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CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

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Re: CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

#101

Post by Freak_NL »

ponkipo wrote: post #75

I've read both Organic Maps thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48794446 (as it's my favorite map app I use for years around the world, and I'm an active OSM contributor as well) which quickly became overrun with CoMaps followers trash-talking about OM, now this thread appears. What I find interesting to see, and I think it's not just me who can see this - that basically every mention of CoMaps and why it is…

I don't really think it's primarily the CoMaps devs and contributors warning others about OrganicMaps. It's mostly OpenStreetMap contributors (e.g., mappers) like myself who followed the relevant discussions and events and decided that the community is better off routing around the problem.

OrganicMaps could be the best app there is in terms of functionality (it isn't), but if there are significant issues with their governance they are harmful to the broader OpenStreetMap community.

So we recommend CoMaps and OsmAnd, and carry on mapping.

Re: CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

#103

Post by exiguus »

gonzalohm wrote: post #41
Cider9986 wrote: post #12

I use CoMaps, it works great. You get notified in the app to download the updated maps you selected every 2 weeks or so. Could be wildly different than that, just what I notice. It's timing estimates are often 5-15 minutes off Apple Maps, which I find accurate, on ~two hour drives, but I imagine it depends on the traffic. To improve OpenStreetMap, which CoMaps uses as the data source, I use StreetComplete[1]–it puts…

Do you know if you can add hiking trails using StreetComplete? I noticed some trails are missing in my area and I would like to contribute

You can record tracks or add places right in the app.

Re: CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

#104

Post by maelito »

tcfhgj wrote: post #59
maelito wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't take so much to enable a good server search on top of OSM + openaddresses. Local search will always be slow and bad. But server search doesn't need that much. It's just that OS initiatives are severely understaffed. OS apps that have a Photon instance are already rare to find. Let's not talk about having an Overpass instance... What is very hard to reproduce is Google's place review data. It's golden to en…

> What is very hard to reproduce is Google's place review data. fake anyways (quite easy to get negative comments deleted), and even for bad reviews. Best look elsewhere or not at all.

I'm not talking about stars, we don't care about stars for search engines.

What's important is people talking about "has air conditioner" in a hotel review or "has vegan" in a restaurant. OSM has none of this data.

Re: CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

#105

Post by SurprisedTiger »

Seems like a minimal OsmAnd.

Map rendering is nice, and crisp.

Functionality really is bare-bones, though.

So for example there is a metro layer - but it's subway only.

No trams. I kinda need trams where I am - they're a major part of the public transport system, more so even than the metro.

Problem is of course a lot of people need a lot of different things, maybe you end up looking like OsmAnd, which much as it is irreplaceable, the config/setup is a bit of an upturned spaghetti bowl.

Re: CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

#106

Post by szszrk »

wraptile wrote: post #87
szszrk wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree. Open maps don't have to compete in this space and it would make them worse. Yes, that is something google maps excels in. Absolutely. But trying to compete here would mean they have to shift into being a social media and their biggest effort would be content moderation. There are some intermediate options here. Osmand integrates Mapilary images (I'm not a fan personally), they have travel guides…

> shift into being a social media and their biggest effort would be content moderation. I really don't buy this argument. You already have to moderate submissions - what's an extra field? Sure, UGC is more opinionated but just don't add star ratings and anything that promotes gaming of system. Just let users expand the dataset with more information, it's almost never a bad idea - isn't that entire point of crowdsourc…

> what's an extra field?

That is not a flag "is the crossing wheelchair accessible?".

It's user created picture or text. This can be any kind of content, abusive, regulated by law, spam, subjective for chat control "age verification" controls, copyrighted and so on.

Moderation is a hard topic. Only very small communities can do that well.

Re: CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

#107

Post by jllyhill »

Sophira wrote: post #71

How does this compare with the F-Droid version of OsmAnd? [Edit: To answer my own question a little bit, I found a post from September 2025 that compares OsmAnd and Organic Maps (which this project forked from): https://blog.firedrake.org/archive/2025/09/OSMAnd_vs_Organic... . I can't find anything more recent or for CoMaps specifically, other than auto-created "alternatives" pages. I would absolutely love to hear fr…

Think of it as a very stripped down and opinionated version of OsmAnd. It lacks a lot of power features, but is extremely fast and all of the options are easily available and work out of the box. So it's great for everyday use (especially in cities with a lot of POIs) but not as good for in depth travel and route planning.

For example, I've used F-Droid OsmAnd extensively when planning my trip to Japan, because its guides, WikiData and Wikipedia integration are godsend for finding interesting places to visit, but used CoMaps when I was there to look things up and build routes. I'm also exclusively using OsmAnd for writing GNSS tracks because I can fine tune the parameters of measurements it captures.

Re: CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

#108

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

Cider9986 wrote: post #12

I use CoMaps, it works great. You get notified in the app to download the updated maps you selected every 2 weeks or so. Could be wildly different than that, just what I notice. It's timing estimates are often 5-15 minutes off Apple Maps, which I find accurate, on ~two hour drives, but I imagine it depends on the traffic. To improve OpenStreetMap, which CoMaps uses as the data source, I use StreetComplete[1]–it puts…

Very interesting. Can the Street Complete be used to improve accessibility of a region, say to mark the availability of a ramp?

Re: CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

#109

Post by duxup »

patcon wrote: post #77
ponkipo wrote: post #75

I've read both Organic Maps thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48794446 (as it's my favorite map app I use for years around the world, and I'm an active OSM contributor as well) which quickly became overrun with CoMaps followers trash-talking about OM, now this thread appears. What I find interesting to see, and I think it's not just me who can see this - that basically every mention of CoMaps and why it is…

I dont know anything about this app besides your framing of "out-of-nowhere community builds an app" but am sometimes suspicious of nation states building these types of open source project forks. It's so easy now, and the cost seems incredibly low, to get into very intimate workflows (of very specific types of people). We've already seen attackers simulate whole communities for attacks on individuals, and I'm just w…

> sometimes suspicious of nation states building these types of open source project forks

Is there an example of this? To what end?

Re: CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

#110

Post by maelito »

Groxx wrote: post #52

One of the main things that keeps me from using essentially all OSM-based mapping apps as my primary is that search seems incredibly bad. I can't blend city and name, road and category, can't usually filter by features or open time, and results are almost always something like: - a result 500 feet away that sounds nothing like what you searched for - a result 23 miles away that shares one word but nothing else - a re…

Could you try https://cartes.app and share your search terms and expectations ? We're using Photon, an OpenSearch search engine. We've build a dictionary of place categories to help in-browser with FuseJS.

Also thinking about using embeddings to complement this.

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