Great app, I like it, but I did notice some problems: My city is comprised of several islands, and there's relatively large bodies of water between them (over 100 metres), but this map shows those large water bodies as narrow (1 or 2 metre) river-like things. I understand this might be the problem of the underlying data source, and not the app itself. (For what it's worth, both Google and Apple maps correctly display…
Check if it looks the same on openstreetmap.org
openstreetmap.org correctly displays the islands and the relative distances between them!
For offline use I've been quite happy with Maps.me (also OSM-based) but it sounds like Organic Maps is worth a try.
Just a heads up for context: "In November 2014, Maps.me was acquired by Mail.Ru Group for 542 million Russian rubles" "On November 2, 2020, Daegu Limited bought Maps.me for 1.56 Billion Russian rubles. Daegu Limited is announced to be part of Parity.com Group" "Parity.com Group is privately held and is headquartered in Zug, Switzerland. It was founded by Viktor Mangazeev and Alex Grebnev in 2018. " https://markets.ft…
maps.me got turned into a cryptocurrency scam. It is bad software now, hence the great fork of Organic Maps.
I genuinely want to know what lead Google to not support Maps offline properly. It’s truly staggering how, even when I do everything I can to say: save this journey, don’t delete the map around it, don’t delete the journey, just passively show me where I am next to it, it will gleefully delete everything. I once met their lead designer (who had just changed to work at another FAANG) and… boy was that not a conversati…
Apple Maps in iOS 17 has good offline maps support:
- Full searching and POI details including hours, etc.
- Full routing (no traffic of course, but possibly expected traffic? I'm not sure)
- Freeform region selection, overlapping regions, etc.
I'm slowly de-googling due to the WEI debacle, and my resident OpenStreetMap evangelist recommended this as a Google Maps replacement. It obviously doesn't have all the features of Google Maps, but surprisingly there are several things that I feel it does better. For example, the transit overlay is much more visible and shows transfers between lines (although that's the only overlay it offers, no bike lane overlay sadly (although, honestly, GM's bike overlay isn't all that useful)). Searching is obviously instantaneous and shows all your hits, so I can search for "cafe" in my city and immediately get a map with pins for every single cafe, which can be overwhelming at large zoom levels but it's fine once you zoom into an area (and it's much less "mystery meat" than GM's approach of selectively only displaying a subset of your search results based on your zoom level, so I think it's a worthwhile tradeoff). And no ads, obviously. The biggest downside is that the search is basic, and searches the whole planet while only sporadically prioritizing results in your current area, or your current zoom, or your downloaded maps. If you have an address it doesn't matter, but if you don't have an address then you'll find yourself longing for the more intelligent search of Google Maps. But it's nice, and I'm using it more and more often by default over time. However, until search is improved, I don't think I'll be able to uninstall Google Maps entirely (although eventually maybe I'll just use it through mobile Firefox).
> I genuinely want to know what lead Google to not support Maps offline properly Very simple answer - they want to know everything you do online. As Google Maps is provided for free, you are the product. Convenience of the product (you) is not a priority whatsoever. > designers like to say that users are always right? It's just smoke and mirrors. Unfortunately IT breeds a number of people who have ignorant position t…
This lowbrow criticism is really old. Google doesn’t do much offline for the same reason almost no one does offline anymore; it’s hard and the number of users affected is very small. Do you honestly think Google is looking at the number of maps users that go offline and saying, “We absolutely need their data!” rather than “Eh, not worth rearchitecting everything for.” Not to mention they have done a lot for it even i…
This post is about an offline maps app which is maintained by volunteers, so it can't be that hard for the likes of Google.
openstreetmap.org correctly displays the islands and the relative distances between them!
Sounds like a bug in the app then. Though, OSM apps have their choice on how to interpret the underlying data, so it could be based on a deliberate decision. May be worth reporting if you don't mind revealing your town on their github.
The critical issue I've always had with OSM-based map apps has been stale data. If I were to update something on OSM, then how long could I reasonably expect it to take for that change to make it onto my phone with Organic Maps? And would it happen automatically in the background while I'm on WiFi, or would I have to do something manually?
If you change something on OSM it takes a few minutes to a day to be visible on the *online* map. And in their faq they state, that they update their maps 1-4 times per month. Automatic updates are planned https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/5679
Yeah, such massive delays will be the one thing preventing me from using Organic Maps. OSM being community-editable is where these map apps get most of their value. Letting the data go that stale defeats the purpose.
Thanks for the link I'll keep an eye on that issue.
This was the first time I’d heard of the app, but due to comments in this thread I downloaded it. * Website, ethos: straightforward. “Old internet” vibes, love it. They seem very active, have a presence on every platform, very impressive * The app seems very nice. Simple clear UI. Lots of features. I need to experiment for more than a few minutes but I get the impression it could replace Google Maps for me, especiall…
> It’s developed in Estonia! Estonia has a remarkable IT and software culture (I live there) and every so often you come across an absolute gem. This looks like one of them
What sets Estonia's IT and software culture apart from other countries?
What other Estonian software would you recommend?
I had a bizarre encounter when working there, also Maps related. I lived in the UK at the time and my post code just didn't exist in Google Maps. I did some digging, and found out that in fact no post codes in the UK had been added in quite some time. Eventually I found out why: There was some lead dev on Maps, who refused to allow new imports of UK post code data because he thought they were "wrong". They were seein…
Any info on how could I have my street address corrected on Maps? They are using a random street name that no one else uses and no matter how many times I report it, they don't change it. It also doesn't matter that I'm a local guide with many, many edits.
You can ask a few friends to report it as well. I suspect Google looks at how many reports are made for a feature.