It becomes trvial if one uses MapTiler or Mapbox with their own styles and overlays. And even self hosting has much improved since the days of raster tiles.
Self-hosting has improved but is still non-trivial. MapTiler and Mapbox are expensive.
We pay something like 35$ per month for four servers and the cheapest plan. That's peanuts compared to the infra we'd have to maintain ourselves and work we'd have to do to build the tiles or money to spend on a yearly tile subscription.
As a non-Czech but close to the border living German I can also recommend this app, my current favourite on iOS. Ahoj!
I've always wondered, why is there such a massive difference in popularity of this app in and outside of Czechia? Do you think it's mainly - lack of focus on non-Czech user experience (poor translations, map layer looking worse, ...), lack of marketing, something else?
I guess it's a combination, the lack of marketing for sure. Perhaps it's also the algorithms fault, if only a few people (considered from a worldwide view) download it, it's not shown to others looking for map apps (it's a very crowded space app wise).
Czechs are very outdoorsy people, they recommend this app to each other and so it's very popular there, but unfortunately the language barrier makes it harder spreading over borders. But these are all just wild guesses, who knows? Most people here in Germany use Komoot which gives away their maps for free on a regular basis, perhaps that's better marketing than "everything is free already"... :)
Or use a real map, and don't risk running out of batteries.
While I love paper maps (especially for hiking), digital maps are more convenient in cities. Also, I'm running out of pockets.
I'll pretty much always carry a paper map when hiking (and a compass) so I'm not dependent on batteries. But otherwise I'm pretty much OK with depending on digital--so long as I have the maps downloaded locally.
For hiking, check out https://en.mapy.cz/turisticka . While it focuses on central Europe, it regularly imports OSM data worldwide and I found the coverage pretty good.
The international version of this is Windy Maps - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.seznam.wind... . I highly recommend it - excellent for outdoors / hiking, tracking route etc. Also has a very polished UI.
with the downside of them being different services, thus you can't have the same account (saved places / routes) on both the web version and the mobile app. Am I wrong?
Too bad, maps.me was by far the best maps application for non city use, and ideal for hiking. Commendable initiative to bring it back in its original version! A few examples of why it was so great: Simple, non social bookmarks. As in: place a bookmark so you don't get lost while hiking, or when you find a nice spot you want to come back to later. Yep, a utility feature that doesn't somehow map to some stoopid busines…
Apple Maps has an option to bookmark any arbitrary point and create collections without creating an account or doing any sort of sharing.
OsmAnd fits description perfectly, you can place bookmarks, no account required, maps from OSM, offline maps which can be used even without internet connection.
OsmAnd is great and it's what I have on my phone, however it has a very un-intuitive UI and I often have to search for what feels ages to find a particular functionality. It might be because I don't need a map often or maybe I'm just an idiot :)
it has a very rich (or maybe feature laden) UI, that's certainly right. For questions and in case you happen to have a Telegram account, you can join Osmand's telegram channel with developers present!
The complete lack of any mention in the article of the long-running F-Droid fork effort is a bit disturbing if I'm honest. If the author had already reached out to @axet to offer to help / become a maintainer I'd imagine it would've been mentioned up top. I'm all for people creating multiple divergent open-source forks of things (diversity is great) but this doesn't seem to be divergent at all. The stated intent is t…
I should have mentioned it. There's now a mention at the end of the post:
I'm aware that one fork already exists, but it hasn't seen any updates for a year and the app doesn't seem to work at this time. The plan is to eventually integrate axel's work back into the app.
They also have a mobile app with downloadable maps. Look for Mapy.cz. I used it throughout whole Europe, and found it superior to even local apps (map content) and OSMAnd (map rendering).
Too bad, maps.me was by far the best maps application for non city use, and ideal for hiking. Commendable initiative to bring it back in its original version! A few examples of why it was so great: Simple, non social bookmarks. As in: place a bookmark so you don't get lost while hiking, or when you find a nice spot you want to come back to later. Yep, a utility feature that doesn't somehow map to some stoopid busines…
For hiking, check out https://en.mapy.cz/turisticka . While it focuses on central Europe, it regularly imports OSM data worldwide and I found the coverage pretty good.
Can't find it on F-droid, perhaps under a different name?