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Organic Maps

organicmaps.app

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Re: Organic Maps

#371

Post by habi »

Vinnl wrote: post #71
OfSanguineFire wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can often find opening times of shops by searching for their own Facebook page instead of using Google Maps. Moreover, you can add business’ opening hours to OpenStreetMap so that other people in future will see the opening hours in Organic Maps and other OSM-based maps. For a programming-savvy crowd like HN, the syntax of OSM’s opening-hours tag is pretty straightforward.

> you can add business’ opening hours to OpenStreetMap And by far the easiest way to do this, if you have an Android phone, is to use the beautiful StreetComplete app: https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/#readme

On iOS https://every-door.app/ wins for easiest `opening_hours` editor.

Re: Organic Maps

#372

Post by KnackeredHues »

ex-googlemaps wrote: post #161
mcv wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had it for a while, but I don't use it nearly enough. I still rely on Google Maps for most things, until Google Maps lets me down. Which it does mostly when I'm on vacation. Although now that I think about it, Google Maps lets me down on vacation because I'm in unfamiliar territory and I have no idea how to correct for the mistakes it makes. When I'm at home (in Amsterdam) it makes plenty of mistakes too, but I'…

I’m an ex-Googler and I tried to fix cycling routing. I’m honestly sorry I wasn’t successful. We had a really nice solution but privacy considerations made it extremely difficult and limited. And then I and the other main driver both left Google so it withered and died I believe. I really hope someone else can fix it one day. This is a throwaway obviously since this basically 50% doxes me.

I’ve been wondering why doesn’t google use its own elevation and traffic data? There are no privacy issues with the data they already make publicly available. Prioritizing flatter and more pleasant routes over shorter ones couldn’t be more complicated than adjusting a few variables, could it?

Re: Organic Maps

#373

Post by MayeulC »

mcv wrote: post #100
vintagedave wrote: post #55

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…

I've had it for a while, but I don't use it nearly enough. I still rely on Google Maps for most things, until Google Maps lets me down. Which it does mostly when I'm on vacation. Although now that I think about it, Google Maps lets me down on vacation because I'm in unfamiliar territory and I have no idea how to correct for the mistakes it makes. When I'm at home (in Amsterdam) it makes plenty of mistakes too, but I'…

OSMAnd + Brouter is really the gold standard for bike routing for me, though the Brouter Android app could certainly use some polish (it barely looks like an Android 1.0 app).

If you just want to try the routing, there's brouter-web too ;)

Re: Organic Maps

#374

Post by et-al »

wds wrote: post #324
izacus wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do not blindly trust it. Map data can be very out of date in some places, especially on remote-ish hiking trails. Also, for the love of everything that's holy, do the same with Apple/Google Maps. They can be horribly wrong to the point of being actively dangerous.

Can't trust Apple/Google, can't trust OSM, can't trust paper maps... What's the right answer here?

To use a cliche, the map is not the territory.

Re: Organic Maps

#375

Post by matkoniecz »

ex-googlemaps wrote: post #319
xigoi wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think Google is watching your location only when you're using Google Maps?

The widespread assumption that Google collects all data all the time and uses it for everything is ridiculous. There’s a labyrinth of explicit user agreements, all of which are strictly enforced, and then there are further layers of voluntary restrictions on top of that. Yes, Google might collect location data even when you’re not using Maps (there are a lot of passionate, dedicated Timeline users), but you have to h…

> The widespread assumption that Google collects all data all the time and uses it for everything is ridiculous.

Maybe they fail to use it competently but it definitely collects a lot of data and attempting to stop it results in punitive reactions and disabling of features not needing it - and repeated badgering to permit Google to collect data again.

Google also collects data that I was initially unaware that it is collecting.

Re: Organic Maps

#376

Post by ihatehn »

aix1 wrote: post #175
palata wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you find it "pretty good", I guess you have never tried an OpenStreetMap-based app like Organic Maps. I also like OSMAnd a lot (I use both for different use-cases).

> I also like OSMAnd a lot (I use both for different use-cases). This is the first come I come across Organic Maps but I do use OSMAnd. I'm wondering how the two compare and would love to hear more about the use cases you have for each of them.

I tell people OsmAnd is a swiss army knife that does everything for power users (the cyclists or hikers or drivers who find it really important to do a few specific things that most apps can't do) whereas Organic Maps is the app I actually recommend to family and friends as soon as I know that there's decent address coverage in their area (it's OSM only, so if an address POI doesn't exist in OSM it isn't searchable in OM. But volunteers and everyday users are adding new addresses all the time.)

Re: Organic Maps

#377

Post by MayeulC »

ex-googlemaps wrote: post #180
aix1 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We had a really nice solution but privacy considerations made it extremely difficult and limited. Would you be willing to elaborate a bit more on those privacy considerations? (I guess what I'm struggling with is how cycling is different in this regard from other modalities.)

There are significantly more people using the other modes, especially in active navigation. For example, it’s well known that Google detects traffic through the movement of active users (there was the wagon of phones traffic jam experiment). Imagine trying to do something similar with the amount of cyclists actively using Google with the necessary privacy settings enabled on any given route. It would be noisy but pos…

I don't think it's necessary to jump right to data collection, the routing algorithms and incomplete maps are the issue. Of course, you'd need additional data about bike lanes, etc (which could come from crowdsourced data? Maybe that's what you are alluding to?).

As it is, offline routers such as Brouter and OSMAnd do a much better job, and it's pretty easy to convince other cyclists to use them.

Traffic jams are almost never an issue when biking - heavy car or bike traffic can slow you down, but by that point you have at least the same density as car traffic jams for data collection...

Re: Organic Maps

#378

Post by matkoniecz »

gniv wrote: post #251
acec wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No not trust it google maps either. There is a crossroads that is wrong in Google near my house and it is right in OSM. In fact... I did fix it but I will not report about the error to Google ;-)

> I did fix it but I will not report about the error to Google Why not? That seems like a weird stance. Is your desire to hurt Google so strong that you are not willing to help potentially thousands of people?

> Is your desire to hurt Google so strong that you are not willing to help potentially thousands of people?

Not the same person: my time is limited, so I volunteer to fix data only when it is released on open license allowing me and others to use it.

Otherwise I expect to be paid.

In general, I need more than "it will help others" to spend time on something, I am already spending too much time on things like this.

Re: Organic Maps

#379

Post by ihatehn »

shellfishgene wrote: post #13
baz00 wrote: post #2

I cannot really express how much praise I have for Organic Maps. It has got me out of the mire a couple of times due to the complete offline capability and paper maps being completely wrong. The OSM base layer is better than a lot of native maps out there. Not only that, you can search for a toilet almost anywhere, including in the middle of nowhere in central Asia, and it found one!

Maybe I'm a little jaded by how the app economy works nowadays, but I find it almost suspicious how fast development seems and how well supported Organic Maps is. At least the high level of quality is explained by the fact that the lead developers seem to be the founders of the original maps.me.

I'm a volunteer working on an improvement to the spoken directions and I can say with firsthand experience that Organic Maps' development is not suspiciously fast. It is simply a fork of Maps.ME which has gone to crap, so when you look at features per year over the whole lifespan it's really not a lot. I think OSM is growing in popularity especially as more people realize that FAANG are awful and so we're seeing more activity lately, but let's just say that it's taken me a year to get around to working on this task again (is it just easier to accomplish things during Back to School week and Christmas-New Years' week?) and in that time I have not had many merge conflicts to deal with. It's getting better, and things are happening more quickly, but certainly not suspiciously-quickly. OM has been a thing since 2021 and I've been trying to ditch Google since 2015 so I've been around for awhile seeing the progress: much slower than I'd like, but still remarkable. Certainly not comparable in any way to a VC-funded startup that can churn out a product in months, this is funded by donations and volunteer work.

Re: Organic Maps

#380

Post by ihatehn »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #234
milliams wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that it was always open-source.

It wasn't always. It started as MapsWithMe by a swiss company, which gave it away for free with a pro version (for which I paid), then mail.ru took it over and made it opensource (while all my build attempts failed) and then a new owner later added tons of ads and stuff into it and made it closed. Then some people forked the slightly older open source version.

Those people are the original founders who took it open source, which was a great move since otherwise it'd have become just another piece of shovelware getting enshittified into oblivion.
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