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Organic Maps

organicmaps.app

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Re: Organic Maps

#81

Post by exhilaration »

ygra wrote: post #22
bronson wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's one more for me: reliable store hours.

Both this and addresses is something that's really easy to survey with StreetComplete. Google has the benefit of having their own street-level imagery for house numbers and street names, Android devices for real-time traffic info, and the ability to simply scrape web pages for shop data including opening hours. but in places with a reasonable number of active mappers, OSM is so much richer and more up to date.

Google doesn't just scrape websites for store hours, they actually call to confirm them: https://support.google.com/business/answer/7690269?hl=en

Re: Organic Maps

#82

Post by mistercheph »

Using CoMaps gave me the "Oh shit!" moment for the first time that the convergence of enough high quality open map data and a reasonably designed maps app to consume it was finally happening. It's crazy to think about how much thankless work it took to the point where we have something that is in many ways at parity and even exceeding in some dimensions the user-hating map software.

There is still a super long way to go until it suits everyone's needs, but the end + even further is starting to come into sight.

Re: Organic Maps

#83

Post by TFNA »

api wrote: post #38

This belongs to a class of thing I've been predicting for a while: as non-volatile storage (not RAM but flash etc.) gets cheaper and cheaper, offline snapshots of quantities of information that used to require an Internet connection to practically access become possible. Example: a modern mid-high end phone can contain this, a complete copy of Wikipedia, and a small LLM capable of understanding natural language queri…

This sounds like an optimistic comment from a decade ago. Cost of storage has gone up recently, as a glance at data-hoarder fora will show. Phones have less storage capacity nowadays inasmuch as many manufacturers are removing SD card slots. The idea is that normies keep stuff in the cloud; self-storage of very large amounts of data is an edge case.

In my country, the typical laptop purcase from a retail chain is still 512GB or so, and moreover, few and fewer people own a laptop since it is becoming normal for a smartphone to be one's only computing device outside the workplace (even uni students are foregoing "real computers" now). Anything more than such a basic laptop is a premium product, and premium products cost premium prices.

Re: Organic Maps

#84

Post by einpoklum »

How does Organic Maps differ from Maps.Me (which it also mentions), or PocketEarth mentiond in comments here? Or CoMaps for that matter?

I've had Maps.Me on my phone for some years; it's often not as accurate or polished as the commercial offerings (Google, Here Technologies), but it's pretty nice. What might make me switch?

Re: Organic Maps

#85

Post by sehugg »

bmitch3020 wrote: post #17
sgt wrote: post #12

Will this take down Big Maps?

There are two things keeping me using "Big Map". 1. Address lookups. Many of the buildings in OSM have yet to get street addresses added, so navigating to an address is a bit hit or miss. This gets fixed with time as people update the maps and wouldn't be a show stopper. 2. Real time traffic and detour navigation. This is really needed when navigating around busy cities where a wreck on a major highway can result in…

Also current place names. You can sometimes find a business on OSM that has correct metadata, but in many areas the majority are missing or stale (like, closed 10+ years ago.) Solving this is an "interesting" problem to say the least when many businesses these days have nothing more than an Instagram/Whatsapp handle.

Re: Organic Maps

#86

Post by wasting_time »

jraph wrote: post #77
dwa3592 wrote: post #67

This is exciting!! I was not aware of organic maps until today. I use offline maps in google maps also. It's not fully private if it requires GPS connection though!! That's why I have been working on https://github.com/deepanwadhwa/anumaan for a while now. The focus is on navigating without internet and without GPS.

> It's not fully private if it requires GPS connection though!! How so? GPS is like FM radio: you send nothing, you only receive. Apps like organic maps or comaps let you use the maps fully offline and you can compute itineraries without GPS when your need this (from point A to point B, with as many stops as you wish). I strongly recommend you to seriously look into comaps or organic maps if you don't know them. Now,…

They may be thinking of Google's coarse location feature where the handset checks SSIDs in the proximity against Googles database for fast lookup.

Re: Organic Maps

#87

Post by palata »

mamaar wrote: post #37

There is also https://gitlab.com/tilelessmap/tilelessmap with some of the same focus areas. > TilelessMap is an open, offline-first mapping engine designed for critical field use, such as forestry, emergency services, and humanitarian work. Built with C and optimized for mobile performance, TilelessMap enables full local map rendering without relying on cloud infrastructure — even in areas with poor or no internet co…

I am curious: is it called "tileless" because it uses tiles, but offline? Or does it somehow not use tiles?

Re: Organic Maps

#89

Post by thinkingemote »

einpoklum wrote: post #84

How does Organic Maps differ from Maps.Me (which it also mentions), or PocketEarth mentiond in comments here? Or CoMaps for that matter? I've had Maps.Me on my phone for some years; it's often not as accurate or polished as the commercial offerings (Google, Here Technologies), but it's pretty nice. What might make me switch?

CoMaps is a fork/spin-off of Organic Maps, which in turn is a fork of Maps.ME

Re: Organic Maps

#90

Post by palata »

RetroTechie wrote: post #74

I'll repeat a question asked in an earlier thread on OM: Do there exist apps that share their offline map data? As in: install app A, dowload offline map data for country xyz, use in app A, install app B, use same map data in app B (or C, D etc) without re-downloading the map data? As I understood, that was not the case as each app uses its own format which is some underlying public geo info (presumably too big to ha…

> The sillyness & waste of this is obvious

Until you realise that there is not one true way to show a map, and that different apps may actually have different needs. Suddenly it becomes obvious that not all apps can use the same shared offline data.

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