4mo ago

Organic Maps is the best open source Maps App I've ever tried

It's essentially an open source fork of maps.me by the original creators.

I've been using OSMAnd for years, but it always felt laggy and not that reliable. Searching was slow and so on. Many street or things it didn't instantly find.

In the Graphene App Store I jnust discovered Accrescent (another app store thing but only with like 10 apps - they're all gold though, god damn)

An in there I found organic maps. And this shit is google maps level responsive. If you're on the lookout for a google maps replacement - consider trying this.

Byeeee

91 comments

For driving I recommend Magic Earth, it's based on OSM data but uses proprietary traffic information as well
- Yeah, you can see that organic maps is sadly not there yet in terms of driving-interface, but hopefully its getting there soon.
  Afaik the app is far younger than magic earth and for what it is its super good. I'm so stoked to see how organic maps is gonna develop in the coming years
- I second magic earth for driving. The only reason I haven't entirely removed Google maps from my phone yet is because magic earth doesn't have data on business hours. This is the last killer feature I'm waiting for.
  In the meantime I'm routing for any open source map that can do live traffic and business info.
  
  Honestly, I uses organic maps and if its not mapped I just go on the business website. Fuck google, thats why!
  
  Could just use yelp or a browser for business hours.
  
  I use gmap wv for that. It's just the web view of google maps but works better than Firefox and easier to pull up when osm fails. Navigation obviously doesn't work but should satisfy your use case.
- Interesting. Do you happen to know where it gets its traffic data from? I haven't yet personally found anything nearly as useful as Waze.
  
  They collect location of their users but anonimize every data on device, they can't track anyone personally. They also sell their SDK to businesses and collect data from there as well.
  
  My experience with Waze was inferior to Organic Maps.
- Will check this out, thanks for the recommendation!
- If we don't need traffic Information Organic maps is fine too. It now even says where you have to turn which is a major improvement.
  
  It now even says where you have to turn
  Only if the map has road lanes defined. That means: everybody join OpenStreetMap and map your local area! :)
- is it on fdroid or do I need to go to github
- Magic Earth is not an open source app. They haven't released any source code. Mentioning it as the OP title is about open source maps app.
  https://www.magicearth.com/faq-en/
  Will Magic Earth be Open Source?
  No; since it is also used commercially (we have a paid Magic Earth SDK for business partners), we cannot make the code public.
  That being said, I love using Magic Earth for driving. It works quite well as long as your area is up-to-date on OSM
- Proprietary software that collects my data, no thanks. It was fine when there weren't any alternatives but that isn't the case anymore.
  
  How will they get traffic data if they don't get the data of their users? I understand being privacy conscious, but some data collection can actually make sense.
- Does it have temporary speed traps and trajectory based traps?
  I often drive in the middle of the night and speedlimits make me fall asleep.
  
  That is an impressive grade of bullshit.
  How well has that particular excuse worked with law enforcement in the past?

Idk ... In their description on f-droid they crossed out "no pesticides" and wrote "purely organic" ... It implies they are using organic pesticides. Not sure if that's something for me tbh.
Edit: screenshot added
- Caffeine and nicotine are legit organic insecticides, that might be a deeper joke about coffee and cigarettes powering development
  
  Great point of view
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke
  
  Exactly ...

It is pretty solid. It lacks some advanced features such as routing around preset areas but that's a minor complaint.
Aldo it is only as good as OSM. Get to work on the map.
- Also the search doesn't work, so there is that...
  Also using it in android auto is a pain and every action takes between 10x and 100x longer than on the phone.
  But yeah it is pretty good and I try to contribute to it when I can. I don't know how to contribute to bad instruction translations though. It just says "verlaat" on an exit in dutch which grammatically makes no sense.
  
  You should open an issue
  
  I noticed that it only downloads local maps initially. You can download more maps and expand the area that it searches in. Maybe this is why you are having issues with searches? I assume that if you search for a place in a map that it hasn't downloaded it may have trouble finding it.

Shame it doesn't do street numbers (possibly an OSM limitation?). Other than that, solid.
- Many street numbers do not exist in OpenStreetMap because no one created them! So if you know about some area with this issue, help edit the map!
  
  StreetComplete tasks got my neighborhood to be the best-mapped little village I've ever seen! 😎
  Since I'm walking around for exercise anyway, I've got most of the addresses, and now I'm working on the fire hydrants.
- Depends what you mean with "doesn't do". I haven't used Organic maps that much yet, but OSMand can handle street numbers. So Organic maps should too.
  However it handles them very poorly, you have to type the address in a certain way or it won't recognise the number in it. Sharing from another app works pretty well most of the time though.
- You need to go around with street complete and add numbers. It takes time but it is fun and good exercise.

Does it know how to navigate NYC public transit? That's a big use case for me. I don't need driving directions. I need to know which subway is closest.

Ok downloaded. Seems very nice!
Still working out how to get directions but all things in good time.

Astronomical Clock in Prague is like a fucking wormhole for humans. Last time I was there it felt there was like a thousand people in one small place.
- my wife forced me to get up really early to look at it without coffee so I wasn't quite as whelmed as I should've been. Prague is lovely though.

Organic Maps is my goto solution for car navigation because it is very quick, responsive and does not require an high end phone. It just works. However for anything more advanced than that (e.g. live location sharing or recording, planning a hiking trip, navigating mountain bike trails, contributing to OpenStreemMap), OSMAnd is still without contender.
- For me, it's even better than GMaps, because it lets me navigate on bike paths, which GMaps couldn't.
- I've used organic for several hikes. What was missing?
  
  Here a a few things that I miss from OsmAnd:
  adding more than a handful of routing points is tedious
  you cannot plan partially or fully independent from existing roads
  no way to save and restore a planned trip
  no overlays for hill shading or incline visualization. Very useful for assessing the effort of a route.
  no public transport support. Very useful for planning a trip with transitions.
  no rain radar
  satellite view

Thanks for the share, had no idea. It felt so nice that I already added two contributions to OpenStreetMap.
- Welcome! I also added a few

Does it do navigation with routes based on current traffic conditions? Because that's table stakes to me.
- No, unfortunately. But maybe soon. I lean on here maps if I need that.
  
  Oh :( pretty useless for driving then

Wow that genuinely looks unbelievable!
It's like an old mall or whatever map except without you are here and movable!
- What until you discover OSM (that's what Organic maps uses)

It's also improving really fast. Organic Maps has a great community of developers.

It is nice app but the problem is it doesn't show Czech hiking and cycling routes by default. I didn't figured out how to enable them.

Too bad OSM (and by extension this app) doesn't have public transport directions...
- Word. That's one of the things where osm gets smashed by this app
- @thegreenguy It doesn't, but if you're lucky, your city might have a transit app itself (mine does). Even if chances are that it's not open source either, you'll still be able to cut your dependency to Google to a certain extent.
  @tootnbuns
  
  Yup, where I'm currently living has a great public transport app, even works without Play Services!
- Try oeffi, it's a great app for public transport.
  
  Doesn't support my city :(

In Berlin it was missing some public transportations like tram

Thanks!
- Welcome : )

Yep, the best of the best :)

It's my go to! Also check out the !open_street_maps@lemmy.world community
Edit: sorry, it looks like the more active community is !openstreetmap@lemmy.ml but I guess you can join both lol!

It is great. But too bad for me - I live 40km away from the nearest town, in the forest of northern Sweden. So the coverage here is quite not so good. Practically all I see is the main road.
- It's open street map data. If there isn't mapping info for your area, you can fix that.
- You can actually contribute to it. There areso.me great mobile apps for this. I recommend Vespucci for in detail changes(creating new structures or editing their properties) and Street Complete for filling missing information.

Downloaded because of this post, it is very good!

I always felt drawn back to G-Maps until a few months ago when a friend recommended this app. Organic Maps is gorgeous!

Specifically for Prague (ha! I'm here now) mapy is insanely good

so i opened this app for the first time just now and entered my address, but it only went to my street. when i tap my house, it just says "building".. is there no residential support?
- Depends in where you live. For instance in Germany house numbers are associated with the building but in France house numbers are their own object. The Idea there being that one should map the location where the plate with the houseumber is, and not the building(s) its associated with. If you dig throug osm map forums or issue trackers you'll find the dispute resurfacing every now and then.

After a few days of use - as a cyclist - I only have one note. I'm missing the cycling style option from OSM. That's a real game changer right there.

I just started using it, and I would say it's even snappier then G Maps. I was pretty skeptical at first, and it does have a few things I miss, like public transport live updates, but I can use the app of the local provider for that and in my experience G Maps can be quute inaccurate anyway. No way I'm going back now. You need some space to preload the maps though.

100% agree with this post. Mostly using google maps now for car route planning (still unbeatable in rerouting in case of car accidents etc. afaik).

Fuck me this thread really exploded

91 comments