OSMAnd vs. Organic Maps(blog.firedrake.org) |
OSMAnd vs. Organic Maps(blog.firedrake.org) |
Vector tiles are generated and served on-demand by https://github.com/styluslabs/geodesk-tiles so there's no need to download an entire country or region first.
You should probably submit a Show HN.
edit: just checked it out, building and running it on Linux was very easy. Nice!
Is it just you building it, is there a business behind it?
And I see you open-sourced Write, thanks!
I always seem to have the map telling me how far it is to some temporary marker I placed months ago that I can't easily work out how to remove.
Also any time I do navigation, the Trip Recording plugin pops up as a sticky system notification even when I haven't enabled trip recording.
But the offline navigation is a killer feature, and following custom GPX's.
You can either tap the marker and tick it off, or use Menu -> Map markers if you can't find it. You can also use Menu -> Configure map and turn off Map markers completely.
> Also any time I do navigation, the Trip Recording plugin pops up as a sticky system notification even when I haven't enabled trip recording.
Hmm, it does pop up every time for me but dismissing it works.
Just one of those things where the default behaviour isn't great and relies on the user to reconfigure.
Menu > Plugins > Trip Recording > Settings > Notification (Second to last option)
FWIW I prefer Organic Maps for casual usage - I think OSMAnd is very featureful but the UI is less intuitive IMO.
It went from great to very intrusive.
OSMAnd also has interesting features for hiking.
For example if I am out riding some trails and then I want to pop out of the wilderness to grab a bite only Google has been able to provide good information of whats nearby (reviews help a lot as well).
Other than that I've been switching between OsmAnd and Gaia GPS (and Garmin built in device maps).
Meanwhile in OSM, everything is much more detailed and kept up to date. I know, because I'm a mapper myself, and help keep it that way.
Google Maps seem like just another ad platform, for companies to pay if they want to be shown in higher zoom levels.
So far I have seen Google Maps be pretty useless in parts of Asia with their own software infrastructure (e.g. Korea or Japan) but it's been very useful in most Western countries.
I know, mostly that's my pet peeve as well and I guess I got trained to see through the noise. It is the last Google product that I am struggling to get rid off.
> I guess that's country-specific. Over here,
Where is that?
I am slowly trying to get move to OSM backed apps and hoping to put in the effort as a mapper/contributor as well.
I use this to take photos of images from my DSLR while on nature walks.
I later download the waypoint photos and upload it to iNaturalist to get the location information I need to link the location to my higher resolution camera images.
More reliable than linking my camera to my phone (via Bluetooth) to record the location info.
It has two downsides not mentioned in the article: OSMAnd's maps are noticeably larger, and the renderer is much slower.
What I’d really like to do is copy the old school car GPS interface of, select state, select city, select street, house number, where at each stage it narrows down the list of possibilities so you only have to type 3 or 4 letters before auto completion. If there’s any pull request I would make it would be to build that out using the open super maps database
I have both OSMAnd and CoMaps installed and started with OSMand, but I see myself reaching for CoMaps exclusively now.
Both apps are very good.
[1]: https://codeberg.org/comaps/Governance [2]: https://opencollective.com/comaps
- People who are regularly contributing to the project: https://codeberg.org/org/comaps/members
- Not yet incorporated, plans likely to have a non-profit in Europe.
- All donation spending is on OpenCollective - https://opencollective.com/comaps
- People who want to contribute to the project can just do so on Codeberg, there is no master plan, people just discuss the work, anyone can provide input : https://codeberg.org/org/comaps/members
For comparison, Organic Maps shares nothing about donations and is opaque about direction and decisions. If those question need to be answered before using an app, then it may be time to drop Organic Maps.
Disclaimer: I don't know anything about this other than having seen the above link mentioned in a comment elsewhere as to why people should switch to CoMaps.
Also, the address search on OSMAnd used to be much worse than Organic Maps, but it has improved, and I actually prefer it over Organic Maps now.
I think it can be fixed by configuring where to save these. But I find it interesting that one os change in the api can have a somewhat remote impact on feature use.
I'm running 5.1.3 and it's rendering is awfully slow
Since its FOSS you can presumably just compile it yourself if you wanted to bypass the paywall (the ethics of this are left as an exercise for the reader). However, Android Auto support is behind the paywall and Android Auto only works with apps downloaded from the play store.
OSMAnd definitely has more features (especially with the paid tiers) but, personally, I just wanted to get from A to B and I actually struggled to work out how to do that in OSMAnd which didn't give me a great impression of it.
I have both installed since I can imagine OSMAnd being better if I was planning a hike or something, but for day to day navigation CoMaps (Organic Maps fork with better governance)
You don't even have to do it yourself - F-Droid does it too. (Which is why it's called OSMand~, as a nod to OSMand+.)
As of OSMAnd, $40 might look like a steep price even for a lifetime unlimited license, but they regularly run sales where the same costs $25.
Why would this be unethical? If the licensing -- that they explicitly chose to release it under -- allows this, then what you are really paying for is the convenience of someone else doing the build for you, and getting automatic updates. If you don't value that enough to pay, then it's perfectly reasonable -- and ethical -- to build it yourself and get the paid features for free.
(Not saying I'd do that; I do value someone else building and updating for me, and also appreciate the difficulties in funding open source enough that I'm fine parting with some cash for useful stuff. But I wouldn't look down on someone for doing a self-build.)
An app to use that is closest to Google Maps experience is probably Mapy.com. It has decent navigation capability for cars, bikes and pedestrians, both in and out of cities, and slick UI.
Also worth trying is CoMaps, OsmAnd or Locus Maps.
And I can only recommend getting into mapping as a hobby. It got me to discover parts of my own city and region I've completely overlooked despite living there for decades, and gave me reasons to get out more.
I just wish it was easier to edit the map on mobile, but alas, nothing beats big desktop screen with a good editor and a precise input method. Mobile screens are small, and my fingers are fat. :)
This drives me insane. I often use OSM for things like "show me all sources of drinking water along this route". But you need the magic key word.
In this case, it's certainly not "drinking water (food) and not "drinking water (tourism)". It's also not "water tab (service)". "Fountain" works mostly OK (since fountain water must be labeled as non potable by law here if it is), but sometimes the fountain will be a tiny bird bath in someone's back yard.
It's so stupid, OSM has data on publicly accessible drinking water, I know because I add them. There's even meta data on whether there's an explicit sign "potable" or not. I just haven't found that magic key word to display them.
It's too bad we don't have a convenient UI for desktop. OSM has to be the only thing that's more convenient to use on mobile for no good technical reasons. Just nobody has done it yet.
For my home town, that displays historic wells (deep, dry, no bucket, barred and locked) but not the little tab in the sandbox of the playground and not the public restroom in the center.
So on first sight it's less useful than "fountain". But I'll play around with it on my next tour.
More on this at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Ddrinking_w...
In case you don't already know this and for others, you can use the editor at https://osm.org or the Every Door app on your mobile phone during your next tour for this (you'll need an OSM account to edit the map).
I'm not 100% sure the CoMaps "Water" category uses amenity:drinking_water, but I have relied on it for this many times during bike tours or hikes without much surprise :-)
Is there a way to search for the "amenity:drinking_water" tag directly in OSMand or CoMaps (or any other app)? Because this would probably fix everything.
In the end, the apps suffer from the complexity of the underlying data. It probably wasn't a good idea to have drinking water (tourism), drinking water (store) and drinking water (man made), fountain, water tab, well, ... and probably a dozen different categories for map makers to chose from.
Apps shall then make it easy to look for stuff and OSM labels are quite low level, they usually have their specific/internal representation of things. All this to say:
- I doubt CoMaps allows searching for "amenity:drinking_water", at least I haven't found a way to do this.
- That's what the higher level and more user-friendly Water category is supposed to be for. This will limit possibilities, but optimize for the common cases. If the Water category surfaces wrong things or doesn't surface things it should, it's a bug that needs to be fixed.
- You might have better luck with apps for editing OSM for working with OSM labels directly but appart from basic use of Street Complete and Every Door, I haven't explored complex OSM app editors like Vespucci on mobile.