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CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

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Re: CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

#201

Post by Groxx »

maelito wrote: post #110
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.

Initial attempts and results:

https://cartes.app/#8.61/37.5261/-121.7338 constant up and down movement at any middle zoom level, e.g. this one. zoomed far out or far in (https://cartes.app/?allez=San+Francisco+Bay%7Cr9451753%7C-12... moves most of the screen up and down, while https://cartes.app/?allez=San+Francisco+Bay%7Cr9451753%7C-12... is stable. (this appears to be the case roughly anywhere, this is just an example) https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/orfhap34liecdon618wkv/Screenc... for a screen recording.

for below, all have "here" selected (not "everywhere") and this same view: https://cartes.app/#12.41/43.0435/-87.89962

"coffee": shows city names in other states, and two places in Iraq.

"valentine": shows... house icons? and a business icon in other states and countries. (top result is apparently a "commune" in France. not sure I'd use a house icon for that tbh)

"valentine coffee": good substring matches for the business name (3 results) and two results in other countries.

"val coffee" (exploring substring behavior): finds one good match from the previous search... but it also shows "Stone Creek Coffee"? what part of that node matches "val" but not "coffee" on its own? https://cartes.app/?allez=Stone+Creek+Coffee%7Cn5066972575%7... -> https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/5066972575

"vendetta": finds 3 good results, e.g. https://cartes.app/?allez=Vendetta+Coffee+Bar%7Cn11268671206... , but why does this work when "valentine" does not?

so... pretty normal results for open-source OSM apps afaict. maybe slightly better than average.

Re: CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

#202

Post by motoroco »

wlesieutre wrote: post #183
motoroco wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thanks for trying it out! I actually happen to have a trip planned for next month in Shenandoah and Blue Ridge Pkwy, looks like that loop is a little out of reach for us this trip but I want to go back to hit Tail of the Dragon and others I will make a native iOS app, but probably only after this summer roadtrip season passes. as far as CarPlay goes, I'll have to find a way to test that first (all my cars/bikes have…

CarPlay support can run in the simulator, obviously you'll need to fake the GPS location too for this to be useful. And you need to get special permission from Apple before you can even use the simulator, they keep CarPlay even more locked down than everything else. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/carplay/using-the-... Between the three roads on my map I'd have to recommend Cherohala Skyway as my favorite d…

thanks for the tips about CarPlay development. I'll definitely target parity with the web app at first so hopefully it'll be something I can get access to eventually

regarding (1), yes, you keep the routes you made even after your subscription ends. the limits revert to the free tier so if it had more waypoints or was longer than that then you just can't add or move waypoints. removing waypoints to get back down below the limit works and you still export your trip to formats included in your tier (e.g. google/apple/waze)

you could absolutely pay for a month just to plan and export all your trips for the year, bookmarking them with google maps or saving the files for your GPS for instance -- not a problem. I am currently exploring alternatives to monthly & annual subscription schedules to further support seasonal usage, too

per your 2nd question, that's correct, only the creator needs to pay to have 2+ collaborators. you can try it out on the free tier with 1 person at first to see if it works for you. if you just want to share maps publicly you can do that without subscribing, too

Re: CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

#203

Post by Groxx »

Groxx wrote: post #197
throwaway284534 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search is a really tough problem in OSM for a few reasons, but I think a lot it stems from bad address parsing. I’ve been working on geocoder which uses a trained model to parse and classify address queries into a tokenized form. In addition to being more accurate than traditional rule-based parsing, this approach also gives the search engine more to work with beyond the tokenized boundaries of each word. The model a…

Is this referring to the difficulty of figuring out what "123 w dhuwdaodks plk" means? I can certainly see that (especially internationally - model-based parsing makes a lot of sense there, assuming enough good training data exists), but like I reliably can't even find precise matches in dedicated fields like "business name" or "city". Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and no open source app I've found yet se…

(as I can no longer edit)

concretely, here's an example search session: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48825127

I mean it when I say that's "maybe slightly better than average". When it gets extra weird I generally go check the OSM node data out of curiosity, and fairly often I find searches returning things where literally no field at all matches any word I searched for, across many different apps. I don't really think that's an address parsing issue, though I have definitely noticed many apps being picky (but completely unspecified) about search formatting when looking for addresses.

Re: CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

#204

Post by ponkipo »

vladms wrote: post #97
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…

> it not only seems to be mostly written not by a regular users, but by people who contribute to CoMaps How did you evaluate that? I use CoMaps, I am not a contributor to it, but in the comments I read I do not remember seeing many people specifying clearly if they are or not contributors (there might have been, but it did not feel like "mostly"). For me CoMaps worked well in the ~6 months for my use-cases (with some…

About evaluation - you are right, they don’t say they are contributors in their comments explicitly (which they probably should do), but it was quite telling in one case, when a person trash-talked about OM clearly without proof, but then if you go to its profile and visit a personal website from there - turns out that they are a contributor.

I totally expect that’s is also the case with other commenters, but it’s fair to say it’s mostly a guess on my side as for most people you can’t say for sure as they don’t have GitHubs linked to the profile. But I’m 100% sure there are several contributors commenting there, especially taking into account how many CoMaps comments and mentions are there and overall popularity of this app, which is not very big.

Re: CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

#205

Post by pastk »

u8080 wrote: post #193
pastk wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hosting etc. expenses are a minor fraction compared to OM's donations inflow. And its enough to hire devs, the first dev was hired more than two years ago, but they have been hiding this fact to look more poor and attract more donations. Even long-term active contributors have been denied even totals information about donations and got to know about first hire by chance about a year since the fact.

>Hosting etc. expenses are a minor fraction compared to OM's donations inflow. How do you know that if they are not disclosing this info?

Because we have similar costs in CoMaps, e.g. the most expensive part is the map generation server and both OM and CoMaps rent the same model from the same provider and its less than 250 eur/month.

And according to https://ariregister.rik.ee/eng/company/16225385/Organic-Maps... in 2025 they got ~120k eur and this figure likely doesn't include all the donation sources (in addition to the main Stripe channel they also have OpenCollective, LiberaPay, crypto...)

Re: CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

#206

Post by u8080 »

pastk wrote: post #205
u8080 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Hosting etc. expenses are a minor fraction compared to OM's donations inflow. How do you know that if they are not disclosing this info?

Because we have similar costs in CoMaps, e.g. the most expensive part is the map generation server and both OM and CoMaps rent the same model from the same provider and its less than 250 eur/month. And according to https://ariregister.rik.ee/eng/company/16225385/Organic-Maps... in 2025 they got ~120k eur and this figure likely doesn't include all the donation sources (in addition to the main Stripe channel they also…

That's fair, however 120k is peanuts for company of developers. I still think it is fair to use that money at dev's disposal.

I got map generator concerns which is totally valid - but that OM trashtalking for things that was never stated(i.e. purpose of donations) is just wrong - even if you like CoMaps, why not be grateful for all awesome work done by OM team which is the foundation of CoMaps?

Re: CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

#207

Post by FireInsight »

forever_frey wrote: post #143
FireInsight wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have set up Owntracks with a self-hosted server, and the android app reports my location to it periodically over MQTT. I would prefer to use https://dawarich.app/ but last time I tried it it was clearly very beta-quality and not ready for reliable usage.

Hi, what were the issues you have encountered in Dawarich? Any feedback appreciated!

I tried it for family location sharing a few months back and, I don't remember exactly, but I remember the UI/UX feeling a bit slow/clunky in general, eventhough setting things up was user-friendly. Definitely potential there, though.

Re: CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

#208

Post by bentley »

pastk wrote: post #121
Magicrafter13 wrote: post #35

This is what I use in my main GrapheneOS profile. I still have a dedicated profile for Google Maps though as I still have not been able to give up their greater datasets (i.e. traffic) in all cases. Decent app though. I saw someone here mention proprietary code but I wouldn't worry about it, just install the F-Droid version. That's why I use F-Droid - to guarantee I don't get proprietary blobs.

Don't worry, we have no proprietary code in all builds of CoMaps, not just F-Droid one :)

To be honest, I use Organic Maps over CoMaps simply because Organic Maps is available in Accrescent (which is in turn provided by the GrapheneOS App Store), and CoMaps is not. Both Google Play and F‐Droid are just enough of a hassle (and I mildly dislike both of them) to keep me on the map app that doesn’t require either one.

Re: CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

#210

Post by nicman23 »

goodpoint wrote: post #118
h4kunamata wrote: post #74

I use CoMaps, it works like a charm on GrapheneOS + Android Auto. I have also contributed to the OpenStreetMap by adding POI and requesting logic to be changed. The only major issue which I got used to but sucks, is the search when it does not involved famous places or streets or both. Streets will be shown as minor or major and alike, I do need to use Google Maps Browser version to find the place, and the on CoMaps…

Stop shilling graphene. We can tell.

what is the issue with graphene?
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