All these apps rely on the data provided by OpenStreetMap (OSM). It is a Wikipedia-like project where anybody can contribute edits.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/

Any recommendations for an OSS maps app that provides tracks like Strava,l and Komoot?

Any ones which tries to avoid realtime traffic, especially in India? Also ones which detects some shortcuts as narrow, meandering roads that will be extremely slow.

yeah, so were LibreOffice and OpenOffice relying on the .odt format

CoMaps forked out of OrganicMaps after a row about money

This is more about OSM than Organic Maps, and I agree that looking for businesses it's not great. But looking for mapped features such as toilets, water taps, benches, fountains, etc. is far superior.

We the FOSS world just have 100 to 10000 less budget to implement this feature. It's a hard problem, and you can't ignore that lots of other features are missing. E.g. street view or place comments.

I'm working on https://cartes.app and we're well aware that search is not on par, far from it. But we have hundreds of other features and bugs to fix. https://codeberg.org/cartes/web

I guess it depends on how you use Google Maps, but I mainly navigate to addresses, and Comaps works fine for that.

Would you consider using cache storage for enabling offline capabilities? Maybe I am in the minority but I usually go to organic maps for offline usage.

> It's not fully private if it requires GPS connection though!!

How so? GPS is like FM radio: you send nothing, you only receive.

Apps like organic maps or comaps let you use the maps fully offline and you can compute itineraries without GPS when your need this (from point A to point B, with as many stops as you wish).

I strongly recommend you to seriously look into comaps or organic maps if you don't know them.

Now, "GPS isn't working or depletes my battery, what do I do?" is an interesting topic worth looking into. It seems you are trying to automate what we all do when GPS doesn't work well. I find that relatively easy in a city, not so much in a road on the countryside.

I actually think the search feature rocks, because you have high fidelity OSM maps to query. Can't search for drinkable wells in Google Maps!

But then, it of course isn't Google Maps. It is likely to be more out of date and will not understand "natural" search queries as Google does. I believe it just takes some getting used to. There is overlap between the two, each service has its strengths and weaknesses, but also unique features.

search greatly improved in the past couple years. try it again?

I bought Maps.me Pro in 2012, used it while traveling then and was happy. Fired it back up for a similar trip this year and in spite of having paid for it already, I don't have Pro features and I get aggressive "Sale ending in 4 hours!" popovers every time I launch the app.

The OSS tool for nautical charts is OpenCPN.

Yup! It is worldwide since it uses OSM data

https://www.openstreetmap.org/

comaps is a fork of organic maps

This used to be a thing on Windows Phone, you could download maps in the settings and they would be available in the default Maps app, but also in HERE Maps, Transit, etc.

Storage constraints haven't been on developers' radar last 20 years.

Offline-first used to be the norm before everything started requiring an internet connection for some reason. I was using OSM data offline 15 years ago on smartphones.

The reason it moved to the internet was not that it wasn't possible to stay offline-first. If the app depends on your server, then the owner can monetise that (e.g. with subscriptions) or track the users. It is more interesting for companies than allowing the users to buy a snapshot of the maps once and never come back.

Offline-first nowadays comes from open source projects, not from companies.

This sounds like an optimistic comment from a decade ago. Cost of storage has gone up recently, as a glance at data-hoarder fora will show. Phones have less storage capacity nowadays inasmuch as many manufacturers are removing SD card slots. The idea is that normies keep stuff in the cloud; self-storage of very large amounts of data is an edge case.

In my country, the typical laptop purcase from a retail chain is still 512GB or so, and moreover, few and fewer people own a laptop since it is becoming normal for a smartphone to be one's only computing device outside the workplace (even uni students are foregoing "real computers" now). Anything more than such a basic laptop is a premium product, and premium products cost premium prices.

Always the rows about some kind of BS that fragments, fractures, and defuses the efforts into pet projects instead of ever actually being a viable alternative for the majority of people to corporate offerings.

The hardest thing about any effort that is two or more people is the interpersonal, coordination, consensus, and organization aspects. Everything else is easy in comparison.

There’s Magic Earth which uses OSM map data but also integrates live traffic information. Not sure whether it works in India, though.

https://www.magicearth.com/

Don't think anyone other than Strava and Komoot have sufficient user-generated trail database to be useful for your use-case.

OsmAnd has a nautical map plugin you can enable.

> The sillyness & waste of this is obvious

Until you realise that there is not one true way to show a map, and that different apps may actually have different needs. Suddenly it becomes obvious that not all apps can use the same shared offline data.

There are two things keeping me using "Big Map".

1. Address lookups. Many of the buildings in OSM have yet to get street addresses added, so navigating to an address is a bit hit or miss. This gets fixed with time as people update the maps and wouldn't be a show stopper.

2. Real time traffic and detour navigation. This is really needed when navigating around busy cities where a wreck on a major highway can result in significant delays. This needs a combination of an external service (separate from OSM) but also one that has enough adoption to have usable data.

I'll preface this by saying I can't speak for India. I live in the US. Use your own discretion to decide what here might apply to you.

I've been using Organic Maps for almost 3 years. I lived in Chicago during this time, as well as some smaller American cities. I go back and forth between Organic Maps and GMaps depending on the situation.

I've found that Organic Maps' lack of traffic data isn't a big deal for me. It doesn't always give you an accurate ETA, sure, but it isn't any worse at actually getting you to your destination.

The thing with GMaps is that everyone has traffic data, so nobody has an advantage. Google's alternative routes end up equally saturated as the main routes, meaning a "dumb" maps app that always takes the main route will get you to your destination in basically the same amount of time. This is backed up by my own personal experience, and some academic research [1].

Now, when I do need an accurate ETA, I go back to GMaps. I'll also use GMaps to route to businesses sometimes, because OSM doesn't have up-to-date info about businesses throughout most of middle America.

[1]: https://trid.trb.org/view/1495267

There’s actually work ongoing on live traffic support from various public sources!

https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/projects/21877

People at Apple are not left-handed, they don't drive, they don't work out, and they don't seem to go out in the cold very much. Oh, and they definitely don't play video games.

IDK, my hypothesis is that they only go anywhere by car. The way they hide public transportation and pedestrian-only streets sucks.

Better and easier to understand and use UX.

Much better performance and much less cluttered UI, at the cost of having fewer features.

At that time I think I was using CityMaps2Go. Not sure if it still exists though.

I believe MapsWithMe (now Maps.me) was released about that time, but I personally didn't get an iOS device until 2013.

> What might make me switch?

Google Maps will always have better POI data because they have a larger userbase and they've gamified adding POIs with the "Local Guides" badge.

The main reason to switch is to have an offline-first experience. Google Maps does not provide offline maps everywhere, e.g. South Korea. And if you've ever tried using the Google Maps app on a weak connection, it's frustrating because it still tries to download remote tiles instead of using the ones you've downloaded.

Lastly any contributions you make in OpenStreetMap will show up in Organic Maps / CoMaps for everyone.

Personally, I use Google Maps on a daily basis, but have Organic Maps and regions downloaded for travel and just switch between the two. It's good to have a reliable fallback.

CoMaps is a fork/spin-off of Organic Maps, which in turn is a fork of Maps.ME

I had bad experience tracking my bike ride with it on iOS - seems like app offloaded and didn't record half of the track. Strava and OutRun don't have this problem.

For the more experience OSM contributors, there is also a fork called SCEE[1] that adds some extra "quests" and a ton of UI customisability!

[1]: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/SCEE

+1 That, and it works in mountainous areas like the Alps or Pyrenees, where you're lucky to have GPS and most definitely can't rely on 4G for Google Maps

Yes it's planned. Should work in theory, but no one tried before.

Maps are so often done as native apps that to my knowledge no one tried to just use the PWA capabilities to cache tiles on the Web. Of course what's hard is cache invalidation. Does the user want to update the tiles ? Never ? Daily, weekly ? Only some regions ? Or manually ?

Here's an issue about that : https://codeberg.org/cartes/web/issues/1078

It's in French, unfortunately Codeberg has no auto-translate capabilities yet.

It's a fork from Maps.me, the streamlined map app popular with normies. I myself use and love OSMAnd, but in the travel communities I am active in, most people react badly to OSMAnd as something arcane and nerdy.

I am curious: is it called "tileless" because it uses tiles, but offline? Or does it somehow not use tiles?

Thank you! This is highly relavant. I wish OPs would put a bit more research into what they post

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.

what are the concerns over governance of organics maps ?

So sad. I imagine 99.9% of organic maps users will never know.

In terms of forks, I believe it was Maps.Me -> Organic Maps -> CoMaps.

So all forks of the same project. Maps.Me is not open source anymore (I think?), and CoMaps was started by a subset of the Organic Maps community that wasn't happy with the Organic Maps governance.

> What might make me switch?

Different reasons for different people, but OpenStreetMap is a great community project, for one. What I really like with those apps (I am now using CoMaps) is that they are open source, offline first and the UI is quite minimal and clean.

OrganicMaps rolled their own 'data license' for the actual map files: https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/blob/master/DATA_...

Plus the code that's necessary to generate the map files that OM relies on is no longer openly published. So while true that the actual app code is open source, you can't use it without relying on their proprietary map files.

iOS has Every Door[1] and there’s also MapComplete[2] which works as a PWA.

[1]: https://every-door.app [2]: https://mapcomplete.org

They may be thinking of Google's coarse location feature where the handset checks SSIDs in the proximity against Googles database for fast lookup.

You are largely correct about everyday location privacy but I was thinking more in the adversarial direction (read military/ GPS denied zones) when I started this work. There have been news about GPS being denied/spoofed over european region. When your phone can't get the GPS signal, it would try to retrieve alternative signals (A-GPS, cellular network etc) - this is where an adversary could be listening for leaks. So GPS denial could effectively be a trigger and the follow ups after that trigger could lead to leaks.

I thought I updated the app before my recent backpacking trip in Europe, but I will give it a try again.

The plugin is just part of why OsmAnd is good for nautical use, there is also an alternate view in the configure map menu for nautical use.

That's possible. I use RideWithGPS, maybe a lot of people use it around here. Or maybe only two other people have ridden the route, it doesn't say, but it's still super useful for finding routes.

For some reason osmAnd was the only GPS map that would work on a flight for me.

To further back this up, just because OSM might be a map's data source, it doesn't mean they use the same rendered vectors or images for the tiles.

I make changes to OSM so they can be propagated to a cycling-specific mapping tool I use (it's a commercial tool with their own custom map layers) - it takes about 3-4 weeks from when a change is made on OSM for it to be incorporated into their data set.

So yeah, it's not as simple as "we all use OSM so we'll just share all our rendered mapping values".

Agree!

CoMaps fork is adding OpenAddresses integration and traffic (linked above)!

https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/pulls/4162

1. This is largely country-dependent with some governments being quite adamant that address data should be in the public domain, and some governments doing the opposite and selling address databases to private companies for some quick cash, where private companies then sell address lookups for some absurd per-lookup price for the next few decades. Most of the world though is probably just not rich enough to compile, publish and accurately maintain a national address database.

OpenAddresses is perhaps the gold standard for open source address data compilation from government datasets. Note for the future that alltheplaces.xyz (project I contribute to) is looking like it may eventually perform the automatic address data download/extraction/compilation that OpenAddresses currently performs. This has the benefit that in backwards countries, alltheplaces.xyz also obtains some addresses through other means--such as advertised location of international restaurant chains. And quite often, being within +/- 100 address numbers on a road is good enough for navigation. Google Maps obviously crawls addresses from all over the Internet AND has quite a high tolerance for errors, hence will perhaps always seem more complete than OSM.

2. Some further ideas for open source mapping applications trying to determine real time traffic situations:

2a. Use GTFS/GTFS-RT feeds for bus networks to detect real time delays but also to compare planned bus route schedules for different times of the day (different traffic conditions) where buses share the road with the public. There's already a few maps out there that overlay nearby GTFS-RT feeds for the city of interest and usefully provide a visual indication of how well public transport vehicles are currently moving.

2b. alltheplaces.xyz extracts public traffic camera feeds which could be presented to users when they plan/commence a journey as an indication of what lies ahead on the route.

While default osm data is great, I've been very impressed with the partnership/collective of Overture Maps data. It's osm + esri/tomtom + corporate processing/funding.

https://overturemaps.org/

While not updated as frequently, their releases have a pretty high quality and coverage.

Also current place names. You can sometimes find a business on OSM that has correct metadata, but in many areas the majority are missing or stale (like, closed 10+ years ago.) Solving this is an "interesting" problem to say the least when many businesses these days have nothing more than an Instagram/Whatsapp handle.

Yeah (2) is the killer feature especially in totalitarian shitholes (pretty much every country nowadays) full of money grab ops disguised as police checkpoints and cameras.

I wonder if we can build a decentralized version of such a reporting service.

IIRC it usually means it stores the vectors and draws it clientside.

Arcane and nerdy is a good description of OSMAnd. That's why I love it and would never switch to anything else.

They tried to put ads into Organic Maps, and they only backed down because CoMaps sprung up in response.

Others in the thread highlighted other issues, like Organic Maps' proprietary license for some parts of the repo: https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/blob/master/DATA_....

There's one more for me: reliable store hours.

I prefer Google Maps cause they'll tell you where pigs camp out.

Saved me a lot of speeding tickets on the interstate.

This looks really solid. It's the thing that would make me switch over. 90% of the time I know exactly where I'm going but need Google Maps to tell me what's unexpectedly in the way while I'm trying to get there.

FWIW, I have an experimental open-source implementation of offline-capable PWA protomaps. Haven't advertised it much, because I haven't sorted out performance (particularly on mobile), and it's a bit buggy still. Also, don't have cache invalidation. But it does work. Usually. xD

app: https://maps.bpev.me

source: https://tangled.org/bpev.me/maps

Based on results from indexeddb pmtiles work:

https://github.com/jtbaker/pmtiles-offline

https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles/issues/395

There are no tiles. All geometry is loaded and rendered directly from an SQLite database on every render.

Geometry is stored as TWKB (Tiny Well-Known Binary) to reduce storage and transport size. During decoding, they do clever work using aggregate functions and reusing buffers across rows to reduce allocations.

There is real potential in the tech, but unfortunately little momentum behind it.

> a small group of shareholders

This is sketchy. The entity at the bottom of the page is Organic Maps OÜ, which is an Estonian private limited company. Estonia has non-profits (MTÜs). The fact that this isn't organised as one makes it a commercial venture, except one that asks for donations.

Some parts of the server were closed source for a bit. No longer the case. Also people got upset that the developers used the product funding to pay for their personal expenses. The idea is folks want the developers to isolate all the money they make from this project and use it to only pay expenses directly related to this project. If they need to eat or something they should get a job, presumably.

https://www.comaps.app/news/2025-04-16/1/?ref=itsfoss.com

I was hoping for an offline open map with specifically tracking (My tracks from Google or now 3rd party) so I can log my adventures. bonus if I can save a printable thing for my wall or something...guess I know what this weekends project is.

Organic Maps was founded by two of the Maps.Me authors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_Maps#History).

With CoMaps I don't think, there are any original authors involved (?). In any case I prefer organic, the original. Donated and very grateful that this app works so well (except for search where I sometimes use another app).

>Plus the code that's necessary to generate the map files that OM relies on is no longer openly published.

Seems like a big red flag. And another reason to migrate to CoMaps.

Didn't know that, very helpful.

This is correct but if the phone's internet is off, there is no way for BSSID look up but maps might collect this in the background for telemetry and send it to the server once the internet is turned back on.

Oh yeah, makes sense didn't think about this especially since I don't have the google services.

That's not really GPS anymore so when discussing the topic it would be worth being exact on this.

Then privacy is not your concern, reliance is. Worth addressing!

E.g., in the CoMaps fork test builds there is now a change to prioritize nearby places more

https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/pulls/4604

It would be really cool to see the social situational awareness sharing feature be implemented in an open client over an open censorship resistant protocol. Because to me Google maps is just mass surveillance by the pigs even if it does happen to help you today, the long term incentive for big tech is to erode user freedom and collude with corrupt governments.

See alltheplaces.xyz for continuously updated straight-from-the-primary-source opening hours of chains of shops and restaurants, public facilities such as libraries, etc. This is probably as accurate as it gets AND you have the confidence of knowing exactly where the data came from (down to the URL) and when it was last checked.

Some OSM contributors go brand-by-brand/operator-by-operator in making sure OSM features have the most up-to-date opening hours added to them from matched ATP features. As such, OSM may be fairly accurate for chains too.

For a standalone shop or restaurant the opening hours situation is usually still better with Google Maps rather than OSM. There aren't enough OSM contributors who care enough to check and maintain opening hours for every shop, restaurant, fuel station, etc.

Agree, which is why I added support for displaying when the hours were last updated in CoMaps

Organic Maps didn’t accept my PR with it…

https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/issues/688

Both this and addresses is something that's really easy to survey with StreetComplete.

Google has the benefit of having their own street-level imagery for house numbers and street names, Android devices for real-time traffic info, and the ability to simply scrape web pages for shop data including opening hours. but in places with a reasonable number of active mappers, OSM is so much richer and more up to date.

My problem is that more often than not the road or business name I'm trying to find us just not in the database. If I'm at home I'll try to add it but if I'm driving that is not going to happen and I'll just use something else.

Indeed and this is one of the key reasons we have started CoMaps. The main OM shareholder made it clear to us that interests of the company and the shareholders are at the forefront.

Awesome, thanks for the links.

Funny : there's another Ben that did his "Ben maps". https://benmaps.fr

> There are no tiles. All geometry is loaded and rendered directly from an SQLite database on every render.

Which can be done with tiles. Or maybe I don't understand what you mean by "tiles"? What do you describe as "tiles"?

> If they need to eat or something they should get a job, presumably.

The tone of this comment is quite different from the text of the open letter to which you refer. Specifically this section. I don't have any personal knowledge either way, but this stood out to me.

> As it was revealed by Roman @rtsisyk it wasn't unusual for the Shareholders to use project's donations as their own money e.g. Alexander @biodranik paid for his personal holiday trip expenses this way. At the same time all other contributors were consistently denied any access to any financial information (even to the totals of money donated/spent). (It's fine for developers to be reimbursed for their hard work, but it should be done in a fair, transparent and accountable way.)

Comaps can record tracks if that's what you need :-)

OSMAnd is similarly OSM-based, offline, and FOSS (available from F-Droid) and does tracking. It is not typically recommended in posts like these because its wealth of options is daunting to the general public, while Organic Maps and CoMaps are more streamlined.

I didn't say "founders", I said "community". The community is more than just the founders. If anything, the part of the community that left did it because of their disagreeing with the founders.

> Some parts of the server were closed source for a bit. No longer the case.

In fact, nowadays there are many more closed parts in OM's map generator - many OM's bigger new features like hiking, cycling and bus routes depend on closed source improvements to the map generator. And some binary files required to build the app (e.g. packed_polygons.bin) are nowadays distributed under a custom non-FOSS data license. I.e. nowadays its basically impossible to fork OM as is with all its features - and the "right to fork" is a cornerstone of FOSS.

Also ref to: https://isitreallyfoss.com/projects/organic-maps/

Another CoMaps Search issue:

https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/issues/4449

Yeah, that's a great call-out. While I can reckon my way most places, memorizing cross streets isn't my strength. Not having at least decent recency on top of traffic makes it tough.

Google doesn't just scrape websites for store hours, they actually call to confirm them: https://support.google.com/business/answer/7690269?hl=en

I would define a tile as a slice of geometries, not whole features.

The difference with Tileless' approach, is that they load whole features from the database and don't split them into tiles. So if a feature extends outside the current view, they would load the whole geometry rather than the intersection of the tile's extent and the geometry.

Vector tiles are optimized for concurrent downloads and browser / CDN caching and doing a good job of that.

What can I say? Bens like maps I guess.

Going on holiday is why I work. And I use organic maps when I’m on holiday. And donate. Good luck to them.

> And donate

How do you square this with Organic Maps being organised as a for-profit entity?

Same as when I donate money to Apple.