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
Ok downloaded. Seems very nice!
Still working out how to get directions but all things in good time.
I always felt drawn back to G-Maps until a few months ago when a friend recommended this app. Organic Maps is gorgeous!
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.
Thanks for the share, had no idea. It felt so nice that I already added two contributions to OpenStreetMap.
Thanks!
Welcome : )
Downloaded because of this post, it is very good!
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 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.
How do I make sure I’m using an up to date map? The very first business I looked up directions for was incorrect.
Not sure - but you contribute stuff pretty easily. I already added a few of my favorite places in my town
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
It’ll at least give you good directions, car/bicycle/walking-optimized based on what you select.
It’ll get there, just needs time.
I mean great if it gets there but in the meantime I’m not going to recommend it to anyone as a google maps replacement. It does look like a good maps.me replacement for hiking though!
I wouldn’t have said it was a replacement just yet to non -open source centric folks, personally.
More attention isn’t a bad thing though, sometimes devs need more input to decide what to focus on next.
Specifically for Prague (ha! I’m here now) mapy is insanely good
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
Fuck me this thread really exploded
For driving I recommend Magic Earth, it’s based on OSM data but uses proprietary traffic information as well
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.
My experience with Waze was inferior to Organic Maps.
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.
But I don’t think Magic Earth is that widely used. How precise is it really?
I use it frequently, and it’s mostly right. It can tell traffic jams really precisely (it says something like “you will have to stop in 300m” and the traffic jam is actually starts at ∓10m from that point)
But it tries to navigate me through fully closed roads. I don’t know why is that. The kind of closed road it misses is regularly closed, but at irregular intervals (like most weekends on the summer, but not always, if there is some happening it is also closed on weekdays, etc). These kind of irregular things shouldn’t be mapped in OpenStreetMap (As documented in the wiki) I have a feeling that they think that it should be mapped, but I won’t map it.
I guess it also depends on where you live, so just try it first.
From reading the Magic Earth FAQ, I believe the user data actually isn’t used for traffic at all (at least the manually reported events certainly aren’t).
Edit: never mind I missed a later part in the FAQ:
Do you share data with third parties?
We send position data to our traffic provider to generate real-time traffic information. The data is anonymized on the phone, using a changing key (so it’s not linked to you), and it is deleted after 5 minutes.
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!
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.
Could just use yelp or a browser for business hours.
Will check this out, thanks for the recommendation!
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.
They don’t
I don’t want my location tracked all the time always
Do you carry a cell phone at all?
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! :)
Didnt knew that. Good that I regularly try to add more data to OSM.
If you use Android, there’s a fun app called StreetComplete that helps you adding details to your neighbourhood
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?
What? I’m asking a question. I don’t need your opinion.
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.
Nope. I type in SPAR and it gives me a bunch of random results 150km away.
I type in Grocery and it gives me SPAR 1.5km away.
I need to type in the exact address for it to find a place, with no errors. Otherwise I can type a category name and hope that it finds it and that I guessed right, that also works.
If you type in a partial name (I.e. not the full legal name including company abbreviations) of a store it will break itself and show you completely random unrelated results from a random place in the country.
I took a bunch of screenshots a while back as proof.
It is fundamentally broken, and it is widely reported IIRC, but I don’t know if there are any issues open about it.
