I use CoMaps, it works great. You get notified in the app to download the updated maps you selected every 2 weeks or so. Could be wildly different than that, just what I notice.
It's timing estimates are often 5-15 minutes off Apple Maps, which I find accurate, on ~two hour drives, but I imagine it depends on the traffic.
To improve OpenStreetMap, which CoMaps uses as the data source, I use StreetComplete[1]–it puts quests around your location which ask you questions, it's user-friendly. A thoughtful feature is that it lets you download data in a location on wifi, in case you didn't want to use cellular.
OpenStreetMap is like Wikipedia for mapping, anyone can contribute and improve the map, and StreetComplete is like Pokemon Go in the sense that you walk around and complete quests, except StreetComplete helps humanity, while Pokemon Go[2]....
I should check to see if I can notice my StreetComplete edits getting onto CoMaps. Might be hard because they're often about accessibility at crosswalks. I've seen quests asking the number of stairs in a staircase. Seriously, is there anything they don't collect?
If you are in the U.S. please each out to OSMUS, they are amazing and can connect you with trail mapping resources. There is a vibrant community of folks keeping our trails mapped!
Last I checked, not with StreetComplete. But the OSM wiki has a table of Android apps https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Android which column "Record tracks" can be sorted by, to see which apps have that feature.
How I've done similar before is to record a GPS trace with an OsmAnd plugin, upload it to OSM servers, import it as an overlay in the web-based editor on desktop, and used that and satellite imagery as reference to draw in the missing trail.
In a pinch you can also record a trace and edit directly on it in the field with the Android app Vespucci, but its UX is clunky and much less friendly to new contributors than the web-based iD editor.
As the other commenter mentioned the web editor is probably the most beginner-friendly editor. It might seem a little daunting but it's actually not that difficult to edit OSM. When you save your change there's an option to request a review of it. That'll get an experienced contributor to take a look at it and help clear up any mistakes.
OSM also has a public database of GPS tracks that contributors use to aid in mapping. Even just walking the trails with GPS tracking on and then uploading the tracks to OSM without doing anything else is a valuable contribution that will allow other contributors to map the trails at some point in the future.
> Despite being advertised as a community-driven project, key decisions, including financial management, partnerships (with Kayak, for instance), and the inclusion of proprietary components in the code were made by a small group of shareholders, often without input from the broader contributor community.
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 result 572 miles away that has a business name that contains exactly what was searched
- ... nowhere is there an exact full-name match that is 1.3 miles away, which can easily be found by exploring the map
Are there any apps that do this better? Android and desktop (e.g. linux) ideally. I'd love to use them more, but I've had endless problems using them. Good map data is kinda useless if it can't be retrieved, and trying to work around it by panning around and manually saving a hundred or so favorites really kinda sucks.
Tangential, but does anyone know if an app exists that that the video feed of your phone with the GPS loc and reads the signs from the road and compare it to OSM to update it if necessary?
Let’s be clear, in the end I use Waze for routing due to the traffic updates, but I see sometimes outdated speed limits and know OSM is one of its sources.
Oh I don't have a link but there was a project just like this someone hacked together a while back. I think it used Gemini live or something and as you walked and scanned things it would suggest changed to the map. It was a rough demo but seemed promising.
I've been wanting to do something similar but just by taking photos of menus and updating the POI with new hours/website/phone etc
As great as Waze and Google Maps are for dynamic routing and responsive path-finding, I am using rental scooters now, and at this point I really need to design some bicycle routes with intention and purpose, and Maps simply refuses to save any "dragged" or "pinned" route in any meaningful way, and I suppose this is deliberate, because A.I. knows best, kids!
Even for driving the major apps are crappy about routes. I was on Foothills Parkway a while ago and wanted to keep Apple Maps running just as a "miles/time remaining" indicator. It can't do anything other than fastest route, with the option to ignore highways.
So unless you set a waypoint halfway between every single entry/exit, it will want to get off the parkway and take US 321 instead.
You can manually set up the route using a bunch of waypoints, but then it tells you the distance/time to next stop (which are arbitrary map points) instead of the distance to the end of the parkway, and you can't save the route so you'd better not touch it or want to look at anything else on the map once you have it set up.
Anything other than cars I believe google maps/waze is nearly unuseable for navigation, yah. I think they even removed "bike" pathing too. Public transport is pretty alright, but very inaccurate vs local app when they use the same data and routing is lacking intelligence sometimes.
Anyone here has been using coMaps and care to share their experience, especially in comparison to OrganicMaps?
My only complaint to OrganicMaps was the slowness to calculate a direction, which in part is certainly because the path is calculated locally instead of some cloud server but old garmin devices also weren't online and can calculate paths on far less powerful hardware. So I'm guessing there is room for improvement on that part.
Comaps and organic maps are very similar (they forked very recently). The only difference I can think of from the top of my mind is that organic maps is not fully open source (map files and generator are proprietary) and has some kayak sponsored suggestions/reviews
My biggest issue with OrganicMaps is that the search isn't very good. It really struggles to find my destination sometimes. That's the one thing I'm afraid Google will always be better at.
It doesn't take so much to enable a good server search on top of OSM + openaddresses.
Local search will always be slow and bad.
But server search doesn't need that much. It's just that OS initiatives are severely understaffed. OS apps that have a Photon instance are already rare to find. Let's not talk about having an Overpass instance...
What is very hard to reproduce is Google's place review data.
I was talking in deep in the weed OSM signal group and apparently its a split between the address data not being present, and OrganicMap / CoMap being bugged.
The way to triage is asking nominatim, the geocoder from OSM. If it can resolve : its on the client side, if not, its a data problem.
I'm just parroting here. Happy to learn more.
This is THE only issue I have with those OSM client ( I don't care about traffic )
For good (server) search, one needs many layers (Photon, Pelias with OpenAdresses, Overpass, in-house pmtiles, etc.) using many DBs, each needing server ressources or expensive paid APIs.
It's obvioulsy expensive in terms of ops + dev, but also just to host.
It can't scale with only 0,0001 % of users donating to the app.
Fortunately, NLNet's there to fund work, but it's still nonethless only a tenth of what would be needed.
Plus map applications and general search engines don't talk to each other... I don't know why, but it is so. Maybe because all the well-known search engines are closed-source ?
This can be due to missing address information in OSM. I also find the grouping sometimes odd, e.g. searching for a street, the place names are from one level higher.
I used to use OrganicMaps. When coMaps forked, I changed to it. From my perspective there were no negatives. If anything, coMaps looked to be under more active development.
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.
While I do use mapping programs for directions, I more often use them for a more accurate estimate of time and traffic density. I haven't looked very hard, but I haven't seen any OpenStreetMap data or equivalent that shows "Real" travel times and traffic density.
I used to use wikiloc, but most of the things that offer which were the most interesting things were by paying, so I think that it could be some opportunity for using these maps and vibe coding for creating something spectacular!
Depends a lot on where you live. My village is pretty fresh cuz I update it lol. My impression is that it's quite good in western Europe, might take a month in major US cities, and probably years old in most other places. I think Indonesia, Israel, and Japan are decent as well.
There is a subway overlay.
And there is marked hiking routes overlay being in development.
There is a also an outdoor-focused map style (some people call it a layer too).
Is it possible to change the maps' colors and contrasts now? Last time I checked I thought the lower contrast and washed-out colors compared to Organic Maps were a poor choice so I switched back to OM.
perfect timing. i was using OpenStreetMap for my ios running app and I found out that there is a cap so I ended up switching to a paid solution and have been trying to build something like comaps by downloading all the tiles
I use CoMaps, it works great. You get notified in the app to download the updated maps you selected every 2 weeks or so. Could be wildly different than that, just what I notice.
It's timing estimates are often 5-15 minutes off Apple Maps, which I find accurate, on ~two hour drives, but I imagine it depends on the traffic.
To improve OpenStreetMap, which CoMaps uses as the data source, I use StreetComplete[1]–it puts quests around your location which ask you questions, it's user-friendly. A thoughtful feature is that it lets you download data in a location on wifi, in case you didn't want to use cellular.
OpenStreetMap is like Wikipedia for mapping, anyone can contribute and improve the map, and StreetComplete is like Pokemon Go in the sense that you walk around and complete quests, except StreetComplete helps humanity, while Pokemon Go[2]....
I should check to see if I can notice my StreetComplete edits getting onto CoMaps. Might be hard because they're often about accessibility at crosswalks. I've seen quests asking the number of stairs in a staircase. Seriously, is there anything they don't collect?
[1] https://streetcomplete.app/
[2] Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48487029 26 days ago 317 comments
Do you know if you can add hiking trails using StreetComplete? I noticed some trails are missing in my area and I would like to contribute
If you are in the U.S. please each out to OSMUS, they are amazing and can connect you with trail mapping resources. There is a vibrant community of folks keeping our trails mapped!
https://openstreetmap.us/
Last I checked, not with StreetComplete. But the OSM wiki has a table of Android apps https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Android which column "Record tracks" can be sorted by, to see which apps have that feature.
How I've done similar before is to record a GPS trace with an OsmAnd plugin, upload it to OSM servers, import it as an overlay in the web-based editor on desktop, and used that and satellite imagery as reference to draw in the missing trail.
In a pinch you can also record a trace and edit directly on it in the field with the Android app Vespucci, but its UX is clunky and much less friendly to new contributors than the web-based iD editor.
> an overlay in the web-based editor on desktop, and used that and satellite imagery as reference to draw in the missing trail.
If you added a gopro and SLAM to the GPS trace and imported USGS topographical data I wonder if you couldn't fully automate the process.
As the other commenter mentioned the web editor is probably the most beginner-friendly editor. It might seem a little daunting but it's actually not that difficult to edit OSM. When you save your change there's an option to request a review of it. That'll get an experienced contributor to take a look at it and help clear up any mistakes.
OSM also has a public database of GPS tracks that contributors use to aid in mapping. Even just walking the trails with GPS tracking on and then uploading the tracks to OSM without doing anything else is a valuable contribution that will allow other contributors to map the trails at some point in the future.
I have been suspicious that streetcomplete is funded by intelligence agencies who want to increase the amount of OSINT avalible.
any OS INT we contribute can be by definition used by intel agencies. such is the way of the world.
Relevant thread from yesterday's thread on the original project this was forked from
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48794575
https://itsfoss.com/news/organic-maps-fork-comaps/
> Despite being advertised as a community-driven project, key decisions, including financial management, partnerships (with Kayak, for instance), and the inclusion of proprietary components in the code were made by a small group of shareholders, often without input from the broader contributor community.
Nitpick: Organic Map is not original project. It's a fork of Maps.me.
Also forked for similar governance concerns :))
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:
Are there any apps that do this better? Android and desktop (e.g. linux) ideally. I'd love to use them more, but I've had endless problems using them. Good map data is kinda useless if it can't be retrieved, and trying to work around it by panning around and manually saving a hundred or so favorites really kinda sucks.Open source? Not that I've found. I use HERE WeGo for searching and driving, and CoMaps for walking around.
Probably posted because of related recent discussion on OrganicMaps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48794446
Which was in turn probably posted because I mentioned it on the same day under another submission
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48793684
Tangential, but does anyone know if an app exists that that the video feed of your phone with the GPS loc and reads the signs from the road and compare it to OSM to update it if necessary?
Let’s be clear, in the end I use Waze for routing due to the traffic updates, but I see sometimes outdated speed limits and know OSM is one of its sources.
Oh I don't have a link but there was a project just like this someone hacked together a while back. I think it used Gemini live or something and as you walked and scanned things it would suggest changed to the map. It was a rough demo but seemed promising.
I've been wanting to do something similar but just by taking photos of menus and updating the POI with new hours/website/phone etc
Looks like a glue-together narrow-purpose kind of app that AI is relatively good at producing.
This is the only app that allows you to easily add stops and permanently save paths for biking. Honestly a life changer.
As great as Waze and Google Maps are for dynamic routing and responsive path-finding, I am using rental scooters now, and at this point I really need to design some bicycle routes with intention and purpose, and Maps simply refuses to save any "dragged" or "pinned" route in any meaningful way, and I suppose this is deliberate, because A.I. knows best, kids!
Even for driving the major apps are crappy about routes. I was on Foothills Parkway a while ago and wanted to keep Apple Maps running just as a "miles/time remaining" indicator. It can't do anything other than fastest route, with the option to ignore highways.
So unless you set a waypoint halfway between every single entry/exit, it will want to get off the parkway and take US 321 instead.
You can manually set up the route using a bunch of waypoints, but then it tells you the distance/time to next stop (which are arbitrary map points) instead of the distance to the end of the parkway, and you can't save the route so you'd better not touch it or want to look at anything else on the map once you have it set up.
Anything other than cars I believe google maps/waze is nearly unuseable for navigation, yah. I think they even removed "bike" pathing too. Public transport is pretty alright, but very inaccurate vs local app when they use the same data and routing is lacking intelligence sometimes.
Anyone here has been using coMaps and care to share their experience, especially in comparison to OrganicMaps?
My only complaint to OrganicMaps was the slowness to calculate a direction, which in part is certainly because the path is calculated locally instead of some cloud server but old garmin devices also weren't online and can calculate paths on far less powerful hardware. So I'm guessing there is room for improvement on that part.
Comaps and organic maps are very similar (they forked very recently). The only difference I can think of from the top of my mind is that organic maps is not fully open source (map files and generator are proprietary) and has some kayak sponsored suggestions/reviews
> organic maps is not fully open source
Organic Maps is a for-profit venture that accepts donations. That's sketchy. Management also seems to have prior Kremlin links. Which is sketchy.
My biggest issue with OrganicMaps is that the search isn't very good. It really struggles to find my destination sometimes. That's the one thing I'm afraid Google will always be better at.
It doesn't take so much to enable a good server search on top of OSM + openaddresses.
Local search will always be slow and bad.
But server search doesn't need that much. It's just that OS initiatives are severely understaffed. OS apps that have a Photon instance are already rare to find. Let's not talk about having an Overpass instance...
What is very hard to reproduce is Google's place review data.
It's golden to enable good search.
> What is very hard to reproduce is Google's place review data.
fake anyways (quite easy to get negative comments deleted), and even for bad reviews.
Best look elsewhere or not at all.
I have the same grippe.
I was talking in deep in the weed OSM signal group and apparently its a split between the address data not being present, and OrganicMap / CoMap being bugged.
The way to triage is asking nominatim, the geocoder from OSM. If it can resolve : its on the client side, if not, its a data problem.
I'm just parroting here. Happy to learn more.
This is THE only issue I have with those OSM client ( I don't care about traffic )
For good (server) search, one needs many layers (Photon, Pelias with OpenAdresses, Overpass, in-house pmtiles, etc.) using many DBs, each needing server ressources or expensive paid APIs.
It's obvioulsy expensive in terms of ops + dev, but also just to host.
It can't scale with only 0,0001 % of users donating to the app.
Fortunately, NLNet's there to fund work, but it's still nonethless only a tenth of what would be needed.
Plus map applications and general search engines don't talk to each other... I don't know why, but it is so. Maybe because all the well-known search engines are closed-source ?
This can be due to missing address information in OSM. I also find the grouping sometimes odd, e.g. searching for a street, the place names are from one level higher.
I used to use OrganicMaps. When coMaps forked, I changed to it. From my perspective there were no negatives. If anything, coMaps looked to be under more active development.
Tried it today. Works fine for navigation. I am missing live traffic info. This is the one thing keeping me in Google Maps the past years.
Same. Apparently there's ongoing work to integrate live traffic: https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/projects/21877
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.
Magic Earth is fairly decent at traffic and dynamic routing. Worth the small subscription fee to keep them going, in my opinion.
HERE WeGo does traffic, if you want to ditch Google Maps.
While I do use mapping programs for directions, I more often use them for a more accurate estimate of time and traffic density. I haven't looked very hard, but I haven't seen any OpenStreetMap data or equivalent that shows "Real" travel times and traffic density.
Indeed, because gleaning telemetry data from millions of active users isn't a map applications normal intended use-case.
I used to use wikiloc, but most of the things that offer which were the most interesting things were by paying, so I think that it could be some opportunity for using these maps and vibe coding for creating something spectacular!
Does anyone know how fresh the business data is? like opening, closure, phone, address of businesses?
i think one thing that's going for google is the network effects and what it's able to do.
Depends a lot on where you live. My village is pretty fresh cuz I update it lol. My impression is that it's quite good in western Europe, might take a month in major US cities, and probably years old in most other places. I think Indonesia, Israel, and Japan are decent as well.
Agreed, same here. But I don't update shops I don't support, such as tobacco, big chains.
You can take the initiative here.
It's as fresh as OSM databse : it depends.
Honestly in my experience is that in some parts of the world, or even particular neighborhoods even google maps is useless.
Even for routing google maps still fail with some one way streets directions.
Do CoMaps somehow support overlays, like bus routes? OSMAnd does that, but I see no such option in CoMaps anywhere (a map layer, a separate map, etc).
There is a subway overlay. And there is marked hiking routes overlay being in development. There is a also an outdoor-focused map style (some people call it a layer too).
Is it possible to change the maps' colors and contrasts now? Last time I checked I thought the lower contrast and washed-out colors compared to Organic Maps were a poor choice so I switched back to OM.
There is an outdoor map style which is more contrast to the general/default style, if that helps.
Very good for trails
How does it compare to AllTrails in America?
Unless I’m mistaken they both ultimately use OpenStreetMap data. So, effectively the same coverage of trails.
AllTrails has its whole review system sitting on top of course.
perfect timing. i was using OpenStreetMap for my ios running app and I found out that there is a cap so I ended up switching to a paid solution and have been trying to build something like comaps by downloading all the tiles
Great for hiking and sharing path.
So nice to be able to do that locally and just send a .gpx file
I tried a TON of hiking apps and this is the best free one hands down.
Being able to download maps, tap to set destination, and see elevation all for free makes it top tier.
How is this different from OpenStreetMaps? Or does it just use OSM as its underlying engine?
OSM is mostly a db with an old website for contributors, osm.org.
Its a renderer. It bakes live OSM data once very few weeks.
Since a few weeks CoMaps updates its map data roughly every week, so maps are a lot fresher now (also compared to Organic Maps :))
Tried today, I like the record track feature
Would love to see a Windows desktop version.