google so strong that you are not willing to help
| potentially thousands of people?
| ihatehn wrote:
| If Google wants to have good updated user-contributed data
| for free, I hear there's a great open source map they can
| use ;)
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > Is your desire to hurt Google so strong that you are not
| willing to help potentially thousands of people?
|
| Not the same person: my time is limited, so I volunteer to
| fix data only when it is released on open license allowing
| me and others to use it.
|
| Otherwise I expect to be paid.
|
| In general, I need more than "it will help others" to spend
| time on something, I am already spending too much time on
| things like this.
| acec wrote:
| I am not a Google employee. Why should I work to fix their
| product? I prefer to help potentially thousands of people
| by helping a non-profit like openstreemaps
| janc_ wrote:
| I'm pretty sure you aren't even allowed to report an error
| to google without creating a privacy-invading account...
| biodranik wrote:
| Please make sure that you have up-to-date app and maps data,
| and tell us where you see cross-border routing issues. There's
| an easy way to report it from the app using "Report a bug"
| button in the About dialog.
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| IIRC, that was over a year ago near Oberstdorf, at the border
| between Austria and Germany. You could not get an on-foot
| route from the Kanzelwand Bergstation[1] to Fellhorn[2]. The
| hiking path follows the border closely, crossing it multiple
| times. That location seems to work fine now.
|
| I'll make sure to report it in the future!
|
| [1]: https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/252814925 [2]:
| https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/276271393
| ihatehn wrote:
| I remember hearing about issues like this and I agree
| things are probably better lately after some fixes.
| patchtopic wrote:
| organic maps is great but it does not have street numbers.
|
| I know this is a limit of the underlying OSM data it uses.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Note that if some data is missing or wrong - you can fix it by
| editing on https://www.openstreetmap.org/ as they use
| OpenStreetMap data
|
| Such help is really welcome!
|
| If you are on Android then I recommend StreetComplete which asks
| questions and edits OSM based on answers (disclaimer: I wrote
| parts of it)
|
| (Organic Maps has some limited editing capability, but for
| example you will not change road geometry or add forest area with
| it)
| technothrasher wrote:
| I started using StreetComplete a few months ago. It's a good
| "time waster" when I'm sitting somewhere in my car waiting for
| somebody, or I'm out for a stroll somewhere. I did laugh though
| when I was recently in Europe and was filling in data with it,
| and it kept wanting to know how wide the streets were in
| meters. I had visions of annoying motorists by putting a tape
| measure across the streets to get an answer.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| There is a separate app to install with VR tool that is
| capable of measuring it without tape measure :)
|
| See https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.westnord
| ost...
|
| (initially it was bundled in one app, later it turned out
| that Google was lying about license of arcore repository, see
| https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/4289
| )
| technothrasher wrote:
| Nice, I'll take a look. Thanks. Though it doesn't seem to
| want to know street widths here in New England.
| fuddle wrote:
| I'm impressed normally free open source apps aren't great
| quality. This looks quite polished. I was trying to figure out
| what library it uses for map rendering. It seems like it uses a
| custom C++ code for map rendering?
| methou wrote:
| This is so nice!
|
| I checked out the map, works great even outside of the US/EU. I
| checked my favorite local food chain, routes are very good. I
| found one missing, followed the lead to OSM and updated the venue
| data. Things gets interesting when you can edit the data behind
| the scenes! Kudos to people behind both projects!
| vintagedave wrote:
| This was the first time I'd heard of the app, but due to comments
| in this thread I downloaded it.
|
| * Website, ethos: straightforward. "Old internet" vibes, love it.
| They seem very active, have a presence on every platform, very
| impressive
|
| * The app seems very nice. Simple clear UI. Lots of features. I
| need to experiment for more than a few minutes but I get the
| impression it could replace Google Maps for me, especially
| because Google Maps has trouble doing things like showing road
| names or other key navigation tools
|
| * On design and UI: the offline approach is very visible. I
| zoomed in to where I live and it starts downloading it. First, a
| great way to get a download (go there on the map, it downloads)
| but also compare how many steps it is to download offline for
| Google Maps compared to this (go to a special section of the app,
| download something in your screen's aspect ratio, limited in
| size, give it a manual name, prompted to manually curate
| downloads, they expire when they could still be perfectly
| valid...) -- this is significantly better design. It's the same
| difference angainst other map apps. I have a hiking trail app
| (AllTrails) that advertises offline, but getting the data and
| keeping it is a complex series of steps and it's impossible to
| know if it's there until you're in the wilderness and unable to
| download if it's not. This is so much simpler... good simple
| design.
|
| * It's developed in Estonia! Estonia has a remarkable IT and
| software culture (I live there) and every so often you come
| across an absolute gem. This looks like one of them
| iavael wrote:
| > It's developed in Estonia!
|
| It's actually developed by mostly Russian and Belorussian
| developers who live in Switzerland, New Zealand, Russia, and
| Belarus. Also, there are some significant contributions from
| residents of other countries, but none of them are from
| Estonia. Looks like the only Estonian thing is legal entity for
| doing business.
|
| But nevertheless, I agree that Estonia is remarkable for its IT
| culture. I used to work with several Estonian colleagues, and
| they are great engineers whom I highly respect as
| professionals.
| vintagedave wrote:
| Thanks for the info. I saw the OU and the registered address
| in Tallinn and thought it was based here. I can't edit my
| original comment now unfortunately.
| jaakl wrote:
| This is essentially po box (or more just fake address) for
| Estonian e-resident companies
| (https://www.e-resident.gov.ee/). It is quite popular for
| fellow neighbours Russians, Belorussians etc for whom their
| local country is not that enterpreneurial-friendly.
| pete_3c1f wrote:
| What I especially like about this over Google is that now (If I
| stay with it) I have a way bigger incentive to contribute to
| OSM, because there's an app where I can see / use my changes.
| fizwidget wrote:
| I get a kick out of seeing my changes appear in Organic Maps
| every month or so. Great motivator for contributing to OSM :D
| maze-le wrote:
| This is definitly my favourite map app. The offline features
| are amazing and it has a great UI and operability. Routing for
| bicycles could be better, I ended up in the middle of the
| forest without clear path the other day, but this is more of an
| issue with old OSM datasets than with the app itself.
| nani8ot wrote:
| What I especially like about Organic Maps and OSM in general is
| how searching for "water" shows nearby water fountains.
| Depending on the country and region it helps if your running
| out of water while hiking. It's not necessarily the best water
| but at least where I live drinking it is usually not a problem
| (especially if your drinking a small amount). Water is also
| listed in the categories tab next to WiFi, Pharmacies, and
| similar points of interest.
| ihatehn wrote:
| Yeah the level of detail for things people care about is
| truly unmatched. I like mapping doggie bag dispensers, trash
| cans, and park benches -- stuff Google will just never care
| about.
| Vinnl wrote:
| You can also more specifically search for "drinking water" I
| think :)
| nani8ot wrote:
| Thank you, that's awesome.
| okok3857 wrote:
| This was an incredible aspect of the app to have when in Rome
| this summer! So many public water sources, and it was so, so
| hot....
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| The app 'fountains in italy' is pretty cool and has saved
| me on a couple of trips there. Especially locating a
| fountain on a bridge(!) at Lake Garda...i was stood almost
| next to it, it was hidden by the people walking past.
| hedora wrote:
| I like this app, and would love to see it succeed, but the
| offline app flow is a huge downgrade from my map app of choice
| (Here We Go; formerly Nokia Maps).
|
| I just tell it what countries (or states / regions) to
| download, and it downloads them. Then, if cell coverage will be
| spotty, I tap the "work offline" slider, which disables
| traffic, but also means that search is on device and instant.
|
| This is how literally every map program I used before MapQuest
| worked. I don't understand why modern interfaces don't support
| this.
|
| For reference, California's maps (including business listings)
| are 856 MB. The total map size for all the regions I have taken
| this phone to is under 3GB.
| dbtc wrote:
| Used organic maps recently in central WA without cell service:
| fantastic app.
| taink wrote:
| > It's developed in Estonia! Estonia has a remarkable IT and
| software culture (I live there) and every so often you come
| across an absolute gem. This looks like one of them
|
| What sets Estonia's IT and software culture apart from other
| countries? What other Estonian software would you recommend?
| jaakl wrote:
| Estonian probably better known unicorns are Skype (now
| Microsoft/Teams), Pipedrive (CRM), Bolt (EU biggest Uber
| alternative), Starship (robotics), Wise, Sixfold (now
| Trimble) As Estonian I would recommend any of them, but it is
| just how our culture works :)
| mcv wrote:
| I've had it for a while, but I don't use it nearly enough. I
| still rely on Google Maps for most things, until Google Maps
| lets me down. Which it does mostly when I'm on vacation.
|
| Although now that I think about it, Google Maps lets me down on
| vacation because I'm in unfamiliar territory and I have no idea
| how to correct for the mistakes it makes. When I'm at home (in
| Amsterdam) it makes plenty of mistakes too, but I'm familiar
| with them and the are, so I can easily correct for it.
|
| For example, Google really dislikes the Sarphatistraat for some
| reason. It's a bike street: basically a gigantic bike path that
| also allows cars, but bikes have right of way. It's one of the
| most important bike thoroughfares in Amsterdam, so of course
| you should always take it. But for some reason, Google always
| prefers to send me along the Stadhouderskade, which is part of
| the centrumring for cars, one of the major car thoroughfares,
| parallel to the Sarphatistraat, and it does have a separate
| bike path, but you're still in car fumes. Also, it's slightly
| longer.
|
| There are plenty of other bike routes it doesn't know. I should
| really try to get used to using Organic Maps on my bike from
| now on. It's excellent on bike and pedestrian infrastructure,
| including hiking trails, things to see, etc. Many years ago
| when I first learned about OSM, I was amazed about the level of
| detail I got when I zoomed in on Artis, the Amsterdam Zoo. You
| don't get that kind of detail on Google Maps. I really should
| use it more.
| aembleton wrote:
| Worth trying out mapy.cz app for cycling. It uses OSM data;
| and I find it works well in the UK, I've never tried it in
| the Netherlands though. It has good route finding, but
| unfortunatelly you can't load in a GPX route: https://en.mapy
| .cz/zakladni?mobilepromo=1&x=15.6252330&y=49....
| cvak wrote:
| there is import GPX feature when you sign in, I use it
| quite often.
| aembleton wrote:
| Ah thanks; you can load them through the website and sync
| from the app.
| m-p-3 wrote:
| One feature I definitely enjoy is the ability to connect with
| my OSM account and easily submit changes on the go (business
| hours, etc).
| ex-googlemaps wrote:
| I'm an ex-Googler and I tried to fix cycling routing. I'm
| honestly sorry I wasn't successful. We had a really nice
| solution but privacy considerations made it extremely
| difficult and limited. And then I and the other main driver
| both left Google so it withered and died I believe. I really
| hope someone else can fix it one day.
|
| This is a throwaway obviously since this basically 50% doxes
| me.
| pja wrote:
| Google maps is still terrible for pedestrian / cycling use.
|
| OSM is much, much better but I guess Google refuses to pull
| OSM data because it would require them to open up their own
| maps.
| ex-googlemaps wrote:
| For cycling, yeah, that's why I said I'm very sorry I
| wasn't successful.
|
| For pedestrian, I'd disagree. At least in places I go, I
| find Google's walking directions to be top notch.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| If you're a pedestrian in a city and you're walking
| between two locations with mailing addresses, then yes,
| Google is great. For anything outside of those
| boundaries, OSM is head and shoulders above Google Maps.
| GMaps is basically unusable for hikers and outdoorsmen
| because of the asinine offline UX and lack of topo data.
| I've also seen it make some outright unsafe routes when
| walking around suburbs and smaller towns.
| mbakke wrote:
| For hiking OSM blows Google out of the water. I'm
| surprised how detailed OSM is with random forest trails
| and shortcuts, resting spots, viewpoints, etc.
|
| The main thing I use Google Maps for is searching for
| stores etc in cities. I hope such information becomes
| easier to contribute to OSM.
|
| Perhaps a Pokemon Go style game for map updates could
| work? StreetComplete[0] is good, but the rewards are kind
| of boring.
|
| 0 https://streetcomplete.app/
| ihatehn wrote:
| Recall that Google as a company doesn't care about making
| people's lives easier and better, they care about
| inserting themselves as a middleman in aspects of your
| daily life and then trying to sell ads about it. They
| might invent a "talk to your grandma anytime" app and
| tell you it's because they love your sweet grandma, but
| the only things that will get attention and dev work are
| the bits that figure out how to sell you more stuff.
| KnackeredHues wrote:
| I've been wondering why doesn't google use its own
| elevation and traffic data? There are no privacy issues
| with the data they already make publicly available.
| Prioritizing flatter and more pleasant routes over shorter
| ones couldn't be more complicated than adjusting a few
| variables, could it?
| aix1 wrote:
| > We had a really nice solution but privacy considerations
| made it extremely difficult and limited.
|
| Would you be willing to elaborate a bit more on those
| privacy considerations?
|
| (I guess what I'm struggling with is how cycling is
| different in this regard from other modalities.)
| ex-googlemaps wrote:
| There are significantly more people using the other
| modes, especially in active navigation. For example, it's
| well known that Google detects traffic through the
| movement of active users (there was the wagon of phones
| traffic jam experiment). Imagine trying to do something
| similar with the amount of cyclists actively using Google
| with the necessary privacy settings enabled on any given
| route. It would be noisy but possible, but then on top of
| that Google is extremely strict with privacy requirements
| (the exact opposite of what everyone on HN assumes). And
| once you add all of Google's voluntary restrictions like
| anonymity of inferred data and such, it's nearly
| impossible to gather any signal, even in major cities.
|
| Edit: By the way, the massive difference in potential
| users compared to all other modes is also why it's so
| hard to prioritise work on cycling inside Google.
| culi wrote:
| What exactly makes the challenge of cycle so much harder
| than walking? Also is there really 0 ways you could use
| pedestrian mode data for biking directions? Even if
| marginally or to confirm hypotheses mostly based on
| cycling data
|
| Lastly, is there anything stopping you from contributing
| potential innovations to open source alternatives?
| chefandy wrote:
| In most densely populated areas near where I live in
| southern New England, bikes are vehicles that, in most
| cases, must operate on the roadway. I'd get a ticket for
| riding a bike across a pedestrian bridge or down an urban
| sidewalk.
| MayeulC wrote:
| I don't think it's necessary to jump right to data
| collection, the routing algorithms and incomplete maps
| are the issue. Of course, you'd need additional data
| about bike lanes, etc (which could come from crowdsourced
| data? Maybe that's what you are alluding to?).
|
| As it is, offline routers such as Brouter and OSMAnd do a
| much better job, and it's pretty easy to convince other
| cyclists to use them.
|
| Traffic jams are almost never an issue when biking -
| heavy car or bike traffic can slow you down, but by that
| point you have at least the same density as car traffic
| jams for data collection...
| rob74 wrote:
| This sounds a bit American to me honestly - I would think
| that in Europe (and especially in Amsterdam) there would
| be enough cyclists to make the data usable. OTOH, they
| may not have the necessary privacy settings enabled (I
| think that's a minority among car users too). Of course
| it's also a vicious circle: if Google Maps is bad for
| cyclists, few cyclists will be using it, so you won't get
| the data you need to make it better. Additionally, I
| think the proportion of cyclists using any kind of
| navigation solution is lower than with car drivers...
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > Additionally, I think the proportion of cyclists using
| any kind of navigation solution is lower than with car
| drivers...
|
| In large part because cycling is fairly resistant to
| traffic jams
| ericfr11 wrote:
| The ex-Googler is most likely talking about the product
| as a whole, across the globe. It would be hard to justify
| features dedicated to a small group of users overall
| (with different goals/expectations), especially while
| keeping privacy (and data sharing). That being said,
| Google maps works great for cyclists in the US ...
| bsimpson wrote:
| It's maddening that tens of millions of users is "give up
| and do something else" territory for Google.
| ex-googlemaps wrote:
| Yes, it's also maddening for most Googlers who are
| passionate about the work they want to do that would
| affect just tens of millions (or less).
|
| But at least it leaves room for other companies in some
| situations. What's really sad is when there's something
| that could only be done by Apple or Google, but it's too
| small for either of them to actually do it.
| ihatehn wrote:
| Problem is those companies are like Nest, who made good
| products with love and then sold themselves to Google who
| then turned most Nest products into bargain-basement
| offerings with half the features. So the only real fix is
| FOSS, since everything else can be bought and killed.
| (FOSS can be too, but it's harder.)
| tuukkah wrote:
| Supporting sustainability, also a job for someone else.
| We are so lucky OSM exist, helping to perhaps save the
| cities and the planet.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| How many cyclists use Google Maps to navigate? I guess
| (with no true facts) most cyclists know their primary
| routes and when going somewhere new have a rough idea and
| just check for the last part.
|
| Whereas car drivers often use navigation all the time to
| see traffic and alternatives, which are non-issues for
| cyclists.
|
| Thus even with many cyclists the information they collect
| is less.
| xigoi wrote:
| You think Google is watching your location only when
| you're using Google Maps?
| ex-googlemaps wrote:
| The widespread assumption that Google collects all data
| all the time and uses it for everything is ridiculous.
|
| There's a labyrinth of explicit user agreements, all of
| which are strictly enforced, and then there are further
| layers of voluntary restrictions on top of that.
|
| Yes, Google might collect location data even when you're
| not using Maps (there are a lot of passionate, dedicated
| Timeline users), but you have to have that enabled, and
| even then the data can only be used in certain ways.
| jasonfarnon wrote:
| "Yes, Google might collect location data even when you're
| not using Maps (there are a lot of passionate, dedicated
| Timeline users), but you have to have that enabled"
|
| Of course that opt-in requirement was only the result of
| a hard-fought class action settlement.
|
| Take this with a grain of salt as my recollection of the
| litigation is somewhat hazy. But I believe Google argued,
| even when a user opted out of location tracking, Google
| could still keep the data for its own uses. Ie opting out
| of location tracking simply meant the user didn't have
| access to their location history, it didn't show up on
| the phone (couldn't be searched by suspicious spouses)
| etc.
| ihatehn wrote:
| I had to go to great lengths to disable location history,
| and Google penalizes me for it by disabling search
| history in Maps as a result. I'm sure 99% of people don't
| go to great lengths to disable location history and so
| yes your entire history of GPS locations is basically
| saved to a Google database as far as I remember. (Note
| I'm obviously a user recalling details from years ago and
| not a Google employee/developer. My perception that
| Google collects all our GPS details forever by default is
| based on reality, whether or not that means you as an
| employee would actually be able to do anything with that
| data.)
| frenchy wrote:
| I believe they also collect location data when you're not
| using Google Maps for the purpose of updating their
| database of wifi locations (that they then use for
| location tracking). There is an agreement for this too,
| but the Android phones I've had regularly spam you until
| you agree to it.
| janc_ wrote:
| You mean: until you accidentally click to agree because
| it popped up just when you wanted to click something
| below it. And then of course the only way to disable it
| again is hidden somewhere several levels deep, and comes
| with warnings that it will break your phone.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > The widespread assumption that Google collects all data
| all the time and uses it for everything is ridiculous.
|
| Maybe they fail to use it competently but it definitely
| collects a lot of data and attempting to stop it results
| in punitive reactions and disabling of features not
| needing it - and repeated badgering to permit Google to
| collect data again.
|
| Google also collects data that I was initially unaware
| that it is collecting.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Well, they collect quite some information, but to figure
| out which exact routs are taken etc need a persistent
| collection which is relatively expensive. The "passive"
| cell based location tracking doesn't work for that.
|
| In a car you can charge your phone and battery usage for
| GPS isn't as much of a problem.
| kseistrup wrote:
| > How many cyclists use Google Maps to navigate?
|
| The Cowboy bike company have started using Google Maps
| for navigation in their app, which is a bummer: Before
| the change, the navigation would reliably take direct me
| to use roads that a bike friendly. Now it does just the
| opposite: it wants me to take big roads that are only
| friendly to cars.
| culi wrote:
| Google Maps was a nightmare at the top 100 US News
| university I went to. It'd constantly be unaware of bike
| routes and try to take me an absurdly wrong way around.
| Even as I was taking the bikable shortcut paths it would
| just keep rerouting telling me to turn around 180deg even
| when I was more than halfway near the other road. You'd
| think there's be sufficient data on a major university
| campus...
| ex-googlemaps wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| Add that there's no Android or Google Auto for bikes, you
| usually don't charge while biking, etc. The people who do
| need to look up their cycling route typically do it
| beforehand, so in the end even in cycling-heavy regions
| there are very few using active navigation.
|
| Delivery workers will in regions where that's common, but
| they likely use company-provided or other local
| solutions.
| tnecniv wrote:
| Also mistakes driving a car are more costly. If you miss
| a turn on a bike, you can stop, walk your bike back, and
| take it. In a car, if the street is busy, you can't do
| that, and who knows where you end up if you take the next
| exit etc.
| kitkat_new wrote:
| > and just check for the last part.
|
| hit is not how I use navigation apps when cycling. When I
| don't know the way, I start my navigation app (not gmaps)
| when I drive off, because
|
| - I don't want to stop midway to check where I need to
| go, when I can do that when I get on the bike - I don't
| know where exactly to stop to check where to go - If I
| don't know where exactly I want to go, going roughly in
| the right direction probably means that I cycle longer
| than I need to
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Biking through Keskuspuisto central park, even when born
| and raised and lived in Helsinki for my whole life, one
| still needs to consult the satellite map a lot. It's a
| maze. The signs are roughly indicative at best. So many
| places look exactly the same you forget the exact
| crossings during the winter. You often can't see far
| because it's a forest.
| mcv wrote:
| Is it that there are more cars? Because I live in
| Amsterdam, and there's definitely more bikes than cars
| here, yet bicycle support still sucks. Although it's
| possible few cyclists use Google Maps because a) it's
| bad, b) they don't need to, and c) you need a special
| clip to use your smartphone live on your bike (though
| that's also true for cars).
| scatters wrote:
| Most modern cars have a center console with Android Auto,
| so you just plug in your phone to USB and it takes over
| navigation, communication and entertainment.
| mcv wrote:
| I guess my car isn't that modern. Our car nav is okayish,
| but the ui is crap and the maps are outdated.
| ihaveajob wrote:
| I feel like nobody in the Google Maps uses a bike for
| commuting or other daily life purposes. If they did, they
| wouldn't route me through the most dangerous, fast traffic
| street in my neighborhood, and instead they would choose the
| adjacent bike boulevard. Apple Maps does this much better,
| even though they've sent me to the wrong side of town a few
| times.
|
| From my early tests, Organic Maps also sends you down
| dangerous routes, so I'll use cautiously.
| ihatehn wrote:
| The bike profile in OSM routers will prioritize bike paths,
| bike lanes, and small streets over big highways, but
| there's always a balance since you're unlikely to want to
| bike 10 miles out of your way to avoid a busy street. That
| balance is always in flux and can only ever be as good as
| the OSM data underlying it (road classification and bike
| tagging etc)
|
| If you bookmark streets that it's sending you down or
| avoiding inaccurately and check them out later on a
| computer, I bet you'll find that there's some OSM tagging
| issue. https://osm.org has a routing tool you can compare
| with as well. The OM Telegram channel is always willing to
| take reports on where OM routes are worse than OSM.org
| routes, and OSM channels are happy to help figure out what
| tagging issues there may be.
|
| Cheers!
| KnackeredHues wrote:
| The balance is problematic in every cycling directions
| app. Some may be a bit more comprehensive than others in
| certain areas but all of them prioritize shorter routes
| over flatter ones.
|
| I wish there were a true flattest route app/website that
| prioritized quieter roads and more gentle slopes by
| default using existing terrain data instead of making
| users manually add a bunch of waypoints using their own
| knowledge in order to compare elevation profiles.
| NGRhodes wrote:
| Magic Earth (proprietary app that uses OSM maps) allows
| you to choose the maximum hilliness you want your cycle
| route. I've never used cycle routing, so can't comment on
| how well it works.
| cpmsmith wrote:
| I know that OsmAnd has fairly granular routing
| preferences, including a "preferred terrain" setting with
| "hilly", "less hilly", and "flat" options (as well as a
| "use elevation data" option which I don't quite
| understand).
| burkaman wrote:
| I they they have designed a routing algorithm that works
| very well in cities where Google employees live and work,
| and they either haven't tested elsewhere or aren't willing
| to make targeted changes to fix specific areas. It does
| work very well in US cities that have Google offices, but
| it's not surprising to me that it would fail elsewhere.
| Arelius wrote:
| I mean, you'd think that, but lately it constantly tries
| to send me down illegal lefts, and tries to have me drive
| on the Muni/Taxi only part of Market. In San Francisco.
| And if San Francisco isn't a coty where Google employees
| live and work, I don't know what is!
| jeffbee wrote:
| This seems local. I just checked routing from North
| Berkeley to Emeryville and Apple Maps routes me down the
| main north-south traffic sewer instead of good parallel
| bike routes, and Apple Maps appears unaware of the new
| bridge across the rail yard. Google's results are far more
| sensible.
| ihaveajob wrote:
| Exactly this. I'm sent down Sacramento or San Pablo
| regularly, instead of the California or King st
| boulevards. Most people who ride around don't need the
| directions, but now and then you see someone you can tell
| is following them, not realizing there's a far safer
| option around the block.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Google displays my street name wrong and there is no way to
| change it. I've reported it 10+ times and nothing is
| happening. I don't know where they got that street name from
| but it's definitely not the "official name" of the street as
| recorded by the official authorities. And this is in Europe
| on a street where the google car goes through basically every
| few years.
|
| I can't even describe the level of frustration this causes
| because I'm forced to use a non-existant street name for
| packages because otherwise no courier finds me.
| titaniumtown wrote:
| But with Organic Maps, since it uses OpenStreetMap, I've
| actually corrected a bunch of street names near me and have
| added about 4,000 house numbers. It's really nice when
| you're able to improve the area near you.
| metabagel wrote:
| Make sure it's correct on OpenStreetMaps. I believe Google
| it as one of their data sources, and it's something you can
| actually go in and fix yourself.
| bsimpson wrote:
| What's the street?
|
| The edit review system for Maps is really frustrating.
| Sometimes obscure things are approved instantly, and
| sometimes really important things are silently ignored.
|
| I once attached a news article to my report, and they still
| denied it. I've also added street vendors like "coconut
| cakes lady" and had them approved.
| mcv wrote:
| That is really harmful and bizarre. But that also means you
| basically need to know which delivery service is going to
| deliver it, because some, like the postal service, may be
| relying on the real name or the postal code.
| eCa wrote:
| How does https://cycle.travel/map/ perform routing-wise in
| Amsterdam?
|
| (Unaffiliated happy user.)
| mcv wrote:
| Maybe slightly better, but still not great. It's skipping
| the eastern part of the Sarphatistraat. Also it struggles
| with street names and encourages you to only type a town,
| which isn't very useful.
|
| I like that it allows you to choose between paved, gravel
| or any. Although gravel may still be too limited for some;
| mountainbikers like dirt tracks, and I've had Google Maps
| send me through loose sand that would probably require a
| BMX.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| > Also it struggles with street names and encourages you
| to only type a town, which isn't very useful.
|
| Oh, good spot. Fixed. OSM geocoding is better than it
| used to be - I used to just say "town" because
| streetnames were partial, but they're pretty good now.
|
| If you have a start and endpoint that should use
| Sarphatistraat but don't, I'm all ears. (It's my site!)
| mcv wrote:
| That's an amazingly quick fix!
|
| Try "Feike de Boerlaan" to "Vondelpark". I would expect
| the trip to take the Czaar Peterstraat and then the
| Sarphatistraat, but instead it takes the Panamalaan,
| Zeeburgerdijk, Mauritskade, and only switches to the
| Sarphatistraat at the Weesperplein, which I think is also
| the point where the Sarphatistraat changes from a bike
| street to a regular street with a bike lane. Although it
| later switches back to bike street again yet the route
| stays on the bike street.
|
| So I have no idea what's going on with that first part of
| the Sarphatistraat. It's a really nice route, yet all
| apps hate it.
| aembleton wrote:
| Useful test case. I've just tried it in mapy.cz which is
| my prefered mapping app for cycling directions when I'm
| out and about and it too makes the same mistake:
| https://en.mapy.cz/zakladni?planovani-
| trasy&rc=9LCtmxhwst9Ks...
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| Really interesting test case - thanks!
|
| cycle.travel's scoring for the two routes differs by 0.4%
| so it's very close. In OSM data terms, the challenge is
| that there's no particular special tagging for the
| Sarphatistraat - it just gets classed as a "cycleway",
| same as the route along Mauritskade. Plus there's a
| couple of very slight advantages for the Panamalaan
| (which is tagged as part of a designated longer-distance
| bike route) and the Zeeburgerdijk/Mauritskade (which are
| beside water so get a scenic uplift).
|
| I might look at doing some Amsterdam-specific routing
| tweaks: I doubt the longer-distance bike route
| consideration should be relevant in this case, for
| example.
| mcv wrote:
| It's true that Mauritskade is besides water, but it's
| also next to pretty heavy car traffic. Is it possible to
| give it a downgrade for that?
|
| > I doubt the longer-distance bike route consideration
| should be relevant in this case
|
| Or maybe it is, but then it's relevant for all routes
| involved, including the Sarphatistraat (which is short
| distance for cars, but long distance for bikes).
| mcv wrote:
| Also worth pointing out: the very first part of the
| Sarphatistraat that's skipped is a bike path between a
| grassy tramline and water, with the zoo on the other side
| of that water. Can't get much more scenic than that. It's
| significantly greener than the corresponding bit of
| Mauritskade.
| local_person wrote:
| These would also be relevant in NYC - sounds like 34th
| Avenue meets this criteria
| MayeulC wrote:
| OSMAnd + Brouter is really the gold standard for bike routing
| for me, though the Brouter Android app could certainly use
| some polish (it barely looks like an Android 1.0 app).
|
| If you just want to try the routing, there's brouter-web too
| ;)
| coolgoose wrote:
| The amount of mistakes Google makes in the Netherlands when
| it comes to bikes is mind-blowing. If you don't know the area
| or manually check the maps it takes you trough a lot more car
| places that it should do.
| mcv wrote:
| Yeah, I think I've gotten too used to it and learned to
| automatically compensate for it, but the more I think about
| it, the more I realise just how terrible Google is at bike
| routes.
| twic wrote:
| I've had some horrendous experiences using Google Maps for
| cycling in the UK too. Mostly it's very good, and it's
| impressive how good it is, really, but it's the times it
| gets it wrong that you remember.
|
| Routing me through a park in the middle of the night, when
| it was closed, was one. Taking me on a detour to avoid a
| busy road, which turned to be on a farm track where the
| road surface was completely destroyed, was another.
| raybb wrote:
| I recently moved to Amsterdam and I find Google maps biking
| directions are often wrong or just a bit worse than organic
| maps. But also when organic maps it wrong (like one time it
| though there was a nice connecting sidewalk that no longer
| existed) it was super easy to go edit on OSM and next time
| I'll get the right directions.
|
| My one wish was the OSM had a great app for discovering POI
| or reviews. Like something that can show me all the
| bookstores around but with a little extra human touch on if
| it's nice to sit at or mostly used books or something like
| this.
| pietervdvn wrote:
| Here you go: https://mapcomplete.org/shops.html?z=12.2&lat=
| 52.36511&lon=4...
|
| Note: it takes a little while to load all of Amsterdam.
|
| Disclaimer: I'm the (main) dev of mapcomplete
| aembleton wrote:
| When did you last refresh your data? It seems at least a
| year out of date compared to OSM as there are shops I've
| added that aren't showing.
| sleepless wrote:
| Confirming the outdated map data lacking many changes
| that are present in OSM.
| chickenWing wrote:
| Seeing all the praise in this thread, I downloaded the app, and
| I must admit I'm disappointed and confused at the effusion, but
| maybe I'm doing something wrong.
|
| I tried a very basic task of getting driving directions to a
| specific address and that doesn't seem to be supported. For
| some streets, it will give me directions to the street as a
| whole, but that's not useful for long streets. Other streets
| don't seem to exist in the map.
|
| Then I typed in a simple query: "ice cream", and the closest
| result listed was 4 miles away, but there are several ice cream
| shops within less than a mile. Other business listings are out
| of date or inaccurate.
| rement wrote:
| Sounds like you have the opportunity to make the map better
| for yourself and everyone else. The data comes from Open
| Street Map which is community edited and maintained
| https://www.openstreetmap.org
| ihatehn wrote:
| A lot of the effusive praise is from people in Europe, who
| navigate slightly differently (often directions are based on
| intersection, etc) and have a lot longer OSM tradition. My
| guess is that you're American (or at least not European) and
| so unfortunately the fact is that volunteers like ourselves
| have to do the work of adding addresses to the map. One easy
| way anyone can do that is with the RapID / MapWithAI address
| layer from the National Address Database, I myself have taken
| to doing large formally-approved imports as well.
|
| OM's only data source is OSM itself and their volunteer dev
| team is already overloaded so that's the only option there
| for now (basically the same as with OsmAnd) but if you really
| want an OpenStreetMaps based GPS app with full address
| support ASAP you can try Magic Earth in the meantime. It's
| not FOSS, but at least it's not Google.
|
| As for ice cream, it's a matter of checking to see if those
| closer businesses are mapped correctly or not. If they're
| properly tagged as "ice cream" in OrganicMaps but not
| displaying in the correct order then that's an OM bug to
| report, but my guess is that they're not entered properly
| into OpenStreetMap to begin with. Both are free open source
| projects though so we can make things better ourselves
| without begging a big corporation to do it for us.
|
| Cheers!
| xcrunner529 wrote:
| Yeah I bought a new build in a greenfield community and so
| it was a fun first project to pull the new street and
| address data from the county auditor and create the streets
| and addresses for my community in OSM. I did it the "hard"
| way with JOSM I guess not knowing about the MapwithAI
| stuff.
| blendergeek wrote:
| Unfortunately your area may not be mapped very well in
| OpenStreetMap yet.
|
| The map is maintained by volunteers and in some areas there
| aren't any.
| Humbly8967 wrote:
| If you are interested in contributing to OSM to make the data
| better in your region, you can even make basic edits from
| within Organic maps, including adding addresses.
| unwind wrote:
| 0n mm mmm nnmmnmnnnnn NMT mmkmkm..mkmmm km km mm kmmmm m
| ummmmmmnm NMT kmm mmummmmm mm mm.........ummmmmmmmmmmkmm mm u
| mmm mmmmmmmm NMT m..mm
| codetrotter wrote:
| > the offline approach is very visible. I zoomed in to where I
| live and it starts downloading it.
|
| Downloaded the app because of this part of your comment.
|
| It's awesome!
|
| At the moment I am in Cancun in Mexico, and one thing that was
| sad about Google maps is that it shows Playa Tortugas in the
| wrong part of the map, so when I booked our hotel thinking we
| were next to that beach it turned out that it was not correct.
|
| Meanwhile, this app with the OSM data shows the correct
| location for Playa Tortugas.
|
| Of course, there is probably a lot of other places in the world
| where OSM has something similarly wrong.
|
| But I found it encouraging to see that OSM data is better than
| Google Maps in this case.
| jdblair wrote:
| This is the first time I see "Get it on F-DROID" on an app
| download page.
| BlackLotus89 wrote:
| I often use my smartphone when driving somewhere by bike/scooter
| and for this only osmand is usable since background mode is not
| yet implemented
| https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/pull/4611
| redauburn wrote:
| Background mode will be in the next release :)
| LispSporks22 wrote:
| Is this one good for motorcycle?
| freyfogle wrote:
| Roman, one of the founders of Organic Maps, was recently
| interviewed on the Geomob podcast:
| https://thegeomob.com/podcast/episode-190
| davelondon wrote:
| My friend is a heavy iOS maps.me user, and has hundreds of
| bookmarks all over the world. She isn't a fan of the new maps.me,
| and would love to use Organic Maps.
|
| I've tested the import / export function, and it looks like we
| can transfer all her bookmarks over and preserve the colour
| information...
|
| The only thing we're missing is an auto-backup function to store
| the bookmarks online. She's not a techie, so it has to be free
| from settings and automatically enabled.
|
| As soon as that feature is added you'll have another user!
| yumraj wrote:
| Just tried it iOS. Maps look interesting.
|
| Tried to plan a route, couldn't figure out how to see step by
| step directions in a list view which is supported by almost every
| map. Is that possible?
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _OrganicMaps is Android and iOS offline maps for travel without
| trackers or ads_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27576882
| - June 2021 (116 comments)
| uhtred wrote:
| Is it better than OSMAnd? (I love OSMAnd)
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| Simpler.
| sv0la4 wrote:
| [flagged]
| sjkoelle wrote:
| mapsme had the conch in its hand
| Zmicier42 wrote:
| Height profile on the route is one of the most useful features of
| Organic maps for hiking. Have not seen such functionality in most
| of other maps apps.
| kibwen wrote:
| I'm slowly de-googling due to the WEI debacle, and my resident
| OpenStreetMap evangelist recommended this as a Google Maps
| replacement. It obviously doesn't have all the features of Google
| Maps, but surprisingly there are several things that I feel it
| does better. For example, the transit overlay is much more
| visible and shows transfers between lines (although that's the
| only overlay it offers, no bike lane overlay sadly (although,
| honestly, GM's bike overlay isn't all that useful)). Searching is
| obviously instantaneous and shows _all_ your hits, so I can
| search for "cafe" in my city and immediately get a map with pins
| for every single cafe, which can be overwhelming at large zoom
| levels but it's fine once you zoom into an area (and it's much
| less "mystery meat" than GM's approach of selectively only
| displaying a subset of your search results based on your zoom
| level, so I think it's a worthwhile tradeoff). And no ads,
| obviously. The biggest downside is that the search is basic, and
| searches the whole planet while only sporadically prioritizing
| results in your current area, or your current zoom, or your
| downloaded maps. If you have an address it doesn't matter, but if
| you don't have an address then you'll find yourself longing for
| the more intelligent search of Google Maps. But it's nice, and
| I'm using it more and more often by default over time. However,
| until search is improved, I don't think I'll be able to uninstall
| Google Maps entirely (although eventually maybe I'll just use it
| through mobile Firefox).
| mezod wrote:
| Looked awesome until I saw there's no satellite imagery, I cannot
| get lost in the middle of the mountains with so little reference
| points :(
| joren wrote:
| By far the best app when abroad. Use it to plan a holiday with
| color coded bookmarks. Easy to plan hikes, runs etc. And all
| offline. Great to spot where you find drinking water,
| playgrounds, and all the other great details OSM provides.
|
| Started using it in Montenegro for driving as well since I didn't
| want to pay a fortune for roaming and all other offline apps or
| even GPS device did not have the country available offline.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| Started using Organic Maps during the pandemic, this is the app
| that weaned me out of Google Maps.
|
| At the moment I only really use Google Maps to check opening
| times of certain shops.
|
| Also way better routing for cyclists than Google maps.
| prometheon1 wrote:
| Do you use the search functionality a lot, and is it giving you
| the results you want? And if so, do you have any tips on how to
| write search queries?
|
| I love Organic Maps, but when I try to search, I think I find
| what I'm looking for about 1 out of 5 times.
| ihatehn wrote:
| Are you searching for street addresses or business names?
| Coverage of those is highly dependent on openstreetmap
| volunteer contributions.
| harabat wrote:
| A workaround I saw a few months ago on HN: for both Organic
| Maps and OSMand, you can use Acastus to search for something
| and then open the result in the maps app (+ share the broken
| query with Organic Maps, as requested by the founder).
|
| Acastus-Photon (An online address/POI search for navigation
| apps) https://f-droid.org/packages/name.gdr.acastus_photon/
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| Usually I will take an address from my email or browser and
| plug it in, so indeed the search feature is not something I
| use much.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Reliable search is just generally hard to implement for OSM,
| as it's highly chaotic. There's no single schema forced upon
| everyone. The same feature can be tagged in multiple ways,
| which are dependent on the consensus between mappers,
| country/jurisdiction, culture, particular mapper preference
| etc. This is especially relevant for addresses and
| businesses.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > The same feature can be tagged in multiple ways
|
| That is not huge problem. You can support just the most
| common schema. Except some rare cases it will not have real
| bad consequences (note: as OSM mapper I put quite
| significant effort into getting rid of some pointless
| duplicates, but I do not consider it a blocker for data
| use).
|
| The problem is that making search working well with
| descriptive, incomplete, typoed, confused input is really,
| really, really hard. Google Maps search is the most amazing
| Google project for me.
| Aachen wrote:
| Um, the wiki is the single schema forced upon everyone:
| https://wiki.openstreetmap.org
|
| Searching the schema works just fine, it's just hard to
| find typos and support natural language queries. Google set
| the standard for searching, we need to remember that we're
| literally comparing a volunteer project against the world
| leader in search who also has the money to employ a hundred
| distributed servers for every query versus the offline on-
| your-phone search of something like OsmAnd.
|
| Borders is one of the few things that need to be different
| between countries (county, municipality, city group
| (Kreisstadt), city region (Stadteregion), etc.: every
| country has a different hierarchy of subdivisions which OSM
| translates to numeric admin_level values). Some countries
| use the abbreviated street names like St. John St., others
| have the convention to expand Saint John Street. Different
| road types have different rules (is a tractor allowed on
| rural motorways? In Uganda maybe yes). These handful of
| things which you'll need to set per country are defined on
| the wiki, but 99% is the same. Particularly for searching
| where the name and POI tags like shop=x are the most
| relevant: after normalising the street name abbreviations,
| you're pretty much good.
| onli wrote:
| Well, to be fair, the search isn't working well even when
| you enter the exact string. I just last week searched for
| a specific address, entered exactly the correct street
| name and the app just did not show the street name in my
| target city as a result. When clicking on the right
| location (taken from memory) the address was shown
| correctly, just the search did not work at all.
|
| Also, in the same city, route planning (by bus) did not
| work. Which was a bit funny to me, when I lived there 10
| years ago the city refused to make the bus data available
| to Google Maps, so back then it was Google Maps that also
| could not do route planning there.
|
| I like Organic Maps, with its offline functionality it
| provides a layer of reliability that Google Maps is
| missing - and my phone has no Gapps anyway. But it's a
| pity neither search nor navigation is close to what
| Google can offer.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| OSM Wiki is not the mechanically enforced schema, it's
| just a collection of knowledge about the actual tagging
| practice. Which is entirely chaotic, and the collective
| consensus is dynamic - usually the most used tag wins,
| but there are less used alternatives here and there.
| There are many good proposals that failed to get traction
| due to too few people backing them up or for some other
| reason.
|
| The addresses in particular are heavily dependent on the
| country and region. And of course OSM is a subject for
| controversies and stupid edit wars as well, just like
| Wikipedia.
|
| I'm not criticizing OSM, mind you - just explaining why
| it's hard to implement a good search in it; you have to
| constantly adapt your application to what people actually
| use in the map in different countries/language
| communities.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Any_tags_you_like
| for confirmation of the first paragraph.
| biodranik wrote:
| Can you please send us more details about non-working search
| queries at support [at] organicmaps.app (or report it on our
| Github), considering that addresses or POIs that you're
| searching for are _present_ on osm.org ?
| [deleted]
| matkoniecz wrote:
| reported
| https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/5890 for
| now
|
| Edit: also
| https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/5891
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| You can often find opening times of shops by searching for
| their own Facebook page instead of using Google Maps. Moreover,
| you can add business' opening hours to OpenStreetMap so that
| other people in future will see the opening hours in Organic
| Maps and other OSM-based maps. For a programming-savvy crowd
| like HN, the syntax of OSM's opening-hours tag is pretty
| straightforward.
| Aachen wrote:
| > by searching for their own Facebook page
|
| At that point I'd rather open up Google and give them the
| data point that someone is interested in this store at this
| time (to make these crowdedness plots) than provide Facebook
| with my data ._.
|
| If they have an own website, sure, but a Facebook page? I'm
| not whitelisting those IP addresses for my browser to be able
| to visit that.
|
| This is why I always add the website as the most important
| field for a POI btw: easy to click through, always up-to-date
| opening hours. They're very often out of date on OSM because
| the shop owners only supply that info to google and call it
| good.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| Because a Facebook page is the business's own
| advertisement, you can add the opening hours displayed
| there straight to OpenStreetMap. (Google's information
| obviously cannot be copied into OSM, and besides, sometimes
| its opening hours are guessed from visitor data instead of
| added by the business itself.)
|
| > This is why I always add the website as the most
| important field for a POI
|
| It has been over a decade now since most physical-retail
| businesses began giving up on maintaining their own
| websites, using only Facebook pages instead, unless they
| are part of large chains.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _It has been over a decade now since most physical-
| retail businesses began giving up on maintaining their
| own websites, using only Facebook pages instead, unless
| they are part of large chains._
|
| This was indeed a trend a few years ago, but it is not
| true anymore, in my personal experience. Even tiny shops,
| if they are only a bit more technologically knowledgable
| than average, tend to have their own web page.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| > You can often find opening times of shops by searching for
| their own Facebook page
|
| Maybe a US thing? Where I live, less than 10% of the shops
| have a Facebook page, and I'd expect maybe 10% of _those_
| have up to date reliable information.
| Vinnl wrote:
| > you can add business' opening hours to OpenStreetMap
|
| And by far the easiest way to do this, if you have an Android
| phone, is to use the beautiful StreetComplete app:
| https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/#readme
| raybb wrote:
| Street complete may be a bit more beginner friendly but if
| you just need to update hours or want to add details to
| several stores quickly everydoor is easier to me
|
| https://every-door.app/
| aembleton wrote:
| Worth taking a look at Street Complete Extended Edition
| too: https://f-droid.org/packages/de.westnordost.streetco
| mplete.e...
| emaro wrote:
| You can do it directly in Organic Maps as well.
| habi wrote:
| On iOS https://every-door.app/ wins for easiest
| `opening_hours` editor.
| gniv wrote:
| There is no UI for opening hours in Organic Maps afaict. I
| think that's part of the complaint.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| There is. When you click on a place, there is an "edit
| place" option which allows you to edit common details
| including business hours.
| gniv wrote:
| Oh, I see it now -- sometimes it's there, but for a lot
| of places I cannot even lift the drawer, probably because
| there is no data other than category, like "Cafe". So I
| cannot edit.
| andrewshadura wrote:
| It usually means that you have outdated data. Update the
| app, update the data, try again.
| quercusa wrote:
| Great for airline passengers!
|
| I saw this while preparing for the return leg of an airplane
| trip, so I downloaded the offline maps and was able to follow my
| flight via GPS - made things much more interesting.
| anderiv wrote:
| If you're on iOS, the University of Minnesota (USA) has release
| an purpose-built app for this sort of thing. I've enjoyed it on
| many flights:
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flyover-country/id1059886913
| euroderf wrote:
| Is there someway to lock North so that it doesn't try to keep
| rotating so "helpfully" ?
| 123pie123 wrote:
| fantastic app, I easily prefer it to OSMand
|
| thanks to all those involved on making a wonderful application
| narrowtux wrote:
| I still want some app that makes the awesome brouter algorithm
| usable on iOS. They have an android app which is "easy" to do
| since the routing module is written in Java, but alas, iOS
| doesn't support Java.
|
| IMO, brouter generates the best routes for bicycling with lots of
| options to customize for what kind of riding you want to do
| (road, trekking, gravel, recreational, commuting, safe and quiet
| vs. quick, etc.).
|
| Right now I use brouter-web on my iPhone but it's really hard to
| use since the UI is really small and it's very simple to
| accidentally place a waypoint. After that, I send the GPX file to
| my bike computer.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Seems like a noble effort, and I'll keep it installed and in-
| mind, but I'm just about to head out on a rather well-tread trail
| that just happens to be quite long and segmented, and I can't
| make anything useful of the UI at all. Though I could piece
| together a custom trail I was satisfied with--after much
| irritation and rezooming--there was then no way to save it for
| later that I could see, and when I tried importing a KML or GPX
| it was rather clumsy; I eventually succeeded at displaying the
| route, and maybe that'll ckme in handy later today, but I
| ultimately just decided to use the AllTrails pro trial and
| hopefully remember to cancel in time. I can't mess around with
| iffy, unpredictable interfaces when I'm exhausted both physically
| and mentally and cell service is spotty at best. hwat would be
| awesome is to seriously iterate on the UI of the trail side of
| things, if the technical bits are in-place, because it seems like
| an otherwise commendable endeavor. It just feels very open-
| source, as in maybe it technically works, but I wouldn't put
| myself in a vulnerable position with it
| elcapitan wrote:
| Does this support custom map styles? OsmAnd has the option to
| create custom xml styles for certain use cases (which I find
| interesting for non-standard uses).
| izacus wrote:
| Nope, it's meant to be simple to use not a kitchen sink app
| like OsmAnd.
| elcapitan wrote:
| No need to be defensive, it's ok if it's less powerful, I
| just need to know what I get.
| 2143 wrote:
| Great app, I like it, but I did notice some problems:
|
| My city is comprised of several islands, and there's relatively
| large bodies of water between them (over 100 metres), but this
| map shows those large water bodies as narrow (1 or 2 metre)
| river-like things.
|
| I understand this might be the problem of the underlying data
| source, and not the app itself.
|
| (For what it's worth, both Google and Apple maps correctly
| displays the islands and water bodies).
| orblivion wrote:
| Check if it looks the same on openstreetmap.org
| 2143 wrote:
| openstreetmap.org correctly displays the islands and the
| relative distances between them!
| orblivion wrote:
| Alternate thought just came to mind - is your map data on
| OrganicMaps up-to-date?
| [deleted]
| 2143 wrote:
| I hope so. I first heard about it (from this very post on
| HN), downloaded, and installed the app all within the
| past 1 hour.
|
| And when I zoomed into my city, it downloaded the map
| information.
| orblivion wrote:
| In that case it's as up-to-date as OrganicMaps has to
| offer, which should be within a couple weeks of OSM's
| main database.
| orblivion wrote:
| Sounds like a bug in the app then. Though, OSM apps have
| their choice on how to interpret the underlying data, so it
| could be based on a deliberate decision. May be worth
| reporting if you don't mind revealing your town on their
| github.
| redauburn wrote:
| could you give rough coordinates? we (OM) can fix it :)
| iagooar wrote:
| Besides hiking and biking, how good are the maps for 4x4 off-road
| driving?
| mothsonasloth wrote:
| Bookmarked. Definitely will use this for the Mongol Rally next
| year
| ricardobayes wrote:
| It installed automatically on the external storage to save space!
|
| Finally someone thinks of the general population who doesn't buy
| the latest gadget just to keep up. A 3-4-5 year old smartphone
| should be perfectly adequate if devs actually thought of
| supporting the "normal phones".
| vladharbuz wrote:
| I would use Organic Maps if OSM supported entering UK postcodes
| in the search box. Can't wait to stop using Google Maps.
| aembleton wrote:
| Try mapy.cz app. You can use UK postcodes in there and it uses
| OSM data.
| rurp wrote:
| I love the offline focus of this app, but the one killer feature
| it lacks is the ability to download satellite maps.
|
| One of my most used and loved apps is a hiking app that supports
| saving different types of maps offline, and I use the satellite
| views quite a bit.
| jacooper wrote:
| Personally, I lost hope in finding any gmaps alternative.
|
| It's always either super out of date, or missing details and nice
| features like reviews, photos and advanced integrations like
| gmaps integration with public transport.
|
| That's without mentioning the clearly worse routing Algorithms.
|
| These issues mostly stem from a lack of data, but there are many
| related to the way the OSM project sees itself, and concepts like
| point of interest.
|
| Let's see what comes from the new big tech alliance against
| gmaps.
| botanical wrote:
| I'm currently using Magic Earth, any major differences between
| the two? I realise this one's open source, but I really like
| Magic Earth's live traffic and recording.
| jacekm wrote:
| If you're using maps primarily for driving I'd stick to Magic
| Earth.
| eh__dub wrote:
| Using OSM is not unique amongst mapping apps. Almost every
| company's mapping app is using OSM data in some way.
|
| The no ads bit is nice.
|
| I don't think I properly understand the "no tracking" claim. I
| don't want to be tracked by miscellaneous third parties, but
| designers and engineers should absolutely be instrumenting the
| app so they can understand user behavior via empirical means.
|
| I saw another comment mention they can update OSM via this app.
| That is def cool and I wish more apps supported that use case and
| educated users about it.
|
| The topo map leaves something to be desired. Once you go Gaia
| Topo, it's hard to look at other companies' topo maps.
| janc_ wrote:
| Whenever a company is tracking such data, there is no way for
| users to know if collected data is used or sold for other
| purposes, now or in the future, so the default should always be
| to collect no data at all.
|
| If you want to run UI/UX tests/experiments on users, just ask
| them (and maybe offer incentives to participate?).
| hnarn wrote:
| I've used maps.me for years and years, I had no idea it had been
| forked by the original creators. I'll definitely move over to
| using this instead.
| ospohngellert wrote:
| Downloaded the app, searched for mexican restaurants in my area
| and it missed a few. I tried searching for the restaurants
| specifically and they were in the DB and categorized as mexican.
| Any recommended way to accomplish this?
| pwillia7 wrote:
| Love it. thanks for making this.
|
| Feature Request: Add a Thrilling style mode for navigation so I
| can map fun drives without using a real computer.
| https://help.tomtom.com/hc/en-us/articles/10428741608466-Rou...
|
| Here is more information about the variables they use to figure
| out the most thrilling route --
| https://developer.tomtom.com/blog/build-different/thrills-an...
| [deleted]
| ihatehn wrote:
| One way I did this randomly the other day was choosing Bicycle
| or Walking mode which prioritize slow streets and pedestrian
| pathways. Maybe a different definition of thrilling than most
| people in cars, but I appreciate being taken into other areas
| of town I might not normally go since they're not major roads.
|
| OsmAnd also has many different navigation profile options, you
| might try customizing that to get what you want. Organic Maps
| focuses on what the bulk of people need to navigate decently,
| so that the end result is simple and usable for everyone even
| if it's not the most feature-packed.
| wooque wrote:
| My go to app for hiking and navigation on trails.
| gorbypark wrote:
| I use Organic Maps for hiking specifically because it's not a
| "hiking app". There are way too many apps out there that expect
| you to just hike a trail that someone else has already hiked.
| Want to combine intersecting trails? You're out of luck. Want to
| use a trail you didn't explicitly pre-download without a data
| connection? You're out of luck
|
| But with Organic Maps, I find it has all the trails (at least on
| two separate one and a half month hiking trips in Andorra), and
| since they're all included with the base data, you can mix and
| match trails and do whatever you want.
|
| Pain points: The search isn't so great, there's a lack of names
| for trails and no real way to tell the "grade" of a trail. It
| could be a super easy walking path or some barely marked
| scramble.
|
| But overall I love it and it's way better than the commercial
| hiking offerings (WikiLoc, AllTrails, etc)
| kccqzy wrote:
| I use MapOut for that purpose. I believe it also has OSM base
| data and allows you to draw your own routes. It provides
| elevation gain and loss, as well as a remarkably accurate time
| estimate for the hike taking into account elevation.
| nerdponx wrote:
| FWIW AllTrails is pretty good, they will only show specific
| "known" routes in the search, but the underlying map data
| itself seems to be OSM data and everything is visible on the
| map. I tend to use it to find interesting trailheads and
| locations, but then I actually use Organic Maps when I need to
| navigate.
| biodranik wrote:
| Please write us more details about search issues at support
| [at] organicmaps.app, or even better, create/update an issue on
| our Github: https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues
|
| If trails have names in osm.org but names are not present in
| OM, please let us know, it's a bug.
| gorbypark wrote:
| Will do! I am pretty sure the trails where I hike (mostly
| Andorra) are just not named is OSM. I thought about trying to
| update some myself, but there's a lot of overlapping trails,
| so it would be tough to get right. For example big stretches
| of the same trail might be both GR-7 and GR-11 and also a
| local Andorran trail number. I'd rather not do it than do it
| and get it wrong!
| lioeters wrote:
| Just wanted to add my experience with Organic Maps.
|
| I used it extensively this year, mainly because it has hiking
| and bicycle paths that are not marked at all on Google Maps.
|
| It works off-line. This is so valuable to me, especially when
| hiking.
|
| One time I was lost deep in a mountain/forest, and the app
| found a GPS signal to show my location and direction, saving me
| from unexpectedly spending the night (for which I was not
| prepared). I suppose any map app is capable of this, but I was
| so glad.
|
| It's also capable of giving directions.
|
| And, unlike Google Maps, I can trust that the app is not
| collecting and misusing my location data.
|
| Of course, as an open-source project, there are some rough
| edges. I have GMaps installed just in case, and on a few
| occasions I had to resort to using it. But I was pleasantly
| surprised by Organic Maps, so far it's my favorite mobile app
| for maps.
| ijustlovemath wrote:
| You can tell the grade of a trail by doing Route To / Route
| From and selecting the walking option. After computing the
| route it shows you a fairly accurate elevation profile, as well
| as the length and total elevation gains/losses.
|
| If you're using imperial units, you can also quickly estimate
| difficulty by doing the following:
|
| - take the total elevation change, in hundreds of feet, eg
| 900ft = 9 * 100ft
|
| - take the total distance, in tenths of a mile, eg 2.1 mi = 21
| * .1 mi
|
| - divide the elevation by the length and convert to a
| percentage: 9/21 ~ 43%
|
| - grades are like so:
|
| 0-40%: relatively easy
|
| 40-70%: moderately big elevation, may be hard to sustain
|
| 70-100%: steep terrain, may involve some scrambling
|
| >100%: very steep, technical terrain. Sometimes involves
| ladders or a static line in particularly steep sections
|
| For example, there's a pretty lengthy trail near me called
| Shining Creek, that's very sustained, but I wouldn't call it
| steep. It's got 2300ft of elevation change over 3.9mi, which
| corresponds to a 58% steepness, aka the upper end of a
| moderately difficulty hike if sustained.
| gorbypark wrote:
| The elevation profile is great, for sure, but I meant more
| like...difficulty, rather than grade? I don't know the exact
| word to use, but sometimes you have well used, well marked
| trails and other times you have a "trail" that maybe gets
| used a few times a year and is more like a choose your own
| adventure with a rock cairn or two every couple hundred
| meters if you are lucky.
| ijustlovemath wrote:
| Ah, I see! I'm not sure if OSM data can have that
| information, but it would be great! Some kind of bushwhack
| out of 10 rating?
| aembleton wrote:
| OSM does have that data, and I've noticed that mapy.cz
| takes it into account. There are sac_scale [1] and
| smoothness keys [2]
|
| 1. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:sac_scale
|
| 2. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:smoothness
| ijustlovemath wrote:
| sac seems a little too broad to me; most trails would be
| level 2 or below, without communicating much more than a
| simple elevation profile already gives you.
| ihatehn wrote:
| I think Komoot uses openstreetmap and is a little more
| hiking oriented, that might be useful to you.
| agent008t wrote:
| It does not really say if any areas are exposed though. You
| can have near flat elevation but a very exposed path.
| ijustlovemath wrote:
| There's a topo layer in Organic! Close lines means
| (potentially) lots of exposure. That's not a silver bullet,
| though, as sometimes the topo shows nothing special, but
| when you get there you can have some exposure. For the
| cliffs in my area, there's also different shading and a
| line with triangles poking out in the direction of the fall
| line. So as long as you're hiking in places that are
| somewhat popular, you will have this extra info to rely on.
|
| Doing true exposure on a per-segment basis would mean a new
| key I think, not to mention how much additional data this
| would require for the maps. If you're worried about the
| terrain to the point of needing highly detailed topo maps,
| it's probably better to get one of the many such maps in
| AllTrails (though the app is rather clunky)
|
| As with all things outdoors, technology will only ever get
| you so far. Situational awareness and emergency
| preparedness are skills you should have if you're going
| somewhere you've never been before. Always prepare for more
| than you expect, and if you're not sure that you're
| prepared once you get to somewhere sketchy, it's always
| best to turn back.
| ZacnyLos wrote:
| Mapy.cz
| [deleted]
| rlaimondas wrote:
| [flagged]
| rlaimondas wrote:
| Superb mapping with a lot of details.
| l9i wrote:
| If you enjoy Organic Maps, please consider supporting them
| financially: https://organicmaps.app/donate/. Supporting their
| serving infrastructure for numerous users is surely costly.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Right now infrastructure appears to be donated, but donations
| increase how much effort developers can spend on it!
| michaelmior wrote:
| > Organic Maps doesn't request excessive permissions to spy on
| you
|
| To be fair, the requesting of these permissions doesn't mean the
| other app highlighted is "spying on you." Some of those
| permissions are required for certain features. Not everyone will
| be comfortable with that, and that's ok. But I think it's unfair
| to suggest that the intention is spying.
| F30 wrote:
| In this particular case I read the statement as a dig at
| maps.me (the app they forked from). On iOS, maps.me would
| always continue accessing my location in the background unless
| force-quit, even if nothing was actually happening in the
| background. I might be wrong of course, the statement could
| have a different background and maps.me's behavior could be an
| honest bug.
| rob74 wrote:
| I'm currently using OSMAnd, which is pretty powerful, but also
| feels a bit overloaded UI-wise - does anyone have any experience
| on how Organic Maps compares to it? Sounds like it could be a
| worthwile alternative. Especially the claim "go for a weeklong
| trip on a single battery charge" sounds interesting - I have the
| feeling that OSMAnd actually _increases_ battery usage, because
| all rendering has to be done client-side, but of course it 's
| probably possible to optimize this. Also, the free version of
| OSMAnd can only download a limited number of maps (split up by
| regions, which are sometimes a whole country, sometimes less) - I
| hope that the donation-based model works out and they will not be
| forced to do something similar.
| orblivion wrote:
| Organic Maps is _way_ less overloaded UI-wise. It 's the go-to
| app for basic use as far as I'm concerned. I keep OSMAnd around
| just in case I need something more advanced.
| Vinnl wrote:
| > I'm currently using OSMAnd, which is pretty powerful, but
| also feels a bit overloaded UI-wise - does anyone have any
| experience on how Organic Maps compares to it?
|
| It's less powerful, but not overloaded UI-wise.
|
| (Where "powerful" means things like travel guides and bus
| lines, but also things like being able to set up different
| profiles with the ability to customise the icon indicating your
| position per profile.)
| koziserek wrote:
| Fantastic app.
|
| To reach perfection for me, it would need:
|
| - to allow storing my POIs in some sync-able location (e.g.
| Nextcloud folder)
|
| - to improve rendering and reach same level of beauty as mapy.cz
| / Windy has...
| baz00 wrote:
| I cannot really express how much praise I have for Organic Maps.
| It has got me out of the mire a couple of times due to the
| complete offline capability and paper maps being completely
| wrong. The OSM base layer is better than a lot of native maps out
| there.
|
| Not only that, you can search for a toilet almost anywhere,
| including in the middle of nowhere in central Asia, and it found
| one!
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Organic Maps is great. I just wish OSM worked on search more.
| They are behind there.
| mrd3v0 wrote:
| Which should be an exciting project any person can work on,
| given the decent amount of metadata OSM provides.
| ihatehn wrote:
| The main issue with OSM search at least in America is a lack
| of addresses. Anyone can help with this by importing
| addresses from the National Address Database:
| https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/watmildon/diary/400812
| biodranik wrote:
| We're actively improving our search in every release. Stay
| tuned!
| shellfishgene wrote:
| Maybe I'm a little jaded by how the app economy works nowadays,
| but I find it almost suspicious how fast development seems and
| how well supported Organic Maps is. At least the high level of
| quality is explained by the fact that the lead developers seem
| to be the founders of the original maps.me.
| biodranik wrote:
| We're not alone, our community and contributors are helping
| us!
| someone321 wrote:
| [dead]
| xNeil wrote:
| Thanks for the work you and your community is doing! Quick
| question - why did you fork maps.me in the first place? And
| how do you make money?
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > And how do you make money?
|
| From what I see, https://organicmaps.app/ is asking for
| donations ( https://organicmaps.app/donate/ )
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| Maps.me got forked because it was sold from the original
| company to a new one (IIRC more than once). The most
| recent company to purchase Maps.me is in crypto, so their
| focus has been on e.g. adding a crypto wallet - yes, a
| crypto wallet in a maps app - instead of actually
| developing the app further for maps users.
| palata wrote:
| Was Maps.me open source before, or did they somehow
| manage to make it open source just before it got bought
| by the cryptobros? That would be a pretty great move IMO.
| milliams wrote:
| I believe that it was always open-source.
| dvdkon wrote:
| I remember them promising to open-source it early on and
| then waiting at least a few months for the code. At the
| time I was jaded and thought they'd go back on the
| promise, but I'm grateful they didn't. It's the most
| polished FLOSS map app.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| It wasn't always. It started as MapsWithMe by a swiss
| company, which gave it away for free with a pro version
| (for which I paid), then mail.ru took it over and made it
| opensource (while all my build attempts failed) and then
| a new owner later added tons of ads and stuff into it and
| made it closed. Then some people forked the slightly
| older open source version.
| ihatehn wrote:
| Those people are the original founders who took it open
| source, which was a great move since otherwise it'd have
| become just another piece of shovelware getting
| enshittified into oblivion.
| biodranik wrote:
| New owners of Maps.Me ruined the offline UX in one of the
| updates in 2020. We could not allow our "baby" to die
| like this.
|
| The project runs on our own money and users' donations.
|
| With enough support, we can replace Google Maps in most
| use-cases in the future. Because we are listening to our
| users, and are actively using Organic Maps ourselves.
| ihatehn wrote:
| I'm a volunteer working on an improvement to the spoken
| directions and I can say with firsthand experience that
| Organic Maps' development is _not_ suspiciously fast. It is
| simply a fork of Maps.ME which has gone to crap, so when you
| look at features per year over the whole lifespan it 's
| really not a lot. I think OSM is growing in popularity
| especially as more people realize that FAANG are awful and so
| we're seeing more activity lately, but let's just say that
| it's taken me a year to get around to working on this task
| again (is it just easier to accomplish things during Back to
| School week and Christmas-New Years' week?) and in that time
| I have not had many merge conflicts to deal with. It's
| getting better, and things are happening more quickly, but
| certainly not suspiciously-quickly. OM has been a thing since
| 2021 and I've been trying to ditch Google since 2015 so I've
| been around for awhile seeing the progress: much slower than
| I'd like, but still remarkable. Certainly not comparable in
| any way to a VC-funded startup that can churn out a product
| in months, this is funded by donations and volunteer work.
| zikduruqe wrote:
| As a cyclist, I use Organic Maps to add drinking water sources,
| shelters, repair stations, fix biking routes and lanes using
| just a mobile app to update OSM when I am out and about.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Thanks for that! Editing the map on a bike can be a hassle
| though. I tried many options and came to conclusion that a
| 360deg camera on the helmet and a physical Bluetooth button
| to take audio notes is the easiest possible setup.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| I collect info on the bike using a Garmin eTrex GPS.
| Because this has physical buttons, and not a touchscreen,
| you don't have to take your eyes off the road so much. You
| rarely have to stop at all if you just make your own
| personal system of abbreviations.
|
| For example, I will save a waypoint titled "RLPGW" or
| "RRPGW" to specify at intersections that the road to my
| left or right is paved and ends in a give-way sign. Or
| "DWL" or "DWR" for drinking water to my left or to my
| right, respectively, etc. Then, when I get home, I just
| connect the Garmin to my laptop and comfortably upload
| everything using the powerful JOSM editor.
| Vinnl wrote:
| If you both don't know about StreetComplete yet, you should
| check it out:
| https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/#readme
| Matrixik wrote:
| https://every-door.app/ is also good.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Yeah I'm often using StreetComplete when walking in a
| city, but on a bike _any_ operation with the phone
| involves stopping and switching the context. Besides, SC
| is intended to fill the missing or fix existing data, and
| sometimes I need more than that (adding /fixing paths and
| objects, for example). So I just record an audio note
| while passing by something, and later on I import the
| video/timelapse and edit it on my computer, which is much
| faster than doing that while cycling.
| MayeulC wrote:
| I also started using EveryDoor recently, which strikes a
| Nice middle ground betweek StreetComplete qnd Vespucci.
|
| https://f-droid.org/packages/info.zverev.ilya.every_door/
|
| https://every-door.app/
| aembleton wrote:
| Worth looking at SCEE [1] for adding objects,
| unfortunatelly it doesn't do paths.
|
| [1] https://f-droid.org/packages/de.westnordost.streetcom
| plete.e...
| oregoncurtis wrote:
| How do you fix the routes? I just checked out the suggested
| route from my work to home and it doesn't stick to the bike
| greenways or streets with bikelanes. It actually suggested I
| take a very dangerous road with no bike traffic at all. How
| can I help improve that?
| samschooler wrote:
| A lot of the routing comes down to pressure around the tag
| `bicycle`. If there is a road illegal to bikes, tag it
| `bicycle=no`. But if it is unsafe, the best way to fix it
| is to better document designated routes, as well as
| cycleways.
|
| OSM's philosophy on routing is you should not try to fix
| routing by trying to translate your opinion that it is
| unsafe to ride on the street into to tags. Instead the
| routing algorithm should improve or the data should improve
| to the point where an alternative route can be suggested
| based on data.
|
| https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bicycle
| xethos wrote:
| > Instead the routing algorithm should improve
|
| Where's the feedback to the routing algorithm? I thought
| graphhopper / OSM was sent to users without feedback.
| evantbyrne wrote:
| The critical issue I've always had with OSM-based map apps has
| been stale data. If I were to update something on OSM, then how
| long could I reasonably expect it to take for that change to make
| it onto my phone with Organic Maps? And would it happen
| automatically in the background while I'm on WiFi, or would I
| have to do something manually?
| SushiHippie wrote:
| If you change something on OSM it takes a few minutes to a day
| to be visible on the *online* map. And in their faq they state,
| that they update their maps 1-4 times per month.
|
| Automatic updates are planned
| https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/5679
| evantbyrne wrote:
| Yeah, such massive delays will be the one thing preventing me
| from using Organic Maps. OSM being community-editable is
| where these map apps get most of their value. Letting the
| data go that stale defeats the purpose.
|
| Thanks for the link I'll keep an eye on that issue.
| eisa01 wrote:
| I don't think monthly updates is letting the data go stale,
| and there's a bandwidth cost of updating e.g., every day.
| Maybe they would update more often if they got more
| donations ;)
|
| Google often takes longer than that to process edits...
| evantbyrne wrote:
| A month+ is incredibly stale. OSM releases full dumps on
| a weekly basis for free, so cost is not a reasonable
| excuse. It is also not normal for updates to Google Maps
| from business owners to take that long. I have on
| multiple recent occasions seen businesses push update
| same day in my small city. It's a shame they went through
| the trouble of rebranding without addressing users' most
| common complaint, which is that data is oftentimes wrong.
| Keeping it up-to-date with OSM and pushing people to
| contribute would help significantly.
| pseudoshikhar wrote:
| damn, I've been waiting for something like this for a long time.
| chaz6 wrote:
| I am very happy that this exists, great job! Unfortunately there
| is one important feature missing for me. On Android I cannot
| change the storage location.
|
| Edit: I was mistaken, the option is not available while maps are
| downloading. It is perfect!
| dotluis wrote:
| Is there any way to disable the POIs on the map?
| itwillnotbeasy wrote:
| It has a cool feature on Android, when phone is locked, I only
| need to press the unlock button to see the map, phone doesn't ask
| for a password/fingerprint scan. This saves so much time when
| traveling on a bicycle because I don't like planning a detailed
| route, i just set a destination point, and ride in that
| direction, choosing the best scenic view. In that scenario, my
| phone mostly sits in my pocket, and I pull it out only when I get
| lost, but it saves so much time through the whole route.
|
| If I want to switch to another app, Android asks me to
| authenticate, I don't know why google maps doesn't work the same
| way.
| curionymous wrote:
| I've used organicmaps for a while. but it needs a way to sync
| bookmarks. I bookmark places like a good restaurant, parking
| places, fuel stations, stores, roadside attractions to places
| I've been to. But without a cloud sync(preferably self-hosted
| nextcloud), I always fear I'm going to lose my bookmarks. There
| was another open-source maps.me fork before Organic maps and it
| lost maps/bookmarks with certain updates and became abandoned.[1]
|
| With file access limitation with recent android versions, I can't
| just use foldersync or syncthing on the bookmarks.
|
| [1]https://gitlab.com/axet/omim/-/issues/168
| ryukoposting wrote:
| Wow, I had no idea this existed 10 minutes ago, and I'm already
| thinking about deleting my AllTrails account. I'm driving about 6
| hours tonight and I think I'm going to give this thing a try.
|
| The UI is tremendous. Takes a while for it to make longer routes,
| but that could be my old phone's fault. One thing I don't like -
| it doesn't seem to be possible to save a route. You can save
| places, but not routes. Especially for hiking trips that have
| very particular manually-selected paths and/or lots of
| destinations, it would be nice to be able to save a route to a
| list, tap it, and have that route show up immediately instead of
| waiting for it to calculate.
| lost_tourist wrote:
| before doing anything drastic, just add a 30 day calendar
| reminder to remove the account after you've used this new app
| for a while. That's how I always handle things that are hard to
| reverse.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I love this thing, it's been tremendously useful in all kinds of
| situations, especially when offline.
| onetimeacc wrote:
| I love organic maps. It's my daily driver for navigation,
| especially in rural areas where GoogleMaps just sucks.
|
| I wish they added warnings for speed limits though. They do this
| only when there is a speed camera, but not generally. The PR is
| here: https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/pull/5233
| biodranik wrote:
| This feature is planned, please check our Github and other
| 1800+ features/issues :)
| Vinnl wrote:
| I think that would be
| https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/952.
| bertil wrote:
| I genuinely want to know what lead Google to not support Maps
| offline properly. It's truly staggering how, even when I do
| everything I can to say: save this journey, don't delete the map
| around it, don't delete the journey, just passively show me where
| I am next to it, it will gleefully delete everything.
|
| I once met their lead designer (who had just changed to work at
| another FAANG) and... boy was that _not_ a conversation I wanted
| to have. You know how designers like to say that users are always
| right? Well, not that guy. Literally 45 minutes of monologue,
| none of it about connectivity, being lost or unfamiliar
| languages. Just how people were wrong, wrong reviews wrong and
| how they couldn't read information properly unless they had 'a
| mission'. "What if the mission is finding their way in a new city
| where they don't have connection?" Didn't care. Not a real
| mission.
|
| A little later, he was told that the company he was now working
| for throttled wifi every Wednesday to encourage empathy. That was
| not a conversation he wanted to have.
| ezfe wrote:
| Apple Maps in iOS 17 has good offline maps support:
|
| - Full searching and POI details including hours, etc. - Full
| routing (no traffic of course, but possibly expected traffic?
| I'm not sure) - Freeform region selection, overlapping regions,
| etc.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _I genuinely want to know what lead Google to not support Maps
| offline properly._
|
| Money. Same reason they won't show you your location on a map
| unless you turn on location tracking, even though there's a
| perfectly good GPS in the phone.
|
| _You know how designers like to say that users are always
| right? Well, not that guy._
|
| I have had similar conversations with leads from Google News &
| Scholar. My impression is that when those people go to a
| conference or whatever they're they're to promote the company's
| outlook, not to listen. In the case of the news guy he when I
| pointed out some logical flaws in his argument (about why they
| didn't offer a way of sorting by date), he just switched to
| nodding while staring off into space and refusing to make eye
| contact, so he could give the appearance of listening without
| engaging further.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| Off-topic, but I find it hard to believe that throttling Wifi
| could possibly encourage empathy. That sounds so petty to me,
| it's like removing printer toner and hoping that the office
| banter about the dysfunctional printer may somehow forge better
| team-spirit. Or, putting the stapler away so people go looking
| for it...
| Nition wrote:
| I think they probably mean empathy for users on slow Internet
| connections rather than for fellow staff. Basically making
| you test your software on a slow connection once a week.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| While it's a good initiative, I don't think it works as
| this kind of throttling almost never simulates a real
| spotty and crap connection.
| ryandrake wrote:
| More tech companies should do this, and they should do
| more of it. On Empathy Days, iOS/Android software
| engineers should have to "live on" 6 year old phones, and
| desktop software developers should have to use laptops
| with 8GB RAM and 15" screens as their daily drivers. And
| Internet throttling should both reduce bandwidth and
| introduce random latencies and connection drops.
|
| Too many developers just assume their users are on this
| year's phones and supercomputer specced desktops with
| three 4K 27 inch monitors and write their software to
| perform well on those systems.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Man I feel so called out haha. I use a laptop with 8GB
| RAM and 15" as my daily. Also have a crap old smartphone.
|
| I think I need to change my ways
| brandall10 wrote:
| I'd gather its empathy for the customers with those
| constraints, as in, if the product you're building is having
| issues in this context then you may rethink perf of this or
| that feature.
| jesterson wrote:
| > I genuinely want to know what lead Google to not support Maps
| offline properly
|
| Very simple answer - they want to know everything you do
| online. As Google Maps is provided for free, you are the
| product. Convenience of the product (you) is not a priority
| whatsoever.
|
| > designers like to say that users are always right?
|
| It's just smoke and mirrors. Unfortunately IT breeds a number
| of people who have ignorant position they have the right to
| tell people how they should interact, conveniently forgetting
| the service will be used by all groups of people, not just IT
| geeks.
| aikinai wrote:
| This lowbrow criticism is really old. Google doesn't do much
| offline for the same reason almost no one does offline
| anymore; it's hard and the number of users affected is very
| small.
|
| Do you honestly think Google is looking at the number of maps
| users that go offline and saying, "We absolutely need their
| data!" rather than "Eh, not worth rearchitecting everything
| for."
|
| Not to mention they have done a lot for it even if it's not
| perfect. There's a dedicated team doing their best with it.
| It's just not worth giving a lot of attention and resources.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| This post is about an offline maps app which is maintained
| by volunteers, so it can't be that hard for the likes of
| Google.
| aikinai wrote:
| Google could certainly design a basic offline mapping
| app. They even have offline mapping in their app today.
|
| I'm actually not even sure what the complaint is actually
| about since I don't use offline myself, but I know that
| Google Maps is a massive app with tons of teams all
| working on a myriad of features in parallel and a huge
| dependency tree. So I'm not surprised at all if there are
| a bunch of features with online assumptions baked in.
| bb611 wrote:
| As an egregious google maps power user, these are the
| ones that bother me:
|
| 1. Offline maps don't actually download all the
| destinations in the mapped area
|
| 2. Google maps is bad at displaying densely packed
| businesses - this is an issue online as well
|
| 3. No offline bike or transit directions
|
| These are the 3 I checked immediately in organic maps,
| and all work significantly better there.
|
| I think your point is reasonable, but I'm also a very
| high income person who thinks nothing of buying data
| plans when traveling internationally and has an unlimited
| plan in the US. I routinely meet people while traveling
| who have the opposite set of financial priorities,
| organic maps is probably a great choice for them.
| brianpan wrote:
| Supporting offline would take design, effort, and
| testing.
|
| Anything can be done. But you can't do everything.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| Sure but Google could surely do this.
| jaakl wrote:
| Offline maps in Google have been blocked also by map data
| license terms - their providers just dont want to allow
| this, as they want to sell it as premium thing.
| kevincox wrote:
| It isn't very difficult to log the events to disk and send
| them later. In fact I would be shocked if they didn't do this
| already. Offline support wouldn't noticeably affect the data
| they receive. In fact it may help it if people are using the
| app more and the event delivery is more reliable.
|
| One real reason could be ads. Unless they are pre-loading ads
| for offline display than offline browsing will not produce
| revenue.
| tuukkah wrote:
| Realtime data is much more valuable than delayed data.
| sdeframond wrote:
| > I genuinely want to know what lead Google to not support Maps
| offline properly.
|
| Perhaps Google's mapping business isn't so much showing maps
| but helping local businesses get found, rated, reviewed...
| (restaurants,shops etc).
| ericfr11 wrote:
| I would have to agree with the designer's I find it easy to
| download a map. I've done it in every single country I went to.
| But I have seen family members struggling because they didn't
| want to take the time to know how to do it (it could be a bad
| design but also laziness of users...)
| xrikcus wrote:
| Once you download it does anything actually work beyond
| viewing? Can you search? Can you ask for directions? I do
| download maps, and pay for roaming data, but I still would
| never completely rely on it in a new place because I'm bound
| to be out of network coverage at some point.
| tazjin wrote:
| I had a bizarre encounter when working there, also Maps
| related. I lived in the UK at the time and my post code just
| didn't exist in Google Maps. I did some digging, and found out
| that in fact no post codes in the UK had been added in quite
| some time.
|
| Eventually I found out why: There was some lead dev on Maps,
| who refused to allow new imports of UK post code data because
| he thought they were "wrong". They were seeing data with
| multiple post codes for the same building!
|
| For the record: This is valid in the UK, as there's a maximum
| number of households per post code or something like that.
|
| Not sure how that ended eventually, left a few years ago, but I
| just checked and those post codes now exist.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I think this is actually a really perfect demonstration of
| why you often shouldn't attribute things to malice which can
| be explained by incompetence.
|
| This is on my mind a lot when I see speculation about why
| google (or other large organizations) does various things.
| It's just a bunch of human beings with egos and biases and
| blind spots and imperfect information. Mistakes are made.
| pydry wrote:
| I'll bet he can reverse a binary tree blindfolded though.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| But that is malice. They're specifically fucking over an
| entire country because they believe that post codes
| shouldn't be that way. They know otherwise.
| sanderjd wrote:
| No, it isn't. It's ignorance. It's incompetent to be
| ignorant of something that matters to doing a good job.
| It's possible to remain ignorant about something despite
| being told the correct information. (This is the
| difference between "ignorant" and "unaware".)
|
| Malice requires intent to do wrong, either for some
| selfish benefit or just to be cruel. That's not what's
| going on in this story, it's "just" ignorance.
| red_admiral wrote:
| The UK system is that the pair ("number", postcode) must be
| unique for any postal address; "number" is often a house
| number but things like "1A" or even names like "Whitehall"
| are allowed too.
|
| Further, as mentioned, there is a limited amount of "number"
| that can be associated with any one postcode (currently 100
| for new codes, but some legacy postcodes may have more), so
| for a long enough street, the postcode will change at some
| point - for example Chepstow Road, Newport changes from
| NP182LU to NP182LX at some point. If you have more addresses
| in a single building than the 100 limit, then the postcode
| indeed changes within the building.
|
| This is quite useful as the standard way of entering a
| shipping address is you type your postcode, and then select
| the exact address from a dropdown, and there's a natural
| limit on how long you have to scroll to find yours.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Sounds like a great system! US "zip codes" are pretty
| useless by comparison.
| bertil wrote:
| I've had to deal with postcodes in too many countries
| (logistic company), and the UK system is by far the best:
| dense, standard, somewhat intuitive, code-correcting,
| specific enough (several dozen households) that if you
| have a delivery, the recipient knows where the van is
| standing angrily. Documentation is excellent (relative to
| the UK government's digital service already very high
| standards), and you have APIs for all sorts of relevant
| conversions.
|
| The only issues are what OC mentioned: some people don't
| know a large building (50+ flats) can have several codes,
| and they are weekly updates because... ::magic dust::
| construction!
|
| The worst? Dubai: three inconsistent systems of varying
| length without any sense, standard, or redeeming
| features. The city road network is apparently even worse,
| so I guess those things work hand in hand?
|
| The funniest? One person once joked that people in
| Ireland were not using postcodes, just the name of the
| nearby pub, which can get confusing as they often have
| the same name, so you also have to say the name of the
| _second_ nearest pub...
|
| I thought was funny, but I wasn't sure that was a joke.
| Apparently, that was still true at the time? I saw a lot
| of discussion about "Introducing PostCodes in Ireland"
| and avoided those meetings so as not to sound clueless.
| We used Google Maps for a while during the transition.
| CMOB wrote:
| I mean it's funny, but I don't know if I'd call it true.
| It was more that if you didn't know an address you could
| bet that the pub would help direct. (Probably wouldn't
| work anymore because all the rural pubs are closing)
|
| Theres a difference between a system and embodied
| knowledge. I did a lot of work with systems which used
| Irish addresses early in my career.
|
| "An Post", pre-eircode operated off a traditional
| hierarchical address system. Where there were "Counties"
| a real political boundary, "Post towns" which were
| usually big market towns but the location of a major
| sorting office, "Localities" (sometimes more than one)
| which were geographically undefined (we tried) at worst
| areas and some combination of street and buildings. The
| hierarchy was not strictly defined, it was a bit
| hungover.
|
| My own address can be a combination of: <House number>
| <Street>, <Post town> <House number> <Street>,
| <Locality>+, <Post town>
|
| Most of these were optional. The "Pub" thing is a
| testament to how awesome the staff at An Post are at just
| getting a letter to a door. If you needed to send a
| letter to "Mary O'Shea" who you knew lived in Kerry and
| near "Paudie O'Sheas pub" you can bet that if you put
| "Mary O'Shea, Near Paudie O'Shea's Pub, Kerry" you can
| bet the letter would get to Kerry, someone in Kerry would
| know Paudie O'Sheas is in Ventry, Send it on to Dingle
| and he postie doing the rounds in Ventry would be like
| "Ah right, thats for Mary" and the only catch being:
| about 60% of the Female population of West Kerry are
| probably called some combination of "Mary" and "O'Shea".
|
| I'd imagine logistics companies were dancing for joy with
| every house having a unique post-code.
| blendergeek wrote:
| The US ZIP+4 code (five digit zip code with four digit
| extension) does this. But nobody uses the ZIP+4 it seems.
| mdaniel wrote:
| That's a bit chicken and egg; I have my ZIP+4 in
| 1Password _(mostly so I don 't forget what it is)_ but
| that also means it autocompletes the full ZIP+4 into form
| fields. I'd wager it's easily 90% of the forms that flag
| the field as "invalid," forcing me to delete the dash and
| 4 numbers. And I'm not talking about the setups where
| there is a separate textbox for the +4, I mean the inputs
| are always "but a zipcode is 5 digits hurr"
|
| So, with users being actively taught not to provide it,
| of course no (reasonable? :-D) person is going to know it
| and thus provide it to make it available for use
| Symbiote wrote:
| As an example, with a postcode "N1C 4DN" we soon learn
| that means North London (the N), the innermost district
| (the 1) and the innermost bit of that (the C). Stick it
| in https://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode and we have
| 5 addresses to choose from.
|
| There are usually 10 to 30 -- if you work in a large
| office it probably has a postcode just for that office,
| for houses you share with 20-30 or so others. (Very large
| businesses might have separate postcodes for individual
| departments, e.g. an electric utility probably has one
| for handling bills, and another for everything else.)
|
| "What's the postcode please?"
|
| "N1C 4DN"
|
| "And the number?"
|
| "12"
|
| Now they have the whole address. Satnav can take "N1C
| 4DN" and be very close:
| https://goo.gl/maps/sGR5XXhmUsLmD2UBA (not the best
| polygon, should be Handyside Street.)
| stavros wrote:
| > we have 5 addresses to choose from
|
| (8 if you scroll down)
| tome wrote:
| > with a postcode "N1C 4DN" we soon learn that means
| North London (the N), the innermost district (the 1)
|
| N1 is innermost, yes, but N2 onwards are sorted
| alphabetically, and N1C isn't really more "inner" than
| N1.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_postal_district
| tazjin wrote:
| So a thing that increments "number" is probably also
| "flat", which probably leads to what I understood as
| "household" in a large building.
| red_admiral wrote:
| "Flat" increments "number" if and only if it has a
| separate post box. If you have several flats behind the
| same box in a common front door - a common set-up in the
| UK when a larger house has been converted into several
| flats - then as far as the postcode system is concerned,
| those flats don't exist; since people still write "Flat
| 3, 11 Wisteria Drive ..." on letters this creates various
| issues with denormalised addresses.
| tazjin wrote:
| How much influence does a building owner/developer have
| over this assignment? Can they explicitly _request_
| multiple post codes for a building?
| xg15 wrote:
| Thank you for that insight. That explains a _lot_ of the
| bizarre design decisions and shortcomings in the maps UI that
| have frequently annoyed me.
| methou wrote:
| This is also valid in Japan, there's huge build with a mall,
| a hotel and residences called sunshine city in Tokyo, every
| few floors has it's own zip code!
|
| https://www.post.japanpost.jp/cgi-
| zip/zipcode.php?pref=13&ci...
|
| Search for 170-0013 for the beginning of the madness. At
| least google accepted this one.
| dspillett wrote:
| It is quite valid for one property to have multiple street
| addresses and therefore postcodes. It could genuinely have
| frontage in two streets, or it could be the result of joining
| two properties in the same street that originally had
| different postcodes - many long streets have multiple
| postcodes along their length1.
|
| ---
|
| [1] For example even a not-very-long street I used to live
| on, Alma Terrace in York, has three postcodes: YO10 4DJ on
| one side of most of it, YO10 4DL on the other side of that,
| and YO10 4DQ for both sides of the part between that and
| Fulford Road. I suspect from the street layout that the third
| code is due to that part of the road being added later, or
| originally not having anything on it needing a postcode.
| tazjin wrote:
| In London what ends up happening is that many buildings are
| so large (e.g. St. George's Wharf[0]) that the household
| count restriction ends up with multiple codes being
| allocated.
|
| [0]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/St
| ._Geor...
| snappysnap wrote:
| And it's also valid for UK postcodes to be reused, e.g.
| following demolition of the original buildings, e.g. tower
| blocks, the postcode may be deactivated for a period of
| time, then reactivated when new buildings elsewhere need a
| new postcode.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Any info on how could I have my street address corrected on
| Maps?
|
| They are using a random street name that no one else uses and
| no matter how many times I report it, they don't change it.
| It also doesn't matter that I'm a local guide with many, many
| edits.
| tazjin wrote:
| If you work there you can maybe reach someone, but at this
| point the company is so large that even that doesn't help
| anymore in many cases ;)
| gniv wrote:
| You can ask a few friends to report it as well. I suspect
| Google looks at how many reports are made for a feature.
| mabbo wrote:
| Google maps is a real-time social network that you don't
| realize you are a part of.
|
| "This store is busiest at 6pm". "This area is less busy than
| usual". "There's a 5 minute delay ahead, but you're still on
| the fastest route".
|
| All of that comes from data generated by online users. An
| offline user isn't providing value to Google, so why would they
| invest in those users?
| lionkor wrote:
| This will be mega off-topic, but:
|
| > throttled wifi every Wednesday to encourage empathy
|
| As much as slow internet hampered my productivity, I used to
| have 15 mbit/s download speed until very recently (Germany is
| behind developing countries, of course, in terms of anything
| internet), it was good to experience.
|
| Before that, when I was living in the countryside, I had 500
| KB/s.
|
| I know exactly how painful downloading 10, 100, 1000MB is, and
| I try to make everything I do load on GPRS with reasonable
| speed. My website, much like HN, loads on a 64 kbit/s mobile
| internet "connection".
|
| Of course vodafone's website to recharge prepaid phones takes
| 20+ minutes (yes) to load on 64 kbit/s internet.
| Maxion wrote:
| Am I just old if I as a developer think that 10mbit/s is
| plenty enough? I could probably do with 1mbit/s and still be
| about as productive as I am now.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Low speed is ok, stability matters more imho.
|
| There are old people in my village complaining that the 200
| Mbps connection is "horrific" because there is something
| wrong with their equipment/setup so it cuts out often and
| leads to buffering on their IPTV.
| lionkor wrote:
| It is plenty, until you have to work with things like
| docker a lot, at which point downloading 1000 packages is
| normal.
|
| Or if you have Steam, and every game wants to push 10-60 GB
| (!) updates every few weeks - this becomes a "leave the pc
| on for a few nights" ordeal. With 100 mbit/s, you give it
| 50mbit/s and an hour and everything is updated - all while
| you can keep working because you still have 50 mbit/s left.
|
| Or if you have to quickly set up a Windows VM or other VM -
| not only is the download the longest process of setting it
| up, it will also happily update forever and hog the
| network.
|
| Now assume you have 2-3 devices in the network, all doing
| backups, downloads, auto updates, and your 10-15 mbit/s
| connection is gone.
|
| Good luck doing a backup, because residential 15 mbit/s
| download means 1.5mbit/s upload - you cant back up
| anything. Or stream your desktop. Or upload images in any
| reasonable amount of time.
| palata wrote:
| Unless your coworkers find it it absolutely normal to
| design a system that needs pulling half of the Internet for
| every build, because they do have a gigabit connection.
|
| Developers should use old hardware and slow connections,
| they would make much better apps.
| dieortin wrote:
| As someone working in a company using old hardware and
| slow connections, hard disagree.
| palata wrote:
| I would guess it's probably because the rest of the
| industry is happily wasting hardware and bandwidth
| because _they_ can afford it.
|
| If the whole industry had been stuck on hardware and
| bandwidth from 10 years ago, that most likely wouldn't be
| a problem.
| dspillett wrote:
| You are not alone. The last time a home internet upgrade
| felt really significant to me was going from 2mbit to
| 8mbit. Everything else has been luxury. Though I'll be
| signing up for ~160 or ~1000 as soon as the new cables the
| street was recently dug up to put in place are connected, I
| like my luxuries!
|
| I do still notice upstream improvements though. Both those
| old 2mbit and 8mbit connections were 256kbit up, and I
| currently have "up to 17mbit" which is [quick check of
| router logs] ~11mbit ATM - that can be limiting for backups
| or when wanting to share video or HQ photos with a large
| group. So the FTTP upgrade _might_ be justifiable as more
| than pure luxury.
| lionkor wrote:
| DSL can usually do up to 250 mbit/s, no?
| janc_ wrote:
| The engineers who invented DSL did Gbit/s speeds in the
| early 2000s. Unfortunately, real life 50 year old copper
| pairs aren't as fast as those in their lab...
| dspillett wrote:
| The standard FTTC options in the UK are nominally 40/10
| and 80/20. I have the latter, which in reality works out
| as "up to 76mbit down, up to 17mbit up". My router is
| currently synced at 56/11. Where G.FAST is available IIRC
| that is up to 250down/36up.
| anabab wrote:
| you get used to high speed. I have recently had to
| download a 3Gb file on a 100mbit wifi. god, it took 5
| minutes! that would take <1min on my 1gbit at home.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| You need ~25Mbps to stream 4k content.
| BizarreByte wrote:
| I rarely steam more than 720p. Seems pointless for me
| personally, especially given I don't like wearing my
| glasses to watch TV.
| bertil wrote:
| It's pretty much right on the money actually...
|
| Our users in less digitally connected countries were insanely
| patient. The main problem was less the time than _the cost_ ,
| actually. The app required updates that were enormous. The
| cost to download them using the most common pay-as-you-go
| services in India represented _a month_ of the local salary
| for day laborers... That information got hammered until
| developers learned to be more parsimonious.
|
| I never heard anyone suggest that FAANG engineers had to
| forgo their monthly wage to download the test version of the
| app, but that probably would have triggered their empathy a
| little too much.
| Tee3993 wrote:
| Google Maps has pretty good support for offline maps. Select
| rectangular area, download, it expires after year. I am in
| Europe, maybe you have different copyright on data?
| bertil wrote:
| The support got better: downloading is good. It should be
| usable now, but there are basic things that are not
| supported, like searching for something or finding a path. I
| typically don't need to search: I know where for things are,
| but there aren't other ways to mark something on the map:
| favorites and stars don't appear consistently, and pointing
| at things is completely useless when logged-in and disabled
| when off-line. So much of it feels like it was never tested.
|
| My main issue is that there should be a way to say, "Keep
| this journey on screen until I explicitly delete it, with a
| confirmation model." I'm assuming that's what "Pin it" is
| meant to do, but in practice, I occasionally see the path I
| last searched when I reopen my phone and map; I _never_ see a
| pinned journey again if anything happens: rotate the phone, a
| quick switch to another app, the screen goes dark...
| palata wrote:
| If you find it "pretty good", I guess you have never tried an
| OpenStreetMap-based app like Organic Maps. I also like OSMAnd
| a lot (I use both for different use-cases).
| aix1 wrote:
| > I also like OSMAnd a lot (I use both for different use-
| cases).
|
| This is the first come I come across Organic Maps but I do
| use OSMAnd. I'm wondering how the two compare and would
| love to hear more about the use cases you have for each of
| them.
| ihatehn wrote:
| I tell people OsmAnd is a swiss army knife that does
| everything for power users (the cyclists or hikers or
| drivers who find it really important to do a few specific
| things that most apps can't do) whereas Organic Maps is
| the app I actually recommend to family and friends as
| soon as I know that there's decent address coverage in
| their area (it's OSM only, so if an address POI doesn't
| exist in OSM it isn't searchable in OM. But volunteers
| and everyday users are adding new addresses all the
| time.)
| rakoo wrote:
| I use organic maps most of the time but osmand has much
| better support for hiking trails: you can see them (not
| just a path, but the name of the route, with a different
| color to separate it), I can tell the app to prefer it
| when building an itinerary, and the altitude info is way
| more detailed. You can spot the exact altitude and
| gradient at any spot. You can add a second map as an
| overlay, and I typically use a contour maps to quickly
| see where the peaks are, where the route will be flat,
| etc...
|
| OSMand is slightly too powerful for everyday use, organic
| maps is the perfect good-enough, less-is-better example.
| pmontra wrote:
| I dowloaded Organic Maps ten minutes ago so take my
| comparison with a grain of salt. I could have missed some
| features in OM. Here we go:
|
| Moving the map is much faster in OM than in OSMAnd. I
| hope that OSMAnd study the code of OM.
|
| The visualization in OM is much nicer. Another thing to
| copy.
|
| OM is extremely better at displaying POIs and their
| information. Again, copy it.
|
| Despite the claims it seems that OM does not show walking
| and cycling routes. OSMAnd shows them with their name,
| that matches the one you see on signposts along the
| routes.
|
| OM does not seem to have a way to record a route and save
| it as gpx. OSMAnd does that.
|
| OM does not seem to have a way to place markers on the
| map. I use them to plan new routes for biking, then I
| follow the markers. Navigation would bring me where it
| wants to go through, not where I want to.
|
| OM is less than half the size of OSMAnd but it's still 58
| MB. I wonder why these mapping apps must be so large.
|
| Having to dowload all the maps again is very bad. I wish
| there is a way to share them among apps but I think that
| Android makes it impossible, unless we want to use a
| folder on an external storage (SD card) or root the phone
| or whatever.
|
| I'll keep using OSMAnd because of recording, markers and
| routes. However I might recommend OM to friends that only
| need a replacement for Google Maps.
| ygra wrote:
| I find the UI in Organic Maps to be much nicer. OSMAnd
| seems to have a larger feature set and extensions and
| stuff you may or may not need/want/require. Navigation
| seem to add an announcement in OSMAnd whenever the OSM
| object for a road changes (seemingly), which leads to a
| number of totally unnecessary >>Continue straight on road
| X<<.
|
| Those were a few differences I noticed.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| With Organic Maps (and Osmand and mapy.cz) I am able to
| download entire Poland, Belgium, Czech Republic and Slovakia.
| This was useful in my recent trips and can download more if
| needed.
|
| I definitely can not do this with Google Maps.
| imp0cat wrote:
| Another vote for mapy.cz and their off-line capabilities.
|
| Too bad their navigation does not care about traffic
| outside of Czechia. You can still use them for directions
| in a car, but no traffic jam avoidance.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| You can also type a city name. Then type 'okmaps' and press
| ok. Then, it will bring up the download offline map screen
| for the whole area.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| The support is terrible. You can only choose a rectangle with
| the same proportions as your screen and the allowed size is
| too small for a trip in lots of areas of the US. Like a lot
| of software there are restrictions that make no sense and are
| extremely user unfriendly.
| wombat-man wrote:
| I think now you can search for a city or something and
| download the offline map
| rqtwteye wrote:
| You can. But you can't download a large region like a
| whole state which makes long road trips a pain.
|
| Apple Maps is even worse because it has no offline mode
| at all.
| wombat-man wrote:
| Idk when you tried it last, but it works for me on the
| iOS app. If you search for something that is a 'region'
| there should be a download offline map option.
|
| In any case, before traveling I try to download the
| offline maps in HERE wego too.
| shaftway wrote:
| I've generally been really impressed with it. Would it be
| nice if I could pick a bigger area? Yeah. Would it be
| nice if I could choose the dimensions of my rectangle, or
| a non-rectangular shape like a state? Yeah.
|
| But the fact that I can download a map that has all of
| New York City, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Delaware, and
| sizable chunks of 4 other states in that area for 890 MB
| is pretty awesome. Especially when it comes with full
| driving directions, business information including hours
| and the search capabilities? And it'll keep it up to date
| periodically? I'll take that win.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| There's no walking directions. But they can definitely do
| it. I was able to start a walking route on a hiking trail
| in Rocky Mountain National Park at 12k feet. Then switch
| into airplane mode and see exactly how far we had left.
|
| All of that impossible if I didn't have signal to start
| the walking route.
| blendergeek wrote:
| Apple introduced offline support to maps in the most
| recent iOS update (I wanna say 17).
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Probably the same reason why they are showing hotels in the
| city I lived all my life, and have my home address set.
|
| It's mindblowing how they don't set meaningful defaults with
| all that mountain of data they have.
| dzogchen wrote:
| Organic Maps is the best for biking and walking, Google Maps has
| left me hanging so many times there.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| It depends on the area of course, but many hiking routes are
| indeed kept meticulously up to date in OpenStreetMap (and thus
| OrganicMaps). Sometimes even by the regional maintainer of
| those paths (like in Northern Italy).
|
| (That said, anyone hiking in the wild should always consider a
| paper map in addition to a digital one. Especially in
| mountainous terrain.)
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| Just a reminder: Apple will (finally!) update Maps in iOS 17 with
| an offline mode.
|
| https://9to5mac.com/2023/06/07/ios-17-offline-maps-in-apple-...
| raylad wrote:
| Organic Maps has the best walking directions.
|
| It's always picking interesting routes and has never led me
| astray.
|
| Also, if you go in a different direction, it automatically remaps
| from where you are at the moment to where you told it you wanted
| to go, unlike Google maps and most others that I've used.
| kensai wrote:
| I would use in Europe Komoot. So amazing for hiking and cycling.
| dbrgn wrote:
| Organic Maps is less powerful than OSMAnd (on Android), but it's
| much more straightforward and easy to use. It's the go-to app I
| recommend to all casual map users that want offline maps.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| I have tried OSMAnd a few times but it reminds me of the GIMP.
| Super powerful but incredibly convoluted UI
| hnben wrote:
| In your opinion what is the most important feature missing in
| organic maps (compared to OSMAnd)?
| Vinnl wrote:
| - I miss the ability to make Wikivoyage articles (and their
| associated POIs) available offline, which is really useful
| when travelling.
|
| - 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 :)
| Vinnl wrote:
| Oh also, OsmAnd's bicycle routes seem better
| (shorter/prettier routes)? Though I'm not even sure if
| Organic Maps's directions are for bicycle - the icon looks
| like a motorcycle, so they might be motorcycle directions.
| ynoxinul wrote:
| Importing GPX tracks and displaying it on the map. For my
| bike trips I do my planning in advance on a computer using
| brouter or openrouteservice, then import the created file
| into OSMAnd.
| biodranik wrote:
| GPX import was already implemented several months ago.
| ynoxinul wrote:
| Thank you, I found it! You have to click the star icon.
| fizwidget wrote:
| OrganicMaps supports this too though?
| ihatehn wrote:
| It's new, many people aren't aware.
| fransje26 wrote:
| We were writing about missing the same feature, for the
| same reason, at the same time. :'-)
| d4f0 wrote:
| Android Auto compatibility. Although I think it's a planned
| feature.
| raybb wrote:
| Yeah they're actively working on it. Though apple car play
| is out and works!
|
| If anyone knows android dev maybe you can checkout one of
| these smaller issues they're having.
|
| https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/4096
| onetimeacc wrote:
| track recording
| biodranik wrote:
| That's planned, now as we fixed some background location-
| related issues, nothing is blocking the track recording
| feature.
| fransje26 wrote:
| The ability to import a gpx track, for instance.
| biodranik wrote:
| GPX import was already implemented several months ago.
| vjerancrnjak wrote:
| Is gpx more powerful than kml? I see that in my lists I
| have circular paths and other things, so I must have
| imported it to OrganicMaps
| raybb wrote:
| For me the biggest missing feature is an easy way to sync
| bookmarks/saved places.
|
| 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
| Occivink wrote:
| It's less powerful, but also orders of magnitude less bloated
| and faster. OSMAnd has that quintessential kitchen-sink
| application feeling where features is the main concern and
| cohesive design an afterthought.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| They rewrote the renderer so OSMAnd speed is tolerable now.
| There's still no real replacement for it for more advanced
| use, only alternatives for certain use cases, like Organic
| Maps.
| palata wrote:
| > only alternatives for certain use cases
|
| Which is fine. I love both, I just use the one that fits
| the use-case at hand :-)
| sneak wrote:
| OSMAnd tracks users using a secret supercookie by default
| because the developer wants metrics. This is done without
| consent. The defensiveness of the developer with regards to
| such unethical tracking means that I will never use any
| software they ever release.
|
| https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/issues/15058
|
| Organic Maps does not, and should be supported instead.
| darkwater wrote:
| I took the time to go through the whole thread. _Your_ tone
| was pretty aggressive from the start and throughout the whole
| conversation. On the developer 's side yeah, they did
| minimize the issue at the beginning and then eventually
| modified how it works to increase privacy (rotating the UUID
| every 3 months, permitting to disable it anyway, clearly
| state it in the TOS etc). You are still downloading a tons of
| data from _their_ infra, and for free, I think it 's fair for
| them to have some sort of control to avoid abuses.
|
| 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.
| sneak wrote:
| > _You are still downloading a tons of data from their
| infra, and for free, I think it 's fair for them to have
| some sort of control to avoid abuses._
|
| 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.
| BlackLotus89 wrote:
| Where does it sound aggressive? I read the whole thread as
| well and was more astounded that harmless messages were
| marked as "abusive". Maybe if you read into it he sounds a
| little pissed > It seems unlikely that this is an accident.
|
| > 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 :)
| darkwater wrote:
| > 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 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.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| > was more astounded that harmless messages were marked
| as "abusive".
|
| 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.
| pulpfictional wrote:
| It's possible to disable it now in the app settings as the
| last message in the issue states. The app does enable it
| and telemetry by default without any warning which I think
| is wrong.
| baz00 wrote:
| Organic maps is also 100% free unlike OSMAnd.
| tangus wrote:
| OsmAnd+ installed from FDroid is 100% free AFAIK.
| biodranik wrote:
| What about iOS?
| teekert wrote:
| There is no free option for iOS.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| On F-Droid that is OsmAnd~, and it is indeed the free
| equivalent of OsmAnd+ from Google's app store.
| onetimeacc wrote:
| I can get OsmAnd~ from FDroid for free.
| Aachen wrote:
| You can also download map files from the server manually
| via, e.g., a web browser and get unlimited downloads that
| way. Don't need to pay for the standard functionality no
| matter where you downloaded the apk.
|
| 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).
| Aachen wrote:
| So how do they finance the servers from which you download
| the sizable map files, if there's no "pay to unlock unlimited
| downloads" like in OsmAnd?
| biodranik wrote:
| We pay it out of pocket or from users' donations.
| ihatehn wrote:
| Also consider that with Google you have to redownload your
| area of the map almost constantly since they're online
| maps, whereas it's only even possible to download a ~100mb
| map file from OrganicMaps monthly-ish when they release app
| updates and most people don't update. 100mb per user is
| nothing.
| balencpp wrote:
| "Our sponsors - Mythic Beasts ISP provides us two virtual
| servers with 400 TB/month of free bandwidth to help our
| users with maps downloads and updates."
|
| On their github README.md.
| hkt wrote:
| Mythic Beasts are absolutely great, on that note. One of
| the truly old school hosts in the UK. They pay their
| employees a share bonus, they're technically excellent,
| and their services are reliable and well priced. I've
| been using them for years (since Bytemark got eaten by
| IOMart) and love them.
| euroderf wrote:
| For offline use I've been quite happy with Maps.me (also OSM-
| based) but it sounds like Organic Maps is worth a try.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Organic Maps is a fork of Maps.me.
| emaro wrote:
| Of the original creators.
| biodranik wrote:
| We have created maps.me, open-sourced it, and then forked it
| to create Organic Maps.
| mpawelski wrote:
| Other people have already written that it's a fork of
| OrganicMaps by original authors.
|
| 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!
| palata wrote:
| In case the other messages are not completely clear:
|
| If you like Maps.me, you should move to Organic Maps. It's a
| fork, just strictly better.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| Just a heads up for context:
|
| "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.
| ..
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| maps.me got turned into a cryptocurrency scam. It is bad
| software now, hence the great fork of Organic Maps.
| CynicusRex wrote:
| And it soon will be again it seems
| https://organicmaps.app/donate/.
| onetimeacc wrote:
| Organic Maps comes from the original founders of Maps.me.
| euroderf wrote:
| OK, Organic Maps looks great. But how the heck do I transfer
| to it all my bookmarks from Maps.me ?
| ynoxinul wrote:
| https://organicmaps.app/news/2021-06-20/to-import-
| bookmarks-...
| itronitron wrote:
| Very cool, I was in a small metropolitan region recently and
| looking up directions to get places was absolutely killing my
| phone battery. Seems like the perfect use for this.
| _AntonM_ wrote:
| It's a great open-source with great team. If you want to
| improve/create some feature and have relevant experience - you
| can join.
| al_be_back wrote:
| looks great - the UI is simple/easy to use. I like the Compass
| Needle , it integrates well on the Map/tile as well as on Place
| Details popover (arrow top-right corner), so smart!
| fhchl wrote:
| I highly recommend "mapy.cz", another free, ad free, offline map
| app. I used it for a longer hike in Slovenia this summer and was
| amazed that it included all of the hiking trails we encountered
| in the area.
|
| We were hiking the Slovenian Mountain Trail. What a beauty!
| RivieraKid wrote:
| I wonder why this app isn't more popular. Basically, there's a
| map app which is _much_ better than Google Maps for a lot of
| use cases and very few people outside of Czechia use it. Is
| this a matter of marketing or is the app actually not that
| good?
| shpx wrote:
| I tried both this summer and Mapy.cz is definitely better for
| hiking. You don't have to zoom in as much to see the trails,
| hiking trails are marked more clearly with major trails marked
| in a nice thick red line and it has relief maps (though they
| can't be downloaded) and the peaks are more clearly labeled
| along with their height. Also when you zoom out you see a
| height map instead of just grey for land and blue for water.
|
| Overall it has a nicer attention to detail, for example dashed
| lines stay in one place as you zoom in/out instead of swimming
| around and I like the selection of downloaded areas better on
| Mapy.cz (it has flags next to country names and downloading a
| new area takes one tap instead of two or three) though it still
| feels flimsy.
| mmoskal wrote:
| I've been using it for a while and love it but intend to give
| the open source Organic maps a try. In particular sharing a way
| point in Mapy.cz seem to require an account with a Czech web
| portal.
|
| The reason Mapy.cz has all the trails is because they also use
| open street maps.
| walteweiss wrote:
| Do they have Linux apps as well? There are links to Flathub and
| the native (repository) app in the bottom of the page.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| In beta, yes.
| mpawelski wrote:
| There is, but the UX is not there yet. I think it was mostly
| used for for easier development and contributing to the project
| (you don't have to use mobile emulators to test map rendering),
| but apparently it's now officially in "beta" state, so maybe
| there is some hope for better UX improvement in future.
| grey_earthling wrote:
| Yes. But the UI is much clunkier than the excellent Android
| version.
| lionkor wrote:
| Not affiliated with them, but I did find their incredible
| selection of donation options very interesting:
|
| https://organicmaps.app/donate/
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| I really want a car navigation app that actually routes you
| correctly.
|
| Apps like Waze have fallen for the "AI" meme where they take a
| limited data set of people driving and extrapolate it.
|
| "It's 0.2 seconds quicker if you take a hard right across 4 lanes
| of traffic in rush hour" it thinks, so it takes you off the main
| road and onto a side street. You are then stuck there for 10
| minutes because you can't turn right across 4 lanes of traffic in
| rush hour.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Been looking for a different map app like this, Thank You.
|
| All the others have turned into commercials, weighed down my
| ad's.
| thom wrote:
| I bought this app when it was maps.me out of a weird prepper urge
| to have more offline stuff on my phone (shout out to Kiwix for
| offline Wikipedia, and modern phones for having terabytes of
| storage). But then I grew to absolutely love it, the coverage of
| walking routes is amazing, it works for car journeys in low
| coverage areas, and often has archaeological points of interest
| that I wouldn't see in other maps apps.
| pete_3c1f wrote:
| I'm a bit disappointed by OSM and their map rendering and always
| wondered why there isn't a good Nav app using MapBox, like
| StreetComplete does for example. This is wonderful, thanks HN!
| joshlemer wrote:
| This looks great! But it needs a bike route layer please!
| fredsmith219 wrote:
| I really want to like it, but I can only figure out how to
| navigate to the street level. It doesn't seem to route to a
| specific address.
| redauburn wrote:
| this is usually due to a lack of data in OpenStreetMap, if you
| go to https://osm.org and check one of the addresses, is it
| there?
|
| the good thing about OpenStreetMap is that if something is
| missing, you can add it in 1 minute :)
| pete_3c1f wrote:
| For my city this seems to work (Northern Germany)
| pSYoniK wrote:
| When I went full "no-google" on my smartphone I had to find a
| Google Maps alternative. Organic Maps filled the gap nicely and
| I've used it for personal navigation about 95% of the time since
| (2ish years now).
|
| The one thing that makes me pull up gmaps now is public transport
| routing in new cities where the information boards in
| bus/tram/metro stations doesnt help me figure out the routes.
|
| Also, for driving OM offers less hand-holding than GM so it took
| a while to get used to that, but it made me a better driver. I
| now use OM to get an idea of which way to go and thn rely on
| public signs to drive. It's been really amazing.
|
| OM also just wins hands down when I'm hiking and cycling. I've
| donatrd to the project each year but every once in a while I'm
| just so happy with itthat I feel bad for not being able to afford
| giving them more money.
| rus64 wrote:
| Fantastic app. Saw me through a 6 month backpacking trip in South
| East Asia.
| Borg3 wrote:
| Anyone know how to upload maps files into app? I do NOT want to
| download maps from their servers. Is it possible?
| threemux wrote:
| A fantastic app that has saved me a few times when I didn't have
| service. I know they're actively working on Android Auto support
| and I'm eagerly awaiting it!
| speg wrote:
| Been using this since last time it was posted on HN. Great little
| app that complements Apple Maps with offline mode and random
| stuff like water fountains. Only thing I would want them to
| improve is the color scheme when used with CarPlay, I don't know
| why but one of the day/night color schemes is almost impossible
| to read.
| reify wrote:
| Great app.
|
| Being a non google user I have used Organic maps for years. I
| have tried all the open source others but they dont compete for
| me.
|
| I install E/OS and lineage with Organic maps on all my phones and
| on all phones my family use.
|
| Its because I am old that I continually get confused with (route
| to) and (route from) selection when working out my destination
| route. I always have to do it twice.
|
| There is a selection of voices but I only like one voice. I
| generally dont need a voice to direct me, I only need to have a
| quick glimpse at the screen every now and then
|
| I walk/ramble a lot and use .gpx files in organic maps for
| rambling routes. I also download .gpx files from rambling
| websites when looking for new rambling routes.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| I've been looking something like this for many years. I installed
| it and it works as described. Old Androids and iPhones sitting in
| my drawer can now be permanently left in my old vehicles as an
| emergency backup GPS.
| marbartolome wrote:
| One thing I find missing from most alternative map apps is
| satellite view - I find it very useful for orienting myself and
| for "exploration".
|
| OSM supports microsoft satellite maps as a layer - any way to add
| it to organic maps too? I do like the simpler interface.
| sva_ wrote:
| Very fast and responsive compared to OsmAnd. Would really benefit
| from having Terrain maps for the mountains though.
| Madeyro wrote:
| How doeas rhis compare to mapy.cz?
| somewhat_drunk wrote:
| I've been using maps.me for a long time for offline map use while
| hiking and traveling off the grid, but recently switched to
| organic maps due to their superior interface. They both use
| openstreetmaps, which I have found to be outstanding. Even the
| most obscure trails and overgrown overlanding tracks are almost
| always on openstreetmaps. The file sizes are quite small, and
| being able to download specific areas, or states, or entire
| countries at a time is perfect. I prefer organic maps to
| alltrails, gaia maps, etc. It's become an indispensable tool for
| me while hiking and traveling.
| fizwidget wrote:
| I highly recommend OrganicMaps. It's leagues better than Google
| Maps for walking & hiking paths, thanks to being powered by
| OpenStreetMap data. Not to mention it's much lighter on resource
| usage.
| gerry_shaw wrote:
| o
| solarkraft wrote:
| I love Organic Maps! I just wish getting a route somewhere was a
| tad bit more intuitive; I keep being thrown off by the UX there.
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