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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 180° even when I was more than halfway near the other road. You'd think there's be sufficient data on a major university campus...
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
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.)
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...
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).
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.
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?
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.
Two days ago, thanks to cycle routing, I accidentally discovered a bike path (with some dirt even!) that ran parallel to a more busy car road that I have been riding for 35 years now. I had no idea it existed. Not all seems lost.
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 Pokémon Go style game for map updates could work? StreetComplete[0] is good, but the rewards are kind of boring.
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.
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.
Google fails pedestrians for the same reason it fails cyclists - it’s off road data is terrible & it’s not interested in fixing it.
In large cities, the roads are the only routes, so pedestrians can go OK with GMaps. Anywhere else & Google is prone to send you waltzing down a main road instead of the paths marked for actual pedestrian use in my experience. Same for cycling.
Thanks for trying, at least: You weren’t able to shift leviathan, but there’s no shame in that.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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!)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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....
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 ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for the info. I saw the OÜ and the registered address in Tallinn and thought it was based here. I can’t edit my original comment now unfortunately.
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.
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.
> I just tell it what countries (or states / regions) to download, and it downloads them.
This is exactly how Organic Maps works. You don't _have_ to zoom in on every region you plan on visiting to download it, you can just go into the menu and select a whole country or parts of it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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 Cancún 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.
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.
> 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?
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 :)
Meta: I did not post this ... I wonder if I managed to post to HN with my phone in my pocket? Rather interesting/scary thought, account breach would not seem like a reasonable thing either, though. :/ Weird.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Not always, I've had that exact situation and the flat number was in all systems. All houses in my postcode had several entries for flats and as far as I can tell, they all only had one box.
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.
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.
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.)
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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[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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
You may not like it, but GP has a point: you are probably making better applications than you would if you had access to very fast hardware and massive bandwidth. Because that tends to invite bloat and you are now more or less forced to deal with it yourself rather than to foist it off on the users. So whatever hardware they have they may well find it runs faster than it does on your machine. Rather than the opposite.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Yeah; ISPs should be forced to advertise their 0.1th percentile speeds (aggregated over 60 second windows) as their topline upload and download numbers.
I once had a 100+ mbit comcast connection that couldn’t reliably do 2mbit in the evenings.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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«.
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…
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.
Apple Maos was only relevant in the Bay Area when they launched. They had no meaningful details elsewhere; they didn’t have most street, told you the Louvre was open on Tuesdays and closed the weekend… “embarrassing” would not cover it.
They gradually increased the radius to bring hood and well documented in most of California, then some of the US coastline. I’m not sure where they are now, but I’d be surprised if they had basic things like public transport information, Nike lanes where I am. It’s never been a priority for Apple to serve an international audience.
Yes, I'm aware that Apple Maps was very different 11 years ago when it launched. While it still has a lesser POI database than Google, I would say in the areas where it has launched its in-house maps (Currently 20% by area, 11% by population - primarily lacking South America, Asia, and Africa)
You'll be happy to know that the Louvre is now marked as closed on Tuesdays, has a 94% positive rating, and its own 3D model
In France, Apple Maps has
- country-wide bike routing (accounts for the size of road, elevation, and prefers bike lanes where present)
- trains and busses (I can't say with certainty that every local bus will be present but the trains are)
- Paris will have detailed bus and bike lane markings directly on the map
I've attached a screenshot of public transit navigation in the greater Paris region:
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...)
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.
I would love to do that offline too. Just suggest any cafe every two hours of walking, or a gas station every two hours of driving and I’ll stop there and nowhere else.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Thanks for that! Editing the map on a bike can be a hassle though. I tried many options and came to conclusion that a 360° camera on the helmet and a physical Bluetooth button to take audio notes is the easiest possible setup.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 ;-)
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 ?
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.
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 (Städteregion), 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- Good contour lines and hill shading! I live in Switzerland and it's considerably harder to understand the terrain without these features.
- Configurable POIs. In Organic Maps I can show POIs for a few common categories, but many are missing (for example EV charging stations). And I can only show one type of POI at once on the map. In OSMand, I can show POIs for "drinking water, EV charging stations and public bathrooms" at the same time.
- Track recording and especially live tracking (OSMand has a very nice plugin for that, which works with services like Traccar).
- 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 :)
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.
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!
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.
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.
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 :)
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
If you enjoy Organic Maps, please consider supporting them financially: https://organicmaps.app/donate/. Supporting their serving infrastructure for numerous users is surely costly.
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).
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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
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.
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?).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It seems like a great app with a nice and fast UI, but it doesn't support public transport in my area, and seeing as my primary mode of transportation is public, it's not very useful to me.
I hope a future update might add that functionality (bus, train, and light rail schedules, routes, and real time arrival data)
If this app would support “streaming” maps it would be the best. I don’t need an entire region stored on my device just because I want to navigate to the closest supermarket while I’m there, and I also don’t want to wait for it to download 50MB of data on cellular just to navigate me a few streets.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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".
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!
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?
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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).
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.)
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!
* 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