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A community-led fork of Organic Maps

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Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#151
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSMAnd and OrganicMaps both have the limitation (and big advantage) of functioning offline by default. The routing will be much more powerful (with alternatives on by default) and faster if you enable an online routing service. For OSMAnd this is possible with e.g. GraphHopper: https://www.graphhopper.com/blog/2024/02/27/osmand-with-grap... The same is true for address search. If you have an online address search lik…

Thanks for the input. I happened to work for a car navigation software development company 15+y ago. Cool stuff, Windows CE / PDAs as devices, android and ios nowhere. These were totally offline devices (map updates through usb / sdcard). Even then, this offline navigation was super fast, across countries. Today I managed to wait a whole minute for a 5km bike navigation in OsmAnd. Then I uninstalled (after years of h…

In my experience, OsmAnd is mostly slow for very long routes.

Maybe it is a matter of quality. Because of course you can find routes fast if they are not the fastest or best routes.

But there is room for improvement. brouter could be integrated even better. Or a router like that could be used directly in OsmAnd.

And long routes could be handled more flexible. E.g., when I go from Copenhagen to Barcelona, it is not super important at first to find the optimal way into Barcelona, or shortcuts in France using regional roads. It will take several days, but I would like to start with a reasonable route giving me an estimate of distance and time. At first I just need a good route to the Great Belt Bridge or the Rødby ferry -- Copenhagen is on an island.

When I drive long distances, I sometimes use several devices. The Xzent system is much faster for longer distances, but the map is not as good, especially it is missing may POI's.

Often they disagree, especially if one is optimizing for distance and other for fuel or time. Then if there is an obstacle or a bad road, I instantly have a good alternative at an intersection.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#152
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, that's all fine. What I am saying is that CoMaps seem to believe that Organic-Maps-the-Company is not transparent about what they do with the donations. They have a bunch of other reasons, but this is the one that I can understand. I can understand that they don't want to donate money to Organic-Maps-the-Company if it then uses it to write proprietary code and later sell it. Not that they necessarily do that, b…

Also with mobile apps, app store users are the most "valuable" thing -- much like Maps.Me, the "app" could be sold tomorrow and what really happens is the FOSS code is thrown away or sunsetted and the users wake up to an update where their map app is now a crypto scam, or whatever. The source code can be forked, but Organic Maps "owns" millions of app store users, and can "sell" that, in a way that violates users' tr…

Happened with Firefox. Mozilla now has unlimited rights to use and publish, anything you see, type or upload in Firefox. And it is still marketed as "privacy" friendly. Even Micro$ft has better license in their browser!

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#153
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the activity is public, so look at the usernames of the fork leaders vs their activity on the upstream project... It's most of the recent top contributors who've been around for a long time and made their perspectives pretty clear.

Good point. I wonder whether it would be good for forks to come with a page that makes a case for the legitimacy of the fork and who will be controlling it and/or setting the founding rules for the governance. With links back to supporting raw evidence in repos and forums, so people can verify. The thing being forked could also respond to these clear assertion, which could be a check against confusing forks that are…

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Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#154
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say stealing, it’s open source.

Well, the code still belongs to the author, who was paid by the Organic company. It is not even merged and the DCO is not signed. Even legally, there are questions here, not to mention the "high community principles".

I'll just quote Oleg, who was an Organic Maps contributor working on the new website (amongst other things) and is in the CoMaps team now:

"The original design was created by me. I also personally hired and paid for a designer to also work on the design. Later I hired a developer and paid him myself to develop the website. Recently minor updates were made, for example removing the stock photos from the Community page, which was paid by OM. This was from the beginning through today open source under the Apache license."

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#155
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflexible routing is the reason I'm not using an Organic maps derivative. On OSMAnd I have tweaked the routing algorithm to my taste and it's hard to beat. There is often construction or other temporary issues, so having on-the-fly rerouting that I can trust is key.

> On OSMAnd I have tweaked the routing algorithm to my taste and it's hard to beat. How do you do this? Is there something I can read or watch about this? Are you using BRouter?

Here are two sources that you may find useful:

[0] https://osmand.net/docs/technical/osmand-file-formats/osmand...

[1] https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd-resources/blob/master/ro...

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#156
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflexible routing is the reason I'm not using an Organic maps derivative. On OSMAnd I have tweaked the routing algorithm to my taste and it's hard to beat. There is often construction or other temporary issues, so having on-the-fly rerouting that I can trust is key.

How are you tweaking it? Would love to hear more about it since I am a have osmand user.

Here are two sources that you may find useful:

[0] https://osmand.net/docs/technical/osmand-file-formats/osmand...

[1] https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd-resources/blob/master/ro...

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, thanks for mentioning https://streetcomplete.app ! This looks very intuitive to use for edits on openstreetmaps. Would someone here know a similiar tool for iOS or MacOS? Or any recommendations to edit roads. We are currently driving with a 4.5 tonne motorhome in Europe and the road weight and height limits are usually marked properly in osmand+ but when they are not we waste multiple hours rerouting in the alps…

Go Map, or just make bookmarks in OsmAnd and go back later

"Go Map!!" was indeed pretty easy to use. Thanks!

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#158
post #32

Sad to see the current state of mobile OSM-based apps. Maps.me becoming OrganicMaps, now this. Lot of development effort, great work going into it, but somehow, after years, the apps don't feel more user-friendly. I was pushing hard to replace Google Maps, but eventually, I gave up. OsmAnd is great if you need that "swiss army knife of OSM apps" on your phone, but I rarely do. Same with Maps.me/Organic Maps, try to s…

I've been using a do-googled LineagoOS fan for the last few months with Organic maps, and not only do I find it super user friendly, I actively like it more than Google Maps. It works offline so much better.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#159
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Impossible in the medium term, unless Organic goes online.

There is a lot one could do offline. Highlight close by stations, have overlays/styles for transport focus (they got an overlay for "Subway", which in some areas includes commuter trains but not for bus/tram/light rail/...) And in theory one could add bundles of data based on GTFS data which many transport organisations these days publish and do routing at least based on schedule times.

Yes, but that would be miles behind G/A maps, on top of being hard to implement.

E.g. Motis needs walk routing data that weights hundred of gigas.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#160
post #96
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If OsmAnd got a new rendering engine (no, not that "3D" sluggish thing it has for a couple years now), like streetcomplete has (or the Strava-built-in mapbox renderer), it would be possibly the best. What "3D sluggish thing" are talking about ? Streetcomplete, like most OSM vector 3D maps use MapLibre, for a few months now https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/pull/5693 Edit : sorry, I read Organic. Inde…

> I don't know why they went for something other than MapLibre. OSMAnd existed looong before MapLibre :-).

Sorry, what I wanted to say is I don't know why they stick with their stack, instead of doing like Streetcomplete.
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