I use CoMaps, it works great. You get notified in the app to download the updated maps you selected every 2 weeks or so. Could be wildly different than that, just what I notice.
It's timing estimates are often 5-15 minutes off Apple Maps, which I find accurate, on ~two hour drives, but I imagine it depends on the traffic.
To improve OpenStreetMap, which CoMaps uses as the data source, I use StreetComplete[1]–it puts quests around your location which ask you questions, it's user-friendly. A thoughtful feature is that it lets you download data in a location on wifi, in case you didn't want to use cellular.
OpenStreetMap is like Wikipedia for mapping, anyone can contribute and improve the map, and StreetComplete is like Pokemon Go in the sense that you walk around and complete quests, except StreetComplete helps humanity, while Pokemon Go[2]....
I should check to see if I can notice my StreetComplete edits getting onto CoMaps. Might be hard because they're often about accessibility at crosswalks. I've seen quests asking the number of stairs in a staircase. Seriously, is there anything they don't collect?
> Despite being advertised as a community-driven project, key decisions, including financial management, partnerships (with Kayak, for instance), and the inclusion of proprietary components in the code were made by a small group of shareholders, often without input from the broader contributor community.
Tangential, but does anyone know if an app exists that that the video feed of your phone with the GPS loc and reads the signs from the road and compare it to OSM to update it if necessary?
Let’s be clear, in the end I use Waze for routing due to the traffic updates, but I see sometimes outdated speed limits and know OSM is one of its sources.
As great as Waze and Google Maps are for dynamic routing and responsive path-finding, I am using rental scooters now, and at this point I really need to design some bicycle routes with intention and purpose, and Maps simply refuses to save any "dragged" or "pinned" route in any meaningful way, and I suppose this is deliberate, because A.I. knows best, kids!
Even for driving the major apps are crappy about routes. I was on Foothills Parkway a while ago and wanted to keep Apple Maps running just as a "miles/time remaining" indicator. It can't do anything other than fastest route, with the option to ignore highways.
So unless you set a waypoint halfway between every single entry/exit, it will want to get off the parkway and take US 321 instead.
You can manually set up the route using a bunch of waypoints, but then it tells you the distance/time to next stop (which are arbitrary map points) instead of the distance to the end of the parkway, and you can't save the route so you'd better not touch it or want to look at anything else on the map once you have it set up.
Anything other than cars I believe google maps/waze is nearly unuseable for navigation, yah. I think they even removed "bike" pathing too. Public transport is pretty alright, but very inaccurate vs local app when they use the same data and routing is lacking intelligence sometimes.
This is what I use in my main GrapheneOS profile. I still have a dedicated profile for Google Maps though as I still have not been able to give up their greater datasets (i.e. traffic) in all cases.
Decent app though. I saw someone here mention proprietary code but I wouldn't worry about it, just install the F-Droid version. That's why I use F-Droid - to guarantee I don't get proprietary blobs.
Anyone here has been using coMaps and care to share their experience, especially in comparison to OrganicMaps?
My only complaint to OrganicMaps was the slowness to calculate a direction, which in part is certainly because the path is calculated locally instead of some cloud server but old garmin devices also weren't online and can calculate paths on far less powerful hardware. So I'm guessing there is room for improvement on that part.
Comaps and organic maps are very similar (they forked very recently). The only difference I can think of from the top of my mind is that organic maps is not fully open source (map files and generator are proprietary) and has some kayak sponsored suggestions/reviews
My biggest issue with OrganicMaps is that the search isn't very good. It really struggles to find my destination sometimes. That's the one thing I'm afraid Google will always be better at.
It doesn't take so much to enable a good server search on top of OSM + openaddresses.
Local search will always be slow and bad.
But server search doesn't need that much. It's just that OS initiatives are severely understaffed. OS apps that have a Photon instance are already rare to find. Let's not talk about having an Overpass instance...
What is very hard to reproduce is Google's place review data.
I was talking in deep in the weed OSM signal group and apparently its a split between the address data not being present, and OrganicMap / CoMap being bugged.
The way to triage is asking nominatim, the geocoder from OSM. If it can resolve : its on the client side, if not, its a data problem.
I'm just parroting here. Happy to learn more.
This is THE only issue I have with those OSM client ( I don't care about traffic )
For good (server) search, one needs many layers (Photon, Pelias with OpenAdresses, Overpass, in-house pmtiles, etc.) using many DBs, each needing server ressources or expensive paid APIs.
It's obvioulsy expensive in terms of ops + dev, but also just to host.
It can't scale with only 0,0001 % of users donating to the app.
Fortunately, NLNet's there to fund work, but it's still nonethless only a tenth of what would be needed.
Plus map applications and general search engines don't talk to each other... I don't know why, but it is so. Maybe because all the well-known search engines are closed-source ?
While I do use mapping programs for directions, I more often use them for a more accurate estimate of time and traffic density. I haven't looked very hard, but I haven't seen any OpenStreetMap data or equivalent that shows "Real" travel times and traffic density.
Depends a lot on where you live. My village is pretty fresh cuz I update it lol. My impression is that it's quite good in western Europe, might take a month in major US cities, and probably years old in most other places. I think Indonesia, Israel, and Japan are decent as well.
I used to use wikiloc, but most of the things that offer which were the most interesting things were by paying, so I think that it could be some opportunity for using these maps and vibe coding for creating something spectacular!
I use CoMaps, it works great. You get notified in the app to download the updated maps you selected every 2 weeks or so. Could be wildly different than that, just what I notice.
It's timing estimates are often 5-15 minutes off Apple Maps, which I find accurate, on ~two hour drives, but I imagine it depends on the traffic.
To improve OpenStreetMap, which CoMaps uses as the data source, I use StreetComplete[1]–it puts quests around your location which ask you questions, it's user-friendly. A thoughtful feature is that it lets you download data in a location on wifi, in case you didn't want to use cellular.
OpenStreetMap is like Wikipedia for mapping, anyone can contribute and improve the map, and StreetComplete is like Pokemon Go in the sense that you walk around and complete quests, except StreetComplete helps humanity, while Pokemon Go[2]....
I should check to see if I can notice my StreetComplete edits getting onto CoMaps. Might be hard because they're often about accessibility at crosswalks. I've seen quests asking the number of stairs in a staircase. Seriously, is there anything they don't collect?
[1] https://streetcomplete.app/
[2] Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48487029 26 days ago 317 comments
Relevant thread from yesterday's thread on the original project this was forked from
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48794575
https://itsfoss.com/news/organic-maps-fork-comaps/
> Despite being advertised as a community-driven project, key decisions, including financial management, partnerships (with Kayak, for instance), and the inclusion of proprietary components in the code were made by a small group of shareholders, often without input from the broader contributor community.
Nitpick: Organic Map is not original project. It's a fork of Maps.me.
Tangential, but does anyone know if an app exists that that the video feed of your phone with the GPS loc and reads the signs from the road and compare it to OSM to update it if necessary?
Let’s be clear, in the end I use Waze for routing due to the traffic updates, but I see sometimes outdated speed limits and know OSM is one of its sources.
Probably posted because of related recent discussion on OrganicMaps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48794446
Which was in turn probably posted because I mentioned it on the same day under another submission
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48793684
This is the only app that allows you to easily add stops and permanently save paths for biking. Honestly a life changer.
As great as Waze and Google Maps are for dynamic routing and responsive path-finding, I am using rental scooters now, and at this point I really need to design some bicycle routes with intention and purpose, and Maps simply refuses to save any "dragged" or "pinned" route in any meaningful way, and I suppose this is deliberate, because A.I. knows best, kids!
Even for driving the major apps are crappy about routes. I was on Foothills Parkway a while ago and wanted to keep Apple Maps running just as a "miles/time remaining" indicator. It can't do anything other than fastest route, with the option to ignore highways.
So unless you set a waypoint halfway between every single entry/exit, it will want to get off the parkway and take US 321 instead.
You can manually set up the route using a bunch of waypoints, but then it tells you the distance/time to next stop (which are arbitrary map points) instead of the distance to the end of the parkway, and you can't save the route so you'd better not touch it or want to look at anything else on the map once you have it set up.
Anything other than cars I believe google maps/waze is nearly unuseable for navigation, yah. I think they even removed "bike" pathing too. Public transport is pretty alright, but very inaccurate vs local app when they use the same data and routing is lacking intelligence sometimes.
Tried it today. Works fine for navigation. I am missing live traffic info. This is the one thing keeping me in Google Maps the past years.
Same. Apparently there's ongoing work to integrate live traffic: https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/projects/21877
This is what I use in my main GrapheneOS profile. I still have a dedicated profile for Google Maps though as I still have not been able to give up their greater datasets (i.e. traffic) in all cases.
Decent app though. I saw someone here mention proprietary code but I wouldn't worry about it, just install the F-Droid version. That's why I use F-Droid - to guarantee I don't get proprietary blobs.
Magic Earth is fairly decent at traffic and dynamic routing. Worth the small subscription fee to keep them going, in my opinion.
Anyone here has been using coMaps and care to share their experience, especially in comparison to OrganicMaps?
My only complaint to OrganicMaps was the slowness to calculate a direction, which in part is certainly because the path is calculated locally instead of some cloud server but old garmin devices also weren't online and can calculate paths on far less powerful hardware. So I'm guessing there is room for improvement on that part.
Comaps and organic maps are very similar (they forked very recently). The only difference I can think of from the top of my mind is that organic maps is not fully open source (map files and generator are proprietary) and has some kayak sponsored suggestions/reviews
> organic maps is not fully open source
It's a for-profit venture that accepts donations. That's sketchy. Management also seems to have prior Kremlin links. Which is sketchy.
My biggest issue with OrganicMaps is that the search isn't very good. It really struggles to find my destination sometimes. That's the one thing I'm afraid Google will always be better at.
It doesn't take so much to enable a good server search on top of OSM + openaddresses.
Local search will always be slow and bad.
But server search doesn't need that much. It's just that OS initiatives are severely understaffed. OS apps that have a Photon instance are already rare to find. Let's not talk about having an Overpass instance...
What is very hard to reproduce is Google's place review data.
It's golden to enable good search.
I have the same grippe.
I was talking in deep in the weed OSM signal group and apparently its a split between the address data not being present, and OrganicMap / CoMap being bugged.
The way to triage is asking nominatim, the geocoder from OSM. If it can resolve : its on the client side, if not, its a data problem.
I'm just parroting here. Happy to learn more.
This is THE only issue I have with those OSM client ( I don't care about traffic )
For good (server) search, one needs many layers (Photon, Pelias with OpenAdresses, Overpass, in-house pmtiles, etc.) using many DBs, each needing server ressources or expensive paid APIs.
It's obvioulsy expensive in terms of ops + dev, but also just to host.
It can't scale with only 0,0001 % of users donating to the app.
Fortunately, NLNet's there to fund work, but it's still nonethless only a tenth of what would be needed.
Plus map applications and general search engines don't talk to each other... I don't know why, but it is so. Maybe because all the well-known search engines are closed-source ?
While I do use mapping programs for directions, I more often use them for a more accurate estimate of time and traffic density. I haven't looked very hard, but I haven't seen any OpenStreetMap data or equivalent that shows "Real" travel times and traffic density.
Does anyone know how fresh the business data is? like opening, closure, phone, address of businesses?
i think one thing that's going for google is the network effects and what it's able to do.
Depends a lot on where you live. My village is pretty fresh cuz I update it lol. My impression is that it's quite good in western Europe, might take a month in major US cities, and probably years old in most other places. I think Indonesia, Israel, and Japan are decent as well.
Agreed, same here. But I don't update shops I don't support, such as tobacco, big chains.
You can take the initiative here.
It's as fresh as OSM databse : it depends.
Honestly in my experience is that in some parts of the world, or even particular neighborhoods even google maps is useless.
Even for routing google maps still fail with some one way streets directions.
I used to use wikiloc, but most of the things that offer which were the most interesting things were by paying, so I think that it could be some opportunity for using these maps and vibe coding for creating something spectacular!
Great for hiking and sharing path.
So nice to be able to do that locally and just send a .gpx file
Very good for trails
How does it compare to AllTrails in America?
How is this different from OpenStreetMaps? Or does it just use OSM as its underlying engine?
OSM is mostly a db with an old website for contributors, osm.org.
Its a renderer. It bakes live OSM data once very few weeks.
Since a few weeks CoMaps updates its map data roughly every week, so maps are a lot fresher now (also compared to Organic Maps :))
Tried today, I like the record track feature
Would love to see a Windows desktop version.