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A community-led fork of Organic Maps

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Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#81

Post by karussell »

kmarc wrote: 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…

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 like photon the search can be more user friendly. We've put together photon and GraphHopper routing on GraphHopper Maps: https://graphhopper.com/maps/ which you could self-host on your own (i.e. also use offline): https://github.com/karussell/local-maps

GraphHopper Maps is also available on fdroid store or you can install the website as PWA in iOS.

Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of GraphHopper.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#82

Post by jraph »

david-gpu wrote: post #78
jraph wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, ok, makes sense! Yeah, getting a nice bike route on OrganicMaps indeed involves some manual app convincing when an obvious bike route exists, I had the exact same thing last week, I agree this could be improved especially given the data is already present in OSM.

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?

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#83

Post by _fat_santa »

karussell wrote: post #81
kmarc wrote: 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…

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…

> (and big advantage) of functioning offline by default.

I don't know about others but that's the main reason I use it. My day to day mapping app is still Google Maps but I always keep a copy of Organic Maps with downloaded maps of wherever I'm going as a backup. While I do not use it often, it's gotten me out of a couple of sticky situations while camping and roadtripping.

Organic Maps (and other offline mapping providers) are far from perfect and the UX is just not the same as it is on Google Maps for example. But with it being a backup app, if I need to open it I don't really care about the limitations, I just need an offline map.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#84

Post by pbmonster »

RetroTechie wrote: post #48
sam_lowry_ wrote: post #13

Why do people contribute to Organic Maps and not to OSM? I always assumed that Organic Maps was a sophisticated way to distribute OSM data, nothing more.

You need both: the map data (OSM project), and software for viewing/using it. Ideally any app using OSM data would enable contributing to the underlaying map data. But that's probably not how it works. For what it's worth: I like Organic Maps for being more lightweight, quicker rendering & simpler configuration than OSMand. But it (still? haven't used in a while) does lack some useful features like points of interest…

> Would be nice if it were easy to share (offline) map data between apps. Download in app A, backup on sd card , use from app B, C, D, or on other device by swap/copy sd card. Maybe it's possible, but I haven't figured out how (on Android).

I'm also really hoping for that. Some kind of local OSM map server that all apps in the ecosystem call to provide geodata.

I run OSMand, StreetComplete, Organic Maps and Magic Earth on my phone. I need all of them to download the exact same geo data. And for convenience reasons, I usually load entire countries. It's so annoying having to download a country in app #3...

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#85

Post by atkirtland »

dagw wrote: post #54
gray_charger wrote: post #30

What's the difference between Organic Maps/this and OSMAnd?

OSMAnd has more advanced features and settings and things you can configure, but at the expense of a nice user friendly out of the box experience. Organic Maps (and thus this project) aimed to produce a more user friendly and streamlined app focusing on usability over lots of features.

The thing that keeps on Organic Maps instead of OSMAnd is how slow it is.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#86

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

The concern seems to be they want a bunch of guarantees about what will be done with the project - not because there is a change happening from Organic, but because they're afraid of a change happening in the future. If such a change happens in the future, they can fork then. I mean, hell, this already happened; they had Maps.ME, it was sold, Roman forked it to Organic. If it gets sold again they can fork again. This seems like it'll hurt the community more than if they'd waited until it was necessary.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#87

Post by agile-gift0262 »

kmarc wrote: 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…

Another alternative to mapy.com you could try is Here WeGo. I prefer it to any other Google Maps alternative I have tried. And there are some things, like the car navigation, that I prefer on it over Google Maps. I don't find their privacy policy creepy, and the most creepy parts are opt-in and the toggle clearly explains what you'd be opting into and what feature you are missing out on by not opting in. Mapy's privacy policy is less creepy than Here's in some aspects, but some of the creepiness that's opt-in in Here, like location data sharing for traffic, it's on with no opting-out on Mapy.

I'd prefer an open-source alternative, but as you said, there isn't any that currently fits my needs.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#88

Post by mnmalst »

kmarc wrote: 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 started using osmand a lot more lately while biking and I agree route calculation on the phone (hi Pixel 4a :) ) are super slow but for that reason you can configure alternative (online) routing engines in the settings https://osmand.net/docs/user/navigation/routing/online-routi.... I use https://openrouteservice.org/ which generates long routes in seconds and works great in general.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#89

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

netbioserror wrote: post #7
ano-ther wrote: post #2

What’s the backstory? > There was no real progress in negotiations with Organic Maps shareholders. > It appears that Viktor is only open to a guarantee not to sell the project, however besides that he wants to retain full control of Organic Maps. > And Organic Maps future is uncertain still, as the disagreement between shareholders (Viktor and Roman) has not been resolved.

I'm more partial to a BDFL than a committee, so I'm not sure why I'd prefer this fork. Community management is not a de facto improvement.

I could have been a BDFL for a project that I authored, but chose against that.

I often say that the best thing that I ever did for the project, was walk away from it. The team that took it over, has made it extremely successful.

Re: A community-led fork of Organic Maps

#90

Post by saubeidl »

boramalper wrote: post #65
saubeidl wrote: post #28

Again? Wasn't the whole thing about Organic Maps to be a community-led fork of maps.me? So now we're at a fork of a fork?

> So now we're at a fork of a fork? This history is full of such "forks of forks" (whatever you're trying to imply with that): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix#/media/File:Un...

I'm not trying to imply anything with that other than that it seems the original fork seems to have failed in its stated goals of being the community-led, non-commercialized version.
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