- cross-posted to:
- opensource@lemmy.ml
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- opensource@lemmy.ml
- technology@beehaw.org
OrganicMaps is amazing. Strong recommend to everyone. I only recently found out about it.
Same, I have recently installed LineageOS on my phone and was looking for various replacements for Goggle apps. What I really like about OrganicMaps is that it downloads the maps locally, so you can view it even if you aren’t connected to the internet.
google maps can do that too though
IIRC At one point Google Maps would let you download a map for browsing, but you couldn’t do offline navigation. Don’t know if that’s still the case.
Organic Maps does the routing on the device.
Thanks, I wasn’t aware of that. I should have really had this information a year ago when I was constantly screenshotting Google Maps, LOL.
The feature looks made ugly on purpose though (compared to organic maps where you can just download the whole country or select more precisely what you want)
Any details on why it’s amazing? What does it do or doesn’t?
- It has the map corpus from OpenStreetMap, so one of the best in the world
- It works offline - just download the desired maps onto the device
- That makes it really, really fast. Google Maps is slower
- You can also use it in areas with bad reception. I’m using it for hiking in the woods where there is no cell phone connection available
- I really like the UI - they are f.e. better at displaying house numbers and street names than Google.
- No ads
Google’s maps are decent and can also be downloaded to be offline…? But yeah, it seems like it’s a nice alternative, especially if you want to be free from Google’s grips.
On the hiking note, it also shows a lot of trails. I used it to navigate to a trail head and was pleasantly surprised to see a rough outline of the trails I would be using plus some others I didn’t know were there.
Organic Maps was put back onto the Play Store the next day day: https://organicmaps.app/news/2024-08-18/good-news-organic-maps-appeared-again-in-the-google-play-store/
Yeah but it demonstrates googles unwillingness to cooperate and give fair warnings.
Absolutely love organic maps for cycling! It recommendeds sensible routes that are much safer. The only feature I miss (and I know organic maps strives for 100% feature completeness even offline so this would be unlikely to be added) is navigation using public transit in the UK. The national rail app is painfully slow and isn’t easy to just search a location and just go, but it does work. Every bus company has their own app too… I haven’t found a good replacement yet unfortunately :/
Magic Earth (while not FOSS, it’s privacy oriented though) can do this.
There’s also Transportr, but AFAIK it’s been unmaintained for quite a while now, so it may not work / stop working soon.
the biggest problem I have with switching is that Google Maps is a business directory. open street maps is empty where i live. it works okay for navigation, but not so much for finding a coffee.
Be the change your want to see in the world https://droidify.eu.org/app/?id=de.westnordost.streetcomplete&repo_address=https://f-droid.org/archive
Link to fdroid next time
Oh weird. That’s shared from droid-ify which is an f-droid client.
Here’s the proper link https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.westnordost.streetcomplete/index.html
It says “page not found”, maybe because I’m not in EU.
I’m in the US, also says page not found for me.
Yea looks like they were linking to this: Street Complete
Same in EU
Very strange. It doesn’t work. I shared directly from the f-droid client droid-ify
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.westnordost.streetcomplete/index.html
Yeah trying to find anything on any of the competing apps is basically impossible. I mean ffs OSMand literally couldn’t do address lookup!
I just recently learned this.
For OsmAnd, go to search, then the categories tab, and then hit “Online Search”.
Voila, address lookup.
I have found Organic Map’s search to be far better than OSMand. OSMand has far more features though.
Same issue here. I really like their maps in general, but my local area in OSM is about a decade out of date
Yeah, it’s interesting to look through the edit history over the years. With StreetComplete I recently fixed ~8 stores that were many years out of date, during an hour walk.
It’s fun to find a real hole-in-the-wall that even google maps doesn’t have.
As many have already told you, you can contribute to OSM, I have put in it almost all the establishments in my area (Not at Big area but…). Although soon I have to update them
im on board with the idea in general, but im not going to do this. it would be an endless effort to the benefit of almost nobody. places go up and down so fast here that google maps is often out of date too. it’s filled with stale information and im flagging missing places constantly. every digital community in this country is a garbage pile.
the ride share apps here do use open street maps though, and im making corrections to building addresses when i find something isn’t right. it’s great.
Umm…it benefits loads of people.
On OSM you don’t have to just flag something. You can edit it directly, so it leads to more accurate information.
But you can also just flag it if editing is not your cup of tea. Here’s a convenient, non-techy tool to add notes for others to use when editing: https://www.onosm.org/
Great point
I keep businesses in my area up-to-date, doesn’t take much time at all.
That kind of contribution seems like a lower level of effort than making changes to source code.
And there are apps that make it very very easy and fun. Check out street complete.
I felt the same however Organic Maps did have many businesses. And with Street Complete I can correct any errors when I visit.
It may simply be my area, but I so recommend organic maps over Osmand for business and POI lookups
You can contribute them!
There’s a pretty barebones editor in Organic Maps, but you can also check out Street Complete and Every door (more advanced and less user friendly, though insanely efficient)
I use Vespucci, it’s advanced but still pretty easy if you just want to do basic editing. https://vespucci.io/
P.s. how do you link to an app on fdroid?
i think openstreetmaps only works in big countries honestly
What does the size of the country have to do with it? Which good big and bad small countries are you talking about?
Most people don’t use openstreetmaps on these small countries like with low/medium population it feels like apple maps on there
Can you give an example? Because I’ve just looked at Luxembourg, Nepal, and Aruba, and they’re all littered with named buildings and landmarks. Pyongyang even has a fair bit filled in.
didnt rlly try it but might try tbh but idk since i see people here where i live use google maps
edit: tried it and it really is quite outdated my house does not show up and idk if waze is even privacy respecting
All it takes is you to fix this. Its even easier in a small country
oh okay
there are ways to make it easier; it’s been gamified:
https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete
Available on FDROID.
When my partner stops to play pokemon go, I complete some Open Street Map info quests…
Just downloaded and installed Organic Maps from F-Droid. Looks really nice.
Don’t post pictures of text
Lemmy added an alt text field for image-only posts a few versions ago; it would be nice if more people would use it.
At least this post does link to the mastodon post which it is a screenshot of.
You don’t have to use it. Just paste it in the text field before or after the image.
Does the app have:
- Location sharing
- Live traffic updates
- Public transportation
Missing one of these is a deal breaker.
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Yes, you can share location, the widgets aren’t as fancy as Google integration with everything.
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Not feasible without the constant data harvesting in the background, which it doesn’t do. It doesn’t log your every move as Google does. Privacy vs surveillance, will always be at odds.
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Depending on the area. In my country public transportation is way better on OSM than on Gmaps. Oftentimes Gmaps won’t even have large structures like train stations or bus terminals. It depends on users and contributors.
- It would be cool if there was an opt-in libre database to which we could submit pseudonymous traffic data. It would be hard to prevent sybil attacks though.
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Google is such a great source of inspiration (^_^)
Openstreetmaps has 8.75% of the contributors Google Maps has.
Organic Maps has 1% the user base Google Maps has.
internet explorer, yahoo mail, myspace, icq… things change. unfortunately it’s mostly due to a huge company having the resources to promote their product to convince people to migrate but still. people can leave old giants.
Proton is 5.5% the size of G-mail. 100m vs 1.8b.
i think proton is getting shittified as well but you should make a post listing all these alternatives for different services, rather than peppering them in the comments.
Yeah, and Wikipedia, linux,… have become important as well, without big corpo
And its still better :)
The same can be said about Lemmy and Reddit, but look where we are.
We need to support open-source projects and stop being simps for bad companies like Google.
Agreed! I got one for that too:
Lemmy vs Reddit
Monthly Users (0.004%) 44k vs 1.2b
1 billion users on reddit is not realistic
With 700 million bots conducting marketing and psychological warfare ops it is!
I mean in visitors.
The difficulty is asking people to get started with this. People want to get to work/navigate as quickly as possible to where they need to be, they don’t want to be figuring it out. Social media can be janky and you’ll be patient, but if you’re late for something because you’re struggling to adjust to an app you’re more likely to go back to Google/Apple Maps
So we work harder
I just did 30 minutes of contributing to the osm database.
So? Every platform starts at 0%.
I think the point is 8× more contributions
This is very ironic coming from someone using Lemmy.
Its good to know how you measure up against the big corpos.
Openstreetmap is better than Google where I live (Anatolian side of İstanbul).
Take a definition of ACTIVE contributors, because both projects have a lot of inactive contributors that only registered and didn’t do anything but just one update and left, if any.
Google is known for dropping projects that they can’t monetize enough. Maps’ been around for a while, but it can always just disappear for public use. Or decide that you need a Google account too use it and that’s a privacy nightmare. We need alternatives, but in this case, we need free and open source alternatives. We can’t put all the eggs in the same basket.
oh this is amazing
I got the files where do I add them?
Can’t we script a complete copy of Google maps data (shops, highways etc) to this? Is the API restricted? Can we run distributed jobs for it? I can spin up some compute if someone is interested in trying this
@MigratingtoLemmy @101 @openstreetmap
No, this is against Google TOS and OpenStreetMap policy on data sources and the Data Working Group will step in and block any accounts doing this to protect the project as a whole.
That’s explicitly forbidden in Google Maps TOS
Organic maps SPECIFICALLY doesn’t want that. It would be grounds for them being sued and having to comb through their database and remove and “questionable” material.
It would be the end of the project, they don’t have money for that.
Not Organic Maps, that’s just the client. The data is OpenStreetMap, more info about imports here: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import
Oops, right. New to this, just started using.
@Melatonin No problem 🙂 Organic Maps is a great client for OSM. And doesn’t it feel good knowing that by correcting something through Organic Maps you are taking part in a community of 10M users who together created a 2TB xml file map of the whole planet, free for anyone to download? It’s one of the miracles of the free libre world.
Yeah they restricted the API a while back.
All of you are invited on !openstreetmap@lemmy.ml
Also checkout the many editing tools, such as https://mapcomplete.org, htpps://streetcomplete.app,…
Thank you for sharing the links!
I successfully used Every Door during my holidays to contribute
There’s a small learning curve I wish some bothered to understand first. Does this app help? The part of this I don’t like is vacationers leaving useless names like ‘Mango lady’, ‘many street vendors’ for a block, or ‘local restaurant’ since they can’t read the sign as opposed marking up the cuisine type, maybe adding an English description, & leaving the name blank. Nobody expects uploads to be perfect but Bangkok is littered with this noise that makes it hard to follow or find things.
It takes effort and knowledge to make good contributions, this app is just a tool to do that.
I can only say I myself try to make valuable contributions, some other people might care less.
I think EveryDoor requires some relatively deep understanding of OSM before actually being a useful tool. So edits like this should be rare with that tool. Many of the edits like this are from when MapsMe was very popular and suddenly introduced editing, without enough nuance in the process. Bad edits do happen everywhere, you need a good balance between people who data curation and newbies making beginner mistakes. In some places, there’s a lack of experienced people maintaining the data.
Every Door
thank you for sharing, definitely the easiest for Android from my research :-)
Note: there is a comparison of editor apps here: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Comparison_of_editors
It’s only a matter of time until Google Maps will enshittify, too.
I didn’t know about Organic-Maps. I used Osmand, which has a subscription fee for downloading maps.
Thx!
I didn’t have to pay for it, installed from F-Droid, and I can download any map I’ve tried so far. When I’m traveling I like to pre-download the standard map for the whole state if it’s one I don’t already have installed. It’s nice to not have to worry about data / reception.
Overall OsmAnd is a pretty good GPS-map-navigation app, but has several annoyances and bugs. Still better than using Google’s app to me. I need to check out Organic maps too
Also nice to download all the Wikipedia data for the area, so you can read about places you visit…again, all without data.
Cool, I didn’t know you could do that
Osmand saved my ass multiple times hiking in very remote locations. Absolutely worth the subscription!
Definetly one of the subscriptions I don’t regret as much as others but still a steep cost for my frequency of usage. I need it approx 6 weeks per year and only as backup when traveling/hiking.
A free alternative (simply Osm) is much appreciated.
The pro version of OsmAnd is free on fdroid!
Anything that keeps maps in local storage so you can use GPS while offline is somewhere between very helpful and lifesaving. Sounds like Osmand is in there.
Organic Maps lets you download also. I got it specifically for backpacking because it enabled that. It certainly has been worth the $0. I should probably donate something each trip.