8 ms·

Organic Maps: An open-source maps app that doesn't suck

340 points by ryukoposting 3y ago

lmm 3y ago
Why this over OSMAnd, which I've been happily using for years?
- ryukoposting 3y ago
  I haven't used OSMAnd, but I'd give it a shot. What's up with the $30 premium version on the Play store?
  - pmontra 3y ago
    That's OSMAnd plus, with unlimited maps. Install it from F-Droid and you won't pay. For some reason they upload the plus version for free there.
- orblivion 3y ago
  A lot fewer features, a lot more streamlined UI. OSMAnd has too many features for my needs, it takes longer to figure out how to do something. I think a lot of people agree. But maybe OSMAnd works better for you.
- dest 3y ago
  In my opinion OSMAnd interface is slow, that of Organic is very responsive
  - orblivion 3y ago
    Have you checked recently? I think I recall there being some sort of significant performance improvement at some point in the last few years. Could be wrong.
- cuu508 3y ago
  OsmAnd: tons of customization options, "prefer unpaved roads" routing option (great for adv motorcycling), can follow GPX tracks, battery hog. Organic Maps: quick, minimalistic UI, can display but not navigate along GPX tracks. Lighter on battery. I use it like I would use paper map when hiking.
- zootboy 3y ago
  Anecdotally, I've found OSMand's search functionality to vary between OK and completely unusable. Especially when entering addresses, OSMand really struggles to interpret what should be quite straightforward entries. While I haven't extensively used OrganicMaps, I found its search functionality to behave much better.
- ianburrell 3y ago
  I use OSMAnd on my phone, where the extra features are useful for hiking and biking. I use Organic Maps on my iPad where I want a simple offline map.
kop316 3y ago
I am assuming this is talking about Android, but for Mobile Linux, Pure Maps has been awesome: https://rinigus.github.io/pure-maps/ https://rinigus.github.io/pure-maps/ I have been successfully using it for over four months now for both car an bike navigation.
- chrismorgan 3y ago
  Now if only I could actually install it under Arch Linux. The AUR package pure-maps is broken (possibly other failures, but mapbox-gl-native fails to build, tries to download https://dev.alpinelinux.org/archive/mapbox-gl-native/mapbox-gl-native-1.6.0.tar.gz https://dev.alpinelinux.org/archive/mapbox-gl-native/mapbox-... but gets a 404).
  - aaomidi 3y ago
    It’s on flatpak. No reason not to use that tbh.
    - chrismorgan 3y ago
      Bleh, Flatpak. No thanks, I want a proper distribution, and I don’t have gigabytes of spare disk space anyway. (I’ve never installed Flatpak before, but installed it just briefly to see what it would say, and it seems to want to download one gigabyte to install this—mostly KDE stuff—which is presumably compressed so that it’ll take even more disk space afterwards. Note that I think I might be overestimating its figure by up to about 350MB, as org.kde.Platform.Locale is “< 355.1 MB (partial)”, so maybe it only downloads the locale you’re using. Either way, my disk is close enough to full at present that I can’t really afford this stuff, even if I didn’t find things like Flatpak and Snap distasteful.)
      - aaomidi 3y ago
        It basically is a static distribution of an application. The benefits are that, you don’t need to be on a specific version of anything to make this work properly. For what it’s worth, flatpaks do share dependencies as much as possible. So that inflated size isn’t going to be replicated for each application. Also, flatpak _is_ a proper distribution. It doesn’t really do anything fancy other than isolate the dependencies from other tools on your system.
3np 3y ago
Also worth to keep an eye on: https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway/ https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway/
synesso 3y ago
As someone who built advanced turn by turn routing based on openstreetmap, problems like the u-turn in the article are hard. Giving good turn instructions for the last 2% is also hard, because so often it requires an appreciation of what the turn looks like from the driver's perspective, not just the curves and angles of the vertices.
freddie_mercury 3y ago
Doesn't work with addresses in Vietnam, so my vote is "still sucks for 100 million people". I tried putting in "46/8B/29 Xô Viết Nghệ Tĩnh" and it directs me to some place 132km away even though it is actually a few hundred meters from my current location.
- orblivion 3y ago
  Search sometimes isn't ordered by distance even in the US. The "obvious" answer I'm looking for can be the 3rd or 4th.
  - freddie_mercury 3y ago
    I scrolled through the entire list of 20 or whatever results and none of them were close to correct. Half the results were in different cities. The results for my city (Ho Chi Minh City) are for totally different roads. For instance "Hem 46 Vo Van Tan" is listed as a result, as is "Hẻm 46 Trần Quang Diệu". Also notice that one has correct diacritics and one doesn't, which gives the whole thing a weird amateurish vibe. I know this is probably the fault on OSM data and not the app itself. But OSM sucks and anything built on it will suck.
    - mistercheph 3y ago
      OSM data in my area is much higher quality than any of the commercial competitors. But, I guess that's because I and a community of local contributors improve them. I'm sorry to hear the quality is substandard in your area, and the amateurish vibe likely comes from the fact that most OSM data is contributed by amateur volunteers.
- JimDabell 3y ago
  I tried getting directions to the next stop on my rail line. When I searched for the station name it didn’t come up, but it did find a road under construction and two fences. I’m not sure why I would ever search for a fence. When I cancelled the search and selected the Transport category before searching, it found it but there was seemingly no way to view the route details beyond which line to get on and how long it would take. With Google Maps, it will let you see the specific walking directions to the origin train station and how long it takes, it will tell you the line and direction to take, how long that train journey will take, which stops are between the two stations you are travelling between, which exit to leave the destination train station at, and walking directions to my destination once I leave the train station. It will also let me put in what time I want to arrive and work backwards to figure out what time I need to leave, taking the train schedules into account. It’s great that there is an open source option available, but it has a long, long way to go before it’s a good choice.
UberFly 3y ago
Tested Organic Maps for the first time on an emergency drive to Chicago and the Midwest, and with the fiancee? Author's got guts.
throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
Organic Maps is the OSS fork of Maps.me, which was basically the best maps app ever made, but was sold. Both use OSM but also can load other map sources (iirc). I used to use Maps.me extensively when traveling abroad as it provided way better maps than Google, and all offline. This is a tried and tested platform that works great, led by people who know their stuff and care deeply about the user. Please donate if you like it: https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps
- appplication 3y ago
  I love OSS products, especially OpenStreetMap, but I have a hard time believing it could be better than the big players. Apple and Google both use OSM data as well, but supplement it with massive internal mapping efforts. What makes Organic Maps better? If it’s interface and features, sure I can buy that. I’m not sure I would believe that base map correctness or POIs could ever be better though. It’s such a hard and ever changing problem, those with the superset of information will always have more the capability to build a better map.
  - FrostKiwi 3y ago
    > What makes Organic Maps better? > I’m not sure I would believe that base map correctness or POIs could ever be better though. You'll be surprised. I cannot speak for Organic Maps, but I can speak for OSMand tested for years in Germany and Japan. Same OSM data at the end of the day. Even today, OSMand distinguishes better between building blocks. I see subdivisions of address numbers, which Google Maps hides with it's minimalist grey for the whole apartment block design. Further more, I often see small walkways and paths simply not represented in Google Maps, whereas they are in Google Maps. And for some reason, here in Japan Google Maps often suggests too-clever for its own good detours, which end up being way slower, whereas OSMand with it's simpler(?) navigation algorithm sticks to more consistent routes along bigger roads. If address and POI search could be further improved, I wouldn't see a reason to use Google Maps ever again.
    - wiz21c 3y ago
altcognito 3y ago
I had the same weird “do a u-turn at an arbitrary point on the freeway” problem with Google maps for about a month while there was construction in the area. Strangest thing. (Was not a get off the freeway and back on)
cturtle 3y ago
I love Organic Maps! I don't use it for driving, but I do use it regularly for hiking. It is reassuring to know that even if I don't have service I can open the app and can check to see if I'm still on the trail. Highly recommended! I'll have to try navigation sometime.
AndyKluger 3y ago
I've been trying to like it, but it doesn't have named places results like I'd really want, and it even fails to locate straight up addresses sometimes. I'm keeping it installed for now and will keep checking back.
- zolbrek 3y ago
  I had the issue of Organic Maps not recognizing addresses until I realized they were located in areas I hadn't downloaded yet.
  - AndyKluger 3y ago
    That makes sense, but my problems are in my own area, already downloaded.
jmspring 3y ago
I am curious how it does its routing. For the Bay Area to a place I go north of Truckee, it takes what may be the shortest route (super curvy) rather than the best.
ryukoposting 3y ago
Author here, I'm going to bed now but it's exciting to see this level of interest in the blog post. I apologize in advance if the site crashes and burns while I'm asleep - this is my own made-from-scratch blogging platform and I'm not sure if it's really "front page of HN-scale" yet.
- sambazi 3y ago
  loads blazing fast and has good design. seems well done
- ynoxinul 3y ago
  Thank you for the great app! Feature request: integration with BRouter for navigation (like OSMAnd does). Currently bicycle navigation is not very good in Organic Maps.
  - sambazi 3y ago
    barking up the wrong tree op is author of the linked blog post, not the app
  - ryukoposting 3y ago
    Sorry to disappoint, but I made the blog, not the map!
fuzzy2 3y ago
Recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37347447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37347447
stevage 3y ago
Just tried it with bike routing and it is pretty terrible. Suggested following two massive roads instead of the obvious bike paths nearby. So not useful for that purpose.
- siwatanejo 3y ago
  For the bike use-case OsmAnd might be better, as other replies in this HN entry suggest.
  - stevage 3y ago
    That's what I mostly use. I was just curious to see whether organic maps had improved since the last time I tried it. No.
- timeon 3y ago
  For me ideal bike routing is like car routing (main road uses shortest distances and has fever intersections - which is safer) but uses bike paths when it is shorter option. Unfortunately most bike routing apps will always prefer bike path even if it is just 100m along the main road where you need to go of the road and then return.
  - stevage 3y ago
    Yeah the good apps give you options. In this case there was no reason at all to take the major roads. Many parallel options existed.
- eythian 3y ago
  I also just gave it a go. I live in Amsterdam where biking is pretty much the dominant mode, and it wasn't great. I told it to take me to a place in the north of the city (over a river), and it gave me directions over a bridge which is about a 14km trip rather than via the free ferry which makes it more like 4km. It also oddly doesn't optimise to the route I usually take (for the segment that makes sense) which is both shorter and quieter. Perhaps it tries to minimise corners, but on this route it doesn't make sense to. OSMand both has the "shortcut" and knows about the ferry.
daft_pink 3y ago
I dunno if anyone remembers running navigation software on a Palm Treo when a 1 gb sd card was super expensive, but you would actually download a major highways file of the United States with all the major roads and that was only 50-100mb. While the last mile smaller roads were enormous files and you would download a state or metro area for your departure zone and your destination zone. It worked really well. You can probably navigate fairly well off of major roads maps that are publicly available for long trips, but the last mile local roads and short distances are paradoxically the major challenge.
aorth 3y ago
This kind of testing and feedback is important for Organic Maps. Good on the author for taking the time to evaluate, investigate, and file an issue on GitHub. It takes so much time, but is invaluable. Still, as someone who has contributed tens of thousands of edits to OpenStreetMap, uploaded hundreds of GPS traces, donates to Organic Maps, and compiles the Organic Maps Android application from git master a few times a week, I constantly find myself wondering when it will finally be good enough that I won't second guess it.
- nicbou 3y ago
  OSM surprises me with its accuracy, so long as you are trying to navigate the world and not find a business.
- Vinnl 3y ago
  Ha, additionally I wonder if that will happen before Google Maps will be good enough that I won't second-guess it.
- ryukoposting 3y ago
  If you are this deeply involved with Organic Maps, you might never trust it fully. You know too much! This is true of any software developer. Something that looks great from the outside can be really nasty under the hood. It's easy to bias your view of your work based on the tiny flaws you see in it, but the average user wouldn't see those faults.
mid-kid 3y ago
As an avid OSMand user, it's a shame that he doesn't compare the two. They're the big players in this space.
- kmarc 3y ago
  I wish OsmAnd had the rendering engine of OrganicMaps. That would be a killer app. Right now, osmand on my phone is virtually unusable. I slow down, and as if I were stepping on egg shells, I still try to use osmand because of its wikivoyage and Wikipedia integration. But seriously, not caching off-screen rendered vector tiles make it feel like an app from the 90s. It's feature-full, but redraws on each user interaction. :-( Organic maps is super fast, in comparison. Their open communication on Telegram makes the project look even more sexy.
  - tetris11 3y ago
    Same. I used OSMAnd for years, both out of a sense of civic duty, and because I thought vectors would be superior. Loading and rendering those vectors on a 6 year old phone though, woof. I still miss the OSMAnd features though: tracking my rides, altitude/speed/gravel metrics.
  - xigoi 3y ago
    Have you enabled the new renderer? It's still worse than Organic's, but much faster than the old one.
    - kmarc 3y ago
      I have been using the new renderer since it was available as a hidden beta feature. Parts of rendering feel smoother but it's painful to watch how streets are redrawn. I also live in a very densely mapped area, which definitely affects rendering performance. Very remote places / not well mapped areas (South America, Laos, Eastern-Europe) render somewhat better, but nothing comparable to Organic maps or StreetComplete
- ximm 3y ago
  OSMand crashed regularly for me (my guess is out of memory). Organic Maps doesn't do that, so that's good.
hiergiltdiestfu 3y ago
Nice article, thanks. This reminded me of the early days of waze.
mongol 3y ago
Not opensource but Locus Map is the one I always return too. Very feature rich and developed by a team that cares.
- Liskni_si 3y ago
  Second this. It's a swiss army knife of a map. Supports planning, track recording, export to various formats and online services like Strava, tools for Geocaching, map overlays, points/track database with folders, dashboards that turn your phone into a bike computer, and many more. And yeah the developers are super nice people!
marwis 3y ago
Doesn't even scroll properly (no acceleration). The UX of all open source mapping apps suck really bad, not even most basic interactions are done right.
- sambazi 3y ago
  the alternatives are even worse, that's the premise; you get better maps than with gog/apl but have a slightly "different" ux
  - marwis 3y ago
    The maps themself aren't any better in my neighborhood (or rather the the places on the map). I tried contributing once but OpenStreeMap ux and data model/tagging taxonomy is a convoluted mess too.
- fizwidget 3y ago
  It does on iOS - maybe not for the Android version?
  - marwis 3y ago
    Yes, should've clarified I was talking about Android.
__jonas 3y ago
Since this article mentions driving navigation: My absolute dream feature for that would be a navigation text to speech voice which can be set to English, but pronounces location names in other languages correctly and not like an English person trying to pronounce an odd English word. As someone who has their phone set to English but usually drives in Germany, sometimes France, Italy or Switzerland it’s funny at first to hear the strange attempts to pronounce street names but it really does get old. Since it appears like none of the big maps apps seem to be interested in this feature I’ve sometimes wondered if it could be done by contributing to something like organic maps. I’ve found some academic projects about doing code-switching tts like that, but nothing built into an actual product. If anyone has any thoughts on that it would be interesting to hear.
- eythian 3y ago
  It's not quite the same, but in Google Maps you can switch the language of the app itself. I use this to get navigation not butchering street names into unrecognisability while the rest of my phone is English. It does do the whole navigation in that language though, so you do need to be able to understand it to a reasonable degree, and it won't switch based on places (so it'll then mess up when I'm somewhere with English names.)
  - franky47 3y ago
    Not all languages are created equal though. When driving in the UK, I use the American English voice which gives more precise directions, like street names. The British English voice doesn't (just "turn left, turn right").
  - __jonas 3y ago
    This would already be an improvement for me, since I am a native German speaker who usually prefers device language be set to English. I wasn't aware it was possible to set language on a per-app basis on iOS, thank you! Doesn't work for Apple Maps unfortunately, which has a nice voice but is dependent on the Siri voice setting, which I prefer to be in English.
  - kiney 3y ago
raybb 3y ago
I hope one day Organic Maps will make it easy to automatically sync bookmarks. That's really one of the biggest features missing for me. https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/622 https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/622
lizknope 3y ago
I've been using Organic Maps for a few years now since Maps.me died I mainly use it for offline access to hiking trails and it has been great for that.
IndySun 3y ago
For a long while Pocket Earth Pro trumped Organic Maps and OSMand. It's still very fast. Walking routes in Europe are excellent. No traffic, which is not important, I find. Unfortunately it also appears to be abandonware.
n4r9 3y ago
The U-Turn on Indiana Toll Road is an interesting one! It looks like Organic Maps' router is making use of a road that's tagged as an emergency service road in OSM: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1186446719 https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1186446719 The road was added three months - apparently based on "updated satellite imagery" - but poorly tagged. It was then edited 9 days ago to improve the tagging. https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1186446719/history https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1186446719/history Perhaps the more recent edit was from Organic Maps so that their router handles the tags appropriately? Looking at this area on Google streetview (from June 2023), I can't see anything that looks like a service road: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.5920007,-87.2303049,3a,90y,32.32h,77.29t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1stzld8DEWH675OLSM97bPZg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@41.5920007,-87.2303049,3a,90y,3... I wonder why Organic Maps would take the U-turn rather than the more obvious ramp. Perhaps it is to avoid the toll gate? Also, regarding this: > it can take a few weeks for an OpenStreetMap update to get pushed out OpenStreetMap updates within a day or two, but Organic Maps' own ingest process might have a lower frequency.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  OSM updates instantly; every edit is an immediate operation on its database. Tile refresh on the official website (which is little more than a tech demo) may take a little while, though it could be you just need to refresh your browser cache. The OSMAnd app updates map data once a month, unless you enable OSMAnd Live where map updates come hourly.
oksidisko 3y ago
[dead]
matkoniecz 3y ago
Note that if some data is missing or wrong - you can fix it by editing on https://www.openstreetmap.org/ https://www.openstreetmap.org/ as they use OpenStreetMap data Such help is really welcome! If you are on Android then I recommend StreetComplete which asks questions and edits OSM based on answers (disclaimer: I wrote parts of it) (Organic Maps has some limited editing capability, but for example you will not change road geometry or add forest area with it)
sir_brickalot 3y ago
I love OrganicMaps but lacks in certain situations. When I want to be able to zoom into any and all of my bookmarks, I have to keep the map data of all countries I've ever been visiting. Thats tens and tens of GB of data on a mobile phone. And everytime there are maps updates I have to redownload all of it. Tens and tens of GB of data. When you're traveling and forgot to DL everythibg beforehand and have to use some WIFI hotspot you might not be able to get your maps downloaded. Happened to me multiple times. So, my feature request: - smaller maps data - incremental updates - online maps ...oh and better search of course. ;)
vackosar 3y ago
I use mapy.cz often, because of the UI and better maps. Only the traffic is probably not estimated the best.

340 points by ryukoposting 3y ago

lmm 3y ago

Why this over OSMAnd, which I've been happily using for years?

ryukoposting 3y ago
I haven't used OSMAnd, but I'd give it a shot. What's up with the $30 premium version on the Play store?
- pmontra 3y ago
  That's OSMAnd plus, with unlimited maps. Install it from F-Droid and you won't pay. For some reason they upload the plus version for free there.
orblivion 3y ago
A lot fewer features, a lot more streamlined UI. OSMAnd has too many features for my needs, it takes longer to figure out how to do something. I think a lot of people agree. But maybe OSMAnd works better for you.
dest 3y ago
In my opinion OSMAnd interface is slow, that of Organic is very responsive
- orblivion 3y ago
  Have you checked recently? I think I recall there being some sort of significant performance improvement at some point in the last few years. Could be wrong.
cuu508 3y ago
OsmAnd: tons of customization options, "prefer unpaved roads" routing option (great for adv motorcycling), can follow GPX tracks, battery hog. Organic Maps: quick, minimalistic UI, can display but not navigate along GPX tracks. Lighter on battery. I use it like I would use paper map when hiking.
zootboy 3y ago
Anecdotally, I've found OSMand's search functionality to vary between OK and completely unusable. Especially when entering addresses, OSMand really struggles to interpret what should be quite straightforward entries. While I haven't extensively used OrganicMaps, I found its search functionality to behave much better.
ianburrell 3y ago
I use OSMAnd on my phone, where the extra features are useful for hiking and biking. I use Organic Maps on my iPad where I want a simple offline map.

kop316 3y ago

I am assuming this is talking about Android, but for Mobile Linux, Pure Maps has been awesome: https://rinigus.github.io/pure-maps/ https://rinigus.github.io/pure-maps/ I have been successfully using it for over four months now for both car an bike navigation.

chrismorgan 3y ago
Now if only I could actually install it under Arch Linux. The AUR package pure-maps is broken (possibly other failures, but mapbox-gl-native fails to build, tries to download https://dev.alpinelinux.org/archive/mapbox-gl-native/mapbox-gl-native-1.6.0.tar.gz https://dev.alpinelinux.org/archive/mapbox-gl-native/mapbox-... but gets a 404).
- aaomidi 3y ago
  It’s on flatpak. No reason not to use that tbh.
  - chrismorgan 3y ago
    Bleh, Flatpak. No thanks, I want a proper distribution, and I don’t have gigabytes of spare disk space anyway. (I’ve never installed Flatpak before, but installed it just briefly to see what it would say, and it seems to want to download one gigabyte to install this—mostly KDE stuff—which is presumably compressed so that it’ll take even more disk space afterwards. Note that I think I might be overestimating its figure by up to about 350MB, as org.kde.Platform.Locale is “< 355.1 MB (partial)”, so maybe it only downloads the locale you’re using. Either way, my disk is close enough to full at present that I can’t really afford this stuff, even if I didn’t find things like Flatpak and Snap distasteful.)
    - aaomidi 3y ago
      It basically is a static distribution of an application. The benefits are that, you don’t need to be on a specific version of anything to make this work properly. For what it’s worth, flatpaks do share dependencies as much as possible. So that inflated size isn’t going to be replicated for each application. Also, flatpak _is_ a proper distribution. It doesn’t really do anything fancy other than isolate the dependencies from other tools on your system.

3np 3y ago

Also worth to keep an eye on: https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway/ https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway/

synesso 3y ago

As someone who built advanced turn by turn routing based on openstreetmap, problems like the u-turn in the article are hard. Giving good turn instructions for the last 2% is also hard, because so often it requires an appreciation of what the turn looks like from the driver's perspective, not just the curves and angles of the vertices.

freddie_mercury 3y ago

Doesn't work with addresses in Vietnam, so my vote is "still sucks for 100 million people". I tried putting in "46/8B/29 Xô Viết Nghệ Tĩnh" and it directs me to some place 132km away even though it is actually a few hundred meters from my current location.

orblivion 3y ago
Search sometimes isn't ordered by distance even in the US. The "obvious" answer I'm looking for can be the 3rd or 4th.
- freddie_mercury 3y ago
  I scrolled through the entire list of 20 or whatever results and none of them were close to correct. Half the results were in different cities. The results for my city (Ho Chi Minh City) are for totally different roads. For instance "Hem 46 Vo Van Tan" is listed as a result, as is "Hẻm 46 Trần Quang Diệu". Also notice that one has correct diacritics and one doesn't, which gives the whole thing a weird amateurish vibe. I know this is probably the fault on OSM data and not the app itself. But OSM sucks and anything built on it will suck.
  - mistercheph 3y ago
    OSM data in my area is much higher quality than any of the commercial competitors. But, I guess that's because I and a community of local contributors improve them. I'm sorry to hear the quality is substandard in your area, and the amateurish vibe likely comes from the fact that most OSM data is contributed by amateur volunteers.
JimDabell 3y ago
I tried getting directions to the next stop on my rail line. When I searched for the station name it didn’t come up, but it did find a road under construction and two fences. I’m not sure why I would ever search for a fence. When I cancelled the search and selected the Transport category before searching, it found it but there was seemingly no way to view the route details beyond which line to get on and how long it would take. With Google Maps, it will let you see the specific walking directions to the origin train station and how long it takes, it will tell you the line and direction to take, how long that train journey will take, which stops are between the two stations you are travelling between, which exit to leave the destination train station at, and walking directions to my destination once I leave the train station. It will also let me put in what time I want to arrive and work backwards to figure out what time I need to leave, taking the train schedules into account. It’s great that there is an open source option available, but it has a long, long way to go before it’s a good choice.

UberFly 3y ago

Tested Organic Maps for the first time on an emergency drive to Chicago and the Midwest, and with the fiancee? Author's got guts.

throwawaaarrgh 3y ago

Organic Maps is the OSS fork of Maps.me, which was basically the best maps app ever made, but was sold. Both use OSM but also can load other map sources (iirc). I used to use Maps.me extensively when traveling abroad as it provided way better maps than Google, and all offline. This is a tried and tested platform that works great, led by people who know their stuff and care deeply about the user. Please donate if you like it: https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps

appplication 3y ago
I love OSS products, especially OpenStreetMap, but I have a hard time believing it could be better than the big players. Apple and Google both use OSM data as well, but supplement it with massive internal mapping efforts. What makes Organic Maps better? If it’s interface and features, sure I can buy that. I’m not sure I would believe that base map correctness or POIs could ever be better though. It’s such a hard and ever changing problem, those with the superset of information will always have more the capability to build a better map.
- FrostKiwi 3y ago
  > What makes Organic Maps better? > I’m not sure I would believe that base map correctness or POIs could ever be better though. You'll be surprised. I cannot speak for Organic Maps, but I can speak for OSMand tested for years in Germany and Japan. Same OSM data at the end of the day. Even today, OSMand distinguishes better between building blocks. I see subdivisions of address numbers, which Google Maps hides with it's minimalist grey for the whole apartment block design. Further more, I often see small walkways and paths simply not represented in Google Maps, whereas they are in Google Maps. And for some reason, here in Japan Google Maps often suggests too-clever for its own good detours, which end up being way slower, whereas OSMand with it's simpler(?) navigation algorithm sticks to more consistent routes along bigger roads. If address and POI search could be further improved, I wouldn't see a reason to use Google Maps ever again.
  - wiz21c 3y ago

altcognito 3y ago

I had the same weird “do a u-turn at an arbitrary point on the freeway” problem with Google maps for about a month while there was construction in the area. Strangest thing. (Was not a get off the freeway and back on)

cturtle 3y ago

I love Organic Maps! I don't use it for driving, but I do use it regularly for hiking. It is reassuring to know that even if I don't have service I can open the app and can check to see if I'm still on the trail. Highly recommended! I'll have to try navigation sometime.

AndyKluger 3y ago

I've been trying to like it, but it doesn't have named places results like I'd really want, and it even fails to locate straight up addresses sometimes. I'm keeping it installed for now and will keep checking back.

zolbrek 3y ago
I had the issue of Organic Maps not recognizing addresses until I realized they were located in areas I hadn't downloaded yet.
- AndyKluger 3y ago
  That makes sense, but my problems are in my own area, already downloaded.

jmspring 3y ago

I am curious how it does its routing. For the Bay Area to a place I go north of Truckee, it takes what may be the shortest route (super curvy) rather than the best.

ryukoposting 3y ago

Author here, I'm going to bed now but it's exciting to see this level of interest in the blog post. I apologize in advance if the site crashes and burns while I'm asleep - this is my own made-from-scratch blogging platform and I'm not sure if it's really "front page of HN-scale" yet.

sambazi 3y ago
loads blazing fast and has good design. seems well done
ynoxinul 3y ago
Thank you for the great app! Feature request: integration with BRouter for navigation (like OSMAnd does). Currently bicycle navigation is not very good in Organic Maps.
- sambazi 3y ago
  barking up the wrong tree op is author of the linked blog post, not the app
- ryukoposting 3y ago
  Sorry to disappoint, but I made the blog, not the map!

fuzzy2 3y ago

Recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37347447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37347447

stevage 3y ago

Just tried it with bike routing and it is pretty terrible. Suggested following two massive roads instead of the obvious bike paths nearby. So not useful for that purpose.

siwatanejo 3y ago
For the bike use-case OsmAnd might be better, as other replies in this HN entry suggest.
- stevage 3y ago
  That's what I mostly use. I was just curious to see whether organic maps had improved since the last time I tried it. No.
timeon 3y ago
For me ideal bike routing is like car routing (main road uses shortest distances and has fever intersections - which is safer) but uses bike paths when it is shorter option. Unfortunately most bike routing apps will always prefer bike path even if it is just 100m along the main road where you need to go of the road and then return.
- stevage 3y ago
  Yeah the good apps give you options. In this case there was no reason at all to take the major roads. Many parallel options existed.
eythian 3y ago
I also just gave it a go. I live in Amsterdam where biking is pretty much the dominant mode, and it wasn't great. I told it to take me to a place in the north of the city (over a river), and it gave me directions over a bridge which is about a 14km trip rather than via the free ferry which makes it more like 4km. It also oddly doesn't optimise to the route I usually take (for the segment that makes sense) which is both shorter and quieter. Perhaps it tries to minimise corners, but on this route it doesn't make sense to. OSMand both has the "shortcut" and knows about the ferry.

daft_pink 3y ago

I dunno if anyone remembers running navigation software on a Palm Treo when a 1 gb sd card was super expensive, but you would actually download a major highways file of the United States with all the major roads and that was only 50-100mb. While the last mile smaller roads were enormous files and you would download a state or metro area for your departure zone and your destination zone. It worked really well. You can probably navigate fairly well off of major roads maps that are publicly available for long trips, but the last mile local roads and short distances are paradoxically the major challenge.

aorth 3y ago

This kind of testing and feedback is important for Organic Maps. Good on the author for taking the time to evaluate, investigate, and file an issue on GitHub. It takes so much time, but is invaluable. Still, as someone who has contributed tens of thousands of edits to OpenStreetMap, uploaded hundreds of GPS traces, donates to Organic Maps, and compiles the Organic Maps Android application from git master a few times a week, I constantly find myself wondering when it will finally be good enough that I won't second guess it.

nicbou 3y ago
OSM surprises me with its accuracy, so long as you are trying to navigate the world and not find a business.
Vinnl 3y ago
Ha, additionally I wonder if that will happen before Google Maps will be good enough that I won't second-guess it.
ryukoposting 3y ago
If you are this deeply involved with Organic Maps, you might never trust it fully. You know too much! This is true of any software developer. Something that looks great from the outside can be really nasty under the hood. It's easy to bias your view of your work based on the tiny flaws you see in it, but the average user wouldn't see those faults.

mid-kid 3y ago

As an avid OSMand user, it's a shame that he doesn't compare the two. They're the big players in this space.

kmarc 3y ago
I wish OsmAnd had the rendering engine of OrganicMaps. That would be a killer app. Right now, osmand on my phone is virtually unusable. I slow down, and as if I were stepping on egg shells, I still try to use osmand because of its wikivoyage and Wikipedia integration. But seriously, not caching off-screen rendered vector tiles make it feel like an app from the 90s. It's feature-full, but redraws on each user interaction. :-( Organic maps is super fast, in comparison. Their open communication on Telegram makes the project look even more sexy.
- tetris11 3y ago
  Same. I used OSMAnd for years, both out of a sense of civic duty, and because I thought vectors would be superior. Loading and rendering those vectors on a 6 year old phone though, woof. I still miss the OSMAnd features though: tracking my rides, altitude/speed/gravel metrics.
- xigoi 3y ago
  Have you enabled the new renderer? It's still worse than Organic's, but much faster than the old one.
  - kmarc 3y ago
    I have been using the new renderer since it was available as a hidden beta feature. Parts of rendering feel smoother but it's painful to watch how streets are redrawn. I also live in a very densely mapped area, which definitely affects rendering performance. Very remote places / not well mapped areas (South America, Laos, Eastern-Europe) render somewhat better, but nothing comparable to Organic maps or StreetComplete
ximm 3y ago
OSMand crashed regularly for me (my guess is out of memory). Organic Maps doesn't do that, so that's good.

hiergiltdiestfu 3y ago

Nice article, thanks. This reminded me of the early days of waze.

mongol 3y ago

Not opensource but Locus Map is the one I always return too. Very feature rich and developed by a team that cares.

Liskni_si 3y ago
Second this. It's a swiss army knife of a map. Supports planning, track recording, export to various formats and online services like Strava, tools for Geocaching, map overlays, points/track database with folders, dashboards that turn your phone into a bike computer, and many more. And yeah the developers are super nice people!

marwis 3y ago

Doesn't even scroll properly (no acceleration). The UX of all open source mapping apps suck really bad, not even most basic interactions are done right.

sambazi 3y ago
the alternatives are even worse, that's the premise; you get better maps than with gog/apl but have a slightly "different" ux
- marwis 3y ago
  The maps themself aren't any better in my neighborhood (or rather the the places on the map). I tried contributing once but OpenStreeMap ux and data model/tagging taxonomy is a convoluted mess too.
fizwidget 3y ago
It does on iOS - maybe not for the Android version?
- marwis 3y ago
  Yes, should've clarified I was talking about Android.

__jonas 3y ago

Since this article mentions driving navigation: My absolute dream feature for that would be a navigation text to speech voice which can be set to English, but pronounces location names in other languages correctly and not like an English person trying to pronounce an odd English word. As someone who has their phone set to English but usually drives in Germany, sometimes France, Italy or Switzerland it’s funny at first to hear the strange attempts to pronounce street names but it really does get old. Since it appears like none of the big maps apps seem to be interested in this feature I’ve sometimes wondered if it could be done by contributing to something like organic maps. I’ve found some academic projects about doing code-switching tts like that, but nothing built into an actual product. If anyone has any thoughts on that it would be interesting to hear.

eythian 3y ago
It's not quite the same, but in Google Maps you can switch the language of the app itself. I use this to get navigation not butchering street names into unrecognisability while the rest of my phone is English. It does do the whole navigation in that language though, so you do need to be able to understand it to a reasonable degree, and it won't switch based on places (so it'll then mess up when I'm somewhere with English names.)
- franky47 3y ago
  Not all languages are created equal though. When driving in the UK, I use the American English voice which gives more precise directions, like street names. The British English voice doesn't (just "turn left, turn right").
- __jonas 3y ago
  This would already be an improvement for me, since I am a native German speaker who usually prefers device language be set to English. I wasn't aware it was possible to set language on a per-app basis on iOS, thank you! Doesn't work for Apple Maps unfortunately, which has a nice voice but is dependent on the Siri voice setting, which I prefer to be in English.
- kiney 3y ago

raybb 3y ago

I hope one day Organic Maps will make it easy to automatically sync bookmarks. That's really one of the biggest features missing for me. https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/622 https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/622

lizknope 3y ago

I've been using Organic Maps for a few years now since Maps.me died I mainly use it for offline access to hiking trails and it has been great for that.

IndySun 3y ago

For a long while Pocket Earth Pro trumped Organic Maps and OSMand. It's still very fast. Walking routes in Europe are excellent. No traffic, which is not important, I find. Unfortunately it also appears to be abandonware.

n4r9 3y ago

The U-Turn on Indiana Toll Road is an interesting one! It looks like Organic Maps' router is making use of a road that's tagged as an emergency service road in OSM: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1186446719 https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1186446719 The road was added three months - apparently based on "updated satellite imagery" - but poorly tagged. It was then edited 9 days ago to improve the tagging. https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1186446719/history https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1186446719/history Perhaps the more recent edit was from Organic Maps so that their router handles the tags appropriately? Looking at this area on Google streetview (from June 2023), I can't see anything that looks like a service road: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.5920007,-87.2303049,3a,90y,32.32h,77.29t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1stzld8DEWH675OLSM97bPZg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@41.5920007,-87.2303049,3a,90y,3... I wonder why Organic Maps would take the U-turn rather than the more obvious ramp. Perhaps it is to avoid the toll gate? Also, regarding this: > it can take a few weeks for an OpenStreetMap update to get pushed out OpenStreetMap updates within a day or two, but Organic Maps' own ingest process might have a lower frequency.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
OSM updates instantly; every edit is an immediate operation on its database. Tile refresh on the official website (which is little more than a tech demo) may take a little while, though it could be you just need to refresh your browser cache. The OSMAnd app updates map data once a month, unless you enable OSMAnd Live where map updates come hourly.

oksidisko 3y ago

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matkoniecz 3y ago

Note that if some data is missing or wrong - you can fix it by editing on https://www.openstreetmap.org/ https://www.openstreetmap.org/ as they use OpenStreetMap data Such help is really welcome! If you are on Android then I recommend StreetComplete which asks questions and edits OSM based on answers (disclaimer: I wrote parts of it) (Organic Maps has some limited editing capability, but for example you will not change road geometry or add forest area with it)

sir_brickalot 3y ago

I love OrganicMaps but lacks in certain situations. When I want to be able to zoom into any and all of my bookmarks, I have to keep the map data of all countries I've ever been visiting. Thats tens and tens of GB of data on a mobile phone. And everytime there are maps updates I have to redownload all of it. Tens and tens of GB of data. When you're traveling and forgot to DL everythibg beforehand and have to use some WIFI hotspot you might not be able to get your maps downloaded. Happened to me multiple times. So, my feature request: - smaller maps data - incremental updates - online maps ...oh and better search of course. ;)

vackosar 3y ago

I use mapy.cz often, because of the UI and better maps. Only the traffic is probably not estimated the best.