101–110 of 382 posts
Looking forward to iOS support so more people can use it.
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?
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?
Google Maps will always have better POI data because they have a larger userbase and they've gamified adding POIs with the "Local Guides" badge.
The main reason to switch is to have an offline-first experience. Google Maps does not provide offline maps everywhere, e.g. South Korea. And if you've ever tried using the Google Maps app on a weak connection, it's frustrating because it still tries to download remote tiles instead of using the ones you've downloaded.
Lastly any contributions you make in OpenStreetMap will show up in Organic Maps / CoMaps for everyone.
Personally, I use Google Maps on a daily basis, but have Organic Maps and regions downloaded for travel and just switch between the two. It's good to have a reliable fallback.
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…
The reason it moved to the internet was not that it wasn't possible to stay offline-first. If the app depends on your server, then the owner can monetise that (e.g. with subscriptions) or track the users. It is more interesting for companies than allowing the users to buy a snapshot of the maps once and never come back.
Offline-first nowadays comes from open source projects, not from companies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am curious: is it called "tileless" because it uses tiles, but offline? Or does it somehow not use tiles?
There are no tiles. All geometry is loaded and rendered directly from an SQLite database on every render. Geometry is stored as TWKB (Tiny Well-Known Binary) to reduce storage and transport size. During decoding, they do clever work using aggregate functions and reusing buffers across rows to reduce allocations. There is real potential in the tech, but unfortunately little momentum behind it.
Which can be done with tiles. Or maybe I don't understand what you mean by "tiles"? What do you describe as "tiles"?
I frequently use it in the airplane without WiFi and wish to have high definition, but downloading country by country is too cumbersome.
Is it feasible for something like this to have heatmaps? Maybe the data could be shared/distributed via hypercore or similar. I find heatmaps are my primary way of finding new mountain biking trails and routes.
Organic Maps a great app in many ways, but I still don't get how people can actually use it every day and say it replaces Google Maps when its search feature totally stinks. I know it's a hard problem, but this is the number one thing that needs to somehow be fixed. I can't tell if I'm just too dumb or if FOSS/degoogle fanboys are just pretending. I just know I've tried to use it exclusively many times and always had…
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 ones which tries to avoid realtime traffic, especially in India? Also ones which detects some shortcuts as narrow, meandering roads that will be extremely slow.
I've been using Organic Maps for almost 3 years. I lived in Chicago during this time, as well as some smaller American cities. I go back and forth between Organic Maps and GMaps depending on the situation.
I've found that Organic Maps' lack of traffic data isn't a big deal for me. It doesn't always give you an accurate ETA, sure, but it isn't any worse at actually getting you to your destination.
The thing with GMaps is that everyone has traffic data, so nobody has an advantage. Google's alternative routes end up equally saturated as the main routes, meaning a "dumb" maps app that always takes the main route will get you to your destination in basically the same amount of time. This is backed up by my own personal experience, and some academic research [1].
Now, when I do need an accurate ETA, I go back to GMaps. I'll also use GMaps to route to businesses sometimes, because OSM doesn't have up-to-date info about businesses throughout most of middle America.
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?
In terms of forks, I believe it was Maps.Me -> Organic Maps -> CoMaps. So all forks of the same project. Maps.Me is not open source anymore (I think?), and CoMaps was started by a subset of the Organic Maps community that wasn't happy with the Organic Maps governance. > What might make me switch? Different reasons for different people, but OpenStreetMap is a great community project, for one. What I really like with t…
With CoMaps I don't think, there are any original authors involved (?). In any case I prefer organic, the original. Donated and very grateful that this app works so well (except for search where I sometimes use another app).