Live data from Hacker News

Organic Maps

organicmaps.app

211–220 of 382 posts

Re: Organic Maps

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these apps rely on the data provided by OpenStreetMap (OSM). It is a Wikipedia-like project where anybody can contribute edits. https://www.openstreetmap.org/

yeah, so were LibreOffice and OpenOffice relying on the .odt format CoMaps forked out of OrganicMaps after a row about money

> CoMaps forked out of OrganicMaps after a row about money

Organic Maps is organized as a for-profit entity. CoMaps is not. This is a real difference, and the former asking for donations makes it look like a scam.

Re: Organic Maps

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While default osm data is great, I've been very impressed with the partnership/collective of Overture Maps data. It's osm + esri/tomtom + corporate processing/funding. https://overturemaps.org/ While not updated as frequently, their releases have a pretty high quality and coverage.

Unfortunately they don't support opening hours in the schema, it's a deliberate choice as it's high value data the contributors would rather license to you

Re: Organic Maps

#215
post #4

Organic Maps was my go to app for a navigation app where you can fix errors yourself immediately! So much better than having to work for free on the proprietary apps, and hope they accept your edits There’s a fork from one year ago, CoMaps, that is gaining different features E.g., I am adding CarPlay Dashboard support that you can test by joining the TestFlight We are in great need of both more testers and some prope…

I have used OsmAnd+ for well over 15 years by now, which also uses OSM data, just like these. And I have used JOSM on my PC to fix the OSM data myself. Does Organic maps / CoMaps offer anything OsmAnd+ doesn't for someone who uses it for car navigation (especially on back roads in the wilderness) as well as hiking? (All in the Nordic countries.) I also record tracks with it.

I ditched osmand because the interface is so convoluted. Ridiculously so. Plus theres a facebook pixel in there somewhere, at least there was when I dropped it 10 years ago.

CoMaps seem sincere.

For Nordic/outdoors, outcomes using either osmand/comaps/etc in practice are going to be very similar.

Re: Organic Maps

#216
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

You are largely correct about everyday location privacy but I was thinking more in the adversarial direction (read military/ GPS denied zones) when I started this work. There have been news about GPS being denied/spoofed over european region. When your phone can't get the GPS signal, it would try to retrieve alternative signals (A-GPS, cellular network etc) - this is where an adversary could be listening for leaks. S…

AGPS actually means two different things.

If by AGPS you are referring to the use of nearby WiFi and cellular networks and querying a service for that (there are ways to have that info purely offline, but I do believe such databases rely on many people leaking their positions to exist at all), I'm not convinced your approach helps much:

1) if you run stock iOS or Android with the Google services, I believe you are already screwed anyway: I wouldn't trust them not to constantly leak stuff about you in the background even if you don't actively use the GPS, at least to build their traffic info and to keep their access network-based location database updated. If you are concerned about the privacy aspect of this stuff, you should be getting rid of the Google services anyway. That leads to the next case:

2) If you are running a phone without the Google services, then you don't have that kind of AGPS. Unless you go the extra mile of explicitly configuring microG to enable network-based location. I used to do this, but on my current phone, getting the position purely from GPS has been so reliable and quick that I didn't bother setting this up (I suppose it could provide some battery saving, but there are privacy concerns indeed, and not relying on such databases that basically depend on people giving up bits of their privacy is always nice). Your main concern there would be the shady blobs most phones run that could be doing you don't know what behind your back, but that's regardless how you use your phone.

If by AGPS you mean the download of the data about the positions of the GPS satellites (MSA) then yes, indeed, I agree, you will leak to your service provider (but not more than if you are not already fully offline - so basically if you use your phone like a phone you already leak as much) and to the server providing the data (which is probably Qualcomm (XTRA) or Google, or possibly your service provider). Then the solution is fully offline, and your current options are non assisted GPS, which can take 10 minutes in good conditions to get a fix if you haven't used it in a while, and reading the map. From what I understand, your current strategy is to help with the latter, which needs to be better than eventually getting a GPS fix (which feels somewhat niche, but I can see some advantages).

(There's also AGPS MSB where you basically ask a remote server to compute your location from what your GPS receiver gets and nearby cellular networks, the leak here is obvious but from what I've read this is quite rare nowadays, it was more useful when GPS receivers didn't have enough compute power to do the compilations themselves, so that would be mostly irrelevant.)

All in all, if I'm not wrong (happy to be proven wrong): as far as privacy is a concern, depending on what you mean by AGPS, your approach only applies to, respectively, devices without the Google Play Services or similar stuff, or to fully offline devices. It needs to be better than, respectively, GPS assisted with the satelite positioning data (which can be good for up to 7 days and then updated through regular GPS if I'm not wrong), or regular GPS. I believe your angle of attack can be battery usage, or better than the time to get a GPS fix. That seems quite tough especially that your approach as I understand it is intrinsically scoped (works mostly in cities where it's easy to ask about what's around).

I believe a stronger angle of your approach is resilience: less dependency on the GPS system which can indeed be jammed or which can fail (although there's redundancy: we do have several constellations of satellites from different countries, so a general failure seems unlikely, and a GPS failure would be catastrophic because many critical things depend on it).

Now, there are devices or places (especially in dense cities with high buildings) where the GPS simply doesn't work well, so a convenient, privacy-preserving alternatives to the GPS would be great in those situations6!

Re: Organic Maps

#217
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

At least in my experience for large retail chains or restaurant chains, hours on their websites are very accurate. I think where Google might benefit from calling to verify hours is, for example, where they've scraped https://schema.org/openingHours from the web page for an independent store, but the website has used an invalid/incorrect format, and some manual human check or clean-up is necessary, but this work would be too time consuming for each of 100,000's of independent stores which exist.

There are cases where a brand might have broken opening hours information such as "Mo- Tu - We 09 00 -4 p m". For alltheplaces.xyz scrapers, a human is often able to make sense of the situation and fix the problem through a few lines of extra code. Contacting the business to get the hours confirmed would only be necessary in very rare cases.

Where it would perhaps make the _most_ sense to contact a business to confirm opening hours is:

1. Ahead of public holidays to confirm planned temporary changes to opening hours. Many brands don't bother to update hours on their websites for such temporary changes, or at least don't list those hours until the week prior, which is usually too late for OSM, ATP, offline maps, etc which would ideally want to know these changes to hours up to a year in advance.

2. To confirm actual dates of permanent store/restaurant closures. Many brands in liquidation tend to fire the website developers (or can't pay them to work) and leave an outdated website online until the final shop or restaurant is closed. Commonly it's only some "CLOSING DOWN SALE LAST DAYS EXTENDED TO FRIDAY" post on social media that informs visitors accurately.

Re: Organic Maps

#218
post #112
post #4

Organic Maps was my go to app for a navigation app where you can fix errors yourself immediately! So much better than having to work for free on the proprietary apps, and hope they accept your edits There’s a fork from one year ago, CoMaps, that is gaining different features E.g., I am adding CarPlay Dashboard support that you can test by joining the TestFlight We are in great need of both more testers and some prope…

Any recommendations for an OSS maps app that provides tracks like Strava,l and Komoot?

You can record tracks with (I think) both Organic Maps and CoMaps. If you are interested in the social aspects of sharing tracks https://wanderer.to/ and a few others offer imports of GPX and other track formats.

Re: Organic Maps

#219
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do these damn projects even push the proposed edits up back to openstreetmap? insanely shameful if not

They can’t do so automatically. Osm Editors must approve. Apparantly OSM fears legislation when people copy info from google maps. They like to see evidence, like street sign photos. In my limited experience anyway.

I occasionally contribute to OSM. You just send your edit and they are directly live. I don't think there's prior moderation. On these apps you log in to OSM using an OSM account IIRC (though I mostly use EveryDoor or directly osm.org for this, occasionally StreetComplete, I don't contribute using Comaps)

Re: Organic Maps

#220
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s Magic Earth which uses OSM map data but also integrates live traffic information. Not sure whether it works in India, though. https://www.magicearth.com/

Have they tried/are there any plans of upstreaming that somehow? While I rely on proprietary services for car navigation today, if I move to a OSM-based services next, I'd want it to be similarly structured to actual OSM, not some proprietary bolted-on-top-of-OSM startup that will disappear/enshittificate within years.

Magic Earth is 10+ years old by now. Only recently they've introduced a (very reasonable, I think) Premium subscription to cover their costs. I guess the live traffic data is bound to some licenses so they can't just "upstream" that.
Post reply on HN