OpenStreetMap is a great ecosystem - I'm a long term contributor.
Some pointers:
- CoMaps is a fork of Organic Maps, which forked long time ago from Maps.me
- OsmAnd is similar. It has more features but is slower and clunkier
- If you see errors/missing stuff on OpenStreetMap, fix them. You need a free account for this. There are various tools to help out, such as the editor on Osm.org. Beginner-friendly editors are https://MapComplete.org (which has thematic maps; disclaimer: I'm the main dev) and https://streetcomplete.app
Just to clarify: OsmAnd has more features, CoMaps and Organic Maps are much faster.
(Aside: I'm using CoMaps myself. The main missing features are tracking (I use OpenTracks for that) and public transportation (I use a website for that). End of aside.)
OsmAnd is not that much slower nowadays since they added the new OpenGL renderer. It is, however, less convenient and pretty. I think OsmAnd really shines for things like hiking, whereas for regular urban navigation CoMaps works just as well.
Exactly my experience as well. OSMAnd is a lot better for hiking as it has 3d views, hiking routes, topo maps and better routing in general. Comaps is great for city navigation or casual usage
Wait, I just used the tracking the other day and generated a GPX from it. It also drew me an elevation map and gave me some other info about the trip. Is there some other tracking that it can't do?
I stand corrected, CoMaps can do tracking. It was introduced in Organic Maps a couple of years ago, but I was already using OpenTracks, so I never switched away from it.
I was recently recommended https://api.transitous.org (it's a webapp despite the domain). It can do things like "someone can pick me up on the far side and I don't mind walking 30 minutes at the start at 6 km/h, what's the optimal route to take?"
Revolutionary! Finally I don't have to look on a map to find all stations in walking/cycling/driving distance and then route to/from every possible combination of start and end station manually to see what busses and trains run there. And repeat the process with each schedule change in each involved country. Every other transport app that I know of will try to keep you within a few hundred metres of a bus stop or train station at all times and say "there exists no route" before telling you to cycle 10 minutes or from which station you have the shortest remaining distance by taxi or whatever
There is actually work being done to integrate exactly this API into Comaps! Although it will certainly take some more time, especially until these more niche routing features are available
Yeah! CoMaps was actually what I used for my very first contribution to OSM! Nice lil gateway to an awesome ecosystem. Mega kudos to the CoMaps devs for doing such a great job with it.
I used this for my family's recent trip in Lisbon and Prague. It worked great! The OSM data was reasonably up-to-date for all of our destinations; I don't remember encountering bad information, even though I often double-checked with other mapping providers (which aren't immune to issues with out-of-date information).
One awesome feature was being able to find "drinking water" while we were walking around. I did come across a tap that was shut off/unavailable, but only once. Again, this is more of an OSM data thing than CoMaps, but I generally found the app pleasant to use.
There sometimes feels like there is something slightly off with the "Route To/From" UX that I can't put my finger on, but no complaints.
The problem I have most of all with the routing is that it seems to default to my location as either the From or To value (whichever is the one I haven't selected). Once that's been chosen it's not immediately clear how to change it, all you can do is view the route. That's a fine solution when you're immediately looking to go somewhere, but it's not great when you're trying to plot a route between two places in advance.
I've been using CoMaps for a few months and only just discovered that if you choose another location on the map once you've got an initial route and select Route To/From, it then updates the current routing.
> The problem I have most of all with the routing is that it seems to default to my location as either the From or To value (whichever is the one I haven't selected). Once that's been chosen it's not immediately clear how to change it
Yeah this is an oft-asked question at least for OsmAnd, but I was recently corrected on this myself: so long as you don't press 'start' on the route, you can always change the from position freely and it won't flip back to your current location. You can close the navigation window (back button, swipe it away, or tap on the map) to get the map view back in full-screen for further browsing and selecting another point that you want as departure point, waypoint, or (subsequent) destination. Rinse and repeat until you have the route figured out with all the waypoints :)
I use this a lot for planning mapping routes. Another protip is to go into the waypoints view and on the top right you can do traveling salesman sorting to get the shortest way that visits all waypoints
CoMaps/OrganicMaps I don't know; I'm one of those who grew up with OsmAnd and got used to having all those features
First there was Osmand. AKA OSMAnd or officially OsmAnd.
It was was powerful but complicated. Normies had never heard of it and preferred Maps.me, a user-friendly alternative with an opaque business model. Then something at Maps.me turned sour and the more privacy-minded normies turned to Organic Maps. Then something at Organic Maps turned sour and some of them moved to CoMaps.
During all this time (literally 15 years), Osmand improved steadily and became more powerful than ever. Even the UX got (a bit) better. It is by far the best mapping app, either FOSS or commercial. And yet somehow it continues to languish in relative obscurity.
We tell our users that OsmAnd is great if you want a mapping swiss army knife in your pocket: it does a little bit of everything, for power users. It has plugins and customizability.
CoMaps' mission is to be an accessible usable privacy-first FOSS map app for the entire world (average people) and so we always have our eye on the typical expected user experience and what obstacles remain between them and uninstalling those non-FOSS privacy-invading apps, but we're not going down the rabbit hole of adding all sorts of niche powerful features: OsmAnd already does that very well, and the world doesn't need two OsmAnds.
100% agree - I think even some of the CoMaps contributors use OsmAnd for the rare specialist use cases. I know I do: CoMaps is my main map app that I use basically every day and works perfectly for all of my common/normal use cases. but once in a while I have a map/nav need beyond that and then OsmAnd's customizability is great!
However, I would not recommend OsmAnd to a normie. My family members, especially the older ones, all use CoMaps because it is much more friendly to them.
100% this. I use OsmAnd very very frequently (it displays on my dash via Android Auto whenever I drive), but try and do something like load a GPX and show the line in a given color... Or add a pin at a specific point... It's not straightforward at all.
This is nice to see. I've been a long-time contributor to OpenStreetMap and a long-time user of applications in the ecosystem. I recently tried the CoMaps fork of Organic Maps and was surprised by a few quality of life improvements. For example, the one named in the article about being able to receive periodic map updates outside of the monthly application update cycle. Another subtle example is the color scheme in CoMaps being slightly more pleasant.
I recently started tinkering with CoMaps to make it more useful for bikepacking, since I do quite a bit of it. I don’t plan to turn this fork into a product, it’s mostly something I’m building for my own needs ; but I figured it might be interesting to share:
I use this regularly when I go on long walks out of the city (including the couple of times I've done stretches of the Camino de Santiago). The offline map support and being able to load and display GPX tracks are really helpful there. Not only because you can sometimes find yourself with spotty reception in remote areas, but also because if you are out all day and your phone battery is not the best, you can just stick on airplane mode which massively saves on battery.
CoMaps also makes it quite easy to edit information about businesses etc, so if you spot something that isn't right you can correct it right there.
Also, for long walks/hikes, OSM is excellent. Most people tend think think of OSM as "Google Maps but worse" but IMO it is clearly superior for this use case (at least, for reasonably popular routes). It will display a lot of paths that Google Maps won't and also has far more granular detail, so you can use it to find nearby water fountains, picnic benches, even bins and so on.
Another alternative to geoIP could be WiFi-based location detection (comparing which WiFis are near you to a database). https://beacondb.net aims to replace Mozilla's shut-down location services, with public data releases once a proper anonymisation scheme has been figured out to avoid another Mozilla event. Google and Apple apparently also have usable back-ends: afaik it's not documented or meant for public use so ymmv, but the reverse engineered API is apparently super stable and not requiring any auth.
In case you have a second device where you'd like location, or ever don't have the USB GNSS receiver on you or something :)
Yep. When I was screwing around getting geoclue to play around with NMEA sentences, I ran across beacondb. I might replace geoclue's back end with it next time I feel like messing around.
it's a great app, I use it whenever I have bad Internet coverage or when I want to use open street map, for example when hiking. It's really a competitor of commercial apps.
after about 6 years of using OSMAnd, i’m pivoting to CoMaps for a hike through switzerland that i’m leaving for tonight. i don’t actually need all of the features of OSMAnd and just downloading maps costs a subscription now. id pay outright for it but i just can’t justify a subscription for how infrequently i use it
You can download Osmand~ from F-droid which doesn't limit downloads. Or you could even download the map from another provider like bbbike or geofabrik, use osmandmapcreator (needs java) to convert the pbf to obf and then import it into the phone.
maybe. i use it every other year though and otherwise simply don’t. i never said that it wasn’t super cheap, i just said it wasn’t cost-effective for my usage profile.
maps.me was my goto for years, but that has since devolved into a mess with ads and upselling. I recently discovered CoMaps, and it is excellent for my needs.
OpenStreetMap is a great ecosystem - I'm a long term contributor.
Some pointers:
- CoMaps is a fork of Organic Maps, which forked long time ago from Maps.me - OsmAnd is similar. It has more features but is slower and clunkier - If you see errors/missing stuff on OpenStreetMap, fix them. You need a free account for this. There are various tools to help out, such as the editor on Osm.org. Beginner-friendly editors are https://MapComplete.org (which has thematic maps; disclaimer: I'm the main dev) and https://streetcomplete.app
> It has more features but is slower and clunkier
Just to clarify: OsmAnd has more features, CoMaps and Organic Maps are much faster.
(Aside: I'm using CoMaps myself. The main missing features are tracking (I use OpenTracks for that) and public transportation (I use a website for that). End of aside.)
OsmAnd is not that much slower nowadays since they added the new OpenGL renderer. It is, however, less convenient and pretty. I think OsmAnd really shines for things like hiking, whereas for regular urban navigation CoMaps works just as well.
Exactly my experience as well. OSMAnd is a lot better for hiking as it has 3d views, hiking routes, topo maps and better routing in general. Comaps is great for city navigation or casual usage
Wait, I just used the tracking the other day and generated a GPX from it. It also drew me an elevation map and gave me some other info about the trip. Is there some other tracking that it can't do?
I stand corrected, CoMaps can do tracking. It was introduced in Organic Maps a couple of years ago, but I was already using OpenTracks, so I never switched away from it.
CoMaps lets you record a route, though it's somewhat limited
What website do you use for public transportation?
I was recently recommended https://api.transitous.org (it's a webapp despite the domain). It can do things like "someone can pick me up on the far side and I don't mind walking 30 minutes at the start at 6 km/h, what's the optimal route to take?"
Revolutionary! Finally I don't have to look on a map to find all stations in walking/cycling/driving distance and then route to/from every possible combination of start and end station manually to see what busses and trains run there. And repeat the process with each schedule change in each involved country. Every other transport app that I know of will try to keep you within a few hundred metres of a bus stop or train station at all times and say "there exists no route" before telling you to cycle 10 minutes or from which station you have the shortest remaining distance by taxi or whatever
There is actually work being done to integrate exactly this API into Comaps! Although it will certainly take some more time, especially until these more niche routing features are available
I've found that websites specific to a single European country or, in the case of France, to a single city are the ones that work best.
KDE Itinerary, a mobile and desktop application, is becoming better and better for this. It's based on MOTIS / Transitous.
I just discovered cartes.app can do this too!
You can also do it directly from CoMaps if you have an OSM account.
Yeah! CoMaps was actually what I used for my very first contribution to OSM! Nice lil gateway to an awesome ecosystem. Mega kudos to the CoMaps devs for doing such a great job with it.
I used this for my family's recent trip in Lisbon and Prague. It worked great! The OSM data was reasonably up-to-date for all of our destinations; I don't remember encountering bad information, even though I often double-checked with other mapping providers (which aren't immune to issues with out-of-date information).
One awesome feature was being able to find "drinking water" while we were walking around. I did come across a tap that was shut off/unavailable, but only once. Again, this is more of an OSM data thing than CoMaps, but I generally found the app pleasant to use.
There sometimes feels like there is something slightly off with the "Route To/From" UX that I can't put my finger on, but no complaints.
The problem I have most of all with the routing is that it seems to default to my location as either the From or To value (whichever is the one I haven't selected). Once that's been chosen it's not immediately clear how to change it, all you can do is view the route. That's a fine solution when you're immediately looking to go somewhere, but it's not great when you're trying to plot a route between two places in advance.
I've been using CoMaps for a few months and only just discovered that if you choose another location on the map once you've got an initial route and select Route To/From, it then updates the current routing.
> The problem I have most of all with the routing is that it seems to default to my location as either the From or To value (whichever is the one I haven't selected). Once that's been chosen it's not immediately clear how to change it
Yeah this is an oft-asked question at least for OsmAnd, but I was recently corrected on this myself: so long as you don't press 'start' on the route, you can always change the from position freely and it won't flip back to your current location. You can close the navigation window (back button, swipe it away, or tap on the map) to get the map view back in full-screen for further browsing and selecting another point that you want as departure point, waypoint, or (subsequent) destination. Rinse and repeat until you have the route figured out with all the waypoints :)
I use this a lot for planning mapping routes. Another protip is to go into the waypoints view and on the top right you can do traveling salesman sorting to get the shortest way that visits all waypoints
CoMaps/OrganicMaps I don't know; I'm one of those who grew up with OsmAnd and got used to having all those features
We're working on the routing UI! It's a common hangup.
Best ist you can directly report the broken tap from the app. So the dates will be fixed.
Even better is to edit directly at osm.org.
Reporting from within CoMaps generates note that will sometimes wait years for verification.
A potted history of mobile OSM-based mapping.
First there was Osmand. AKA OSMAnd or officially OsmAnd.
It was was powerful but complicated. Normies had never heard of it and preferred Maps.me, a user-friendly alternative with an opaque business model. Then something at Maps.me turned sour and the more privacy-minded normies turned to Organic Maps. Then something at Organic Maps turned sour and some of them moved to CoMaps.
During all this time (literally 15 years), Osmand improved steadily and became more powerful than ever. Even the UX got (a bit) better. It is by far the best mapping app, either FOSS or commercial. And yet somehow it continues to languish in relative obscurity.
We tell our users that OsmAnd is great if you want a mapping swiss army knife in your pocket: it does a little bit of everything, for power users. It has plugins and customizability.
CoMaps' mission is to be an accessible usable privacy-first FOSS map app for the entire world (average people) and so we always have our eye on the typical expected user experience and what obstacles remain between them and uninstalling those non-FOSS privacy-invading apps, but we're not going down the rabbit hole of adding all sorts of niche powerful features: OsmAnd already does that very well, and the world doesn't need two OsmAnds.
100% agree - I think even some of the CoMaps contributors use OsmAnd for the rare specialist use cases. I know I do: CoMaps is my main map app that I use basically every day and works perfectly for all of my common/normal use cases. but once in a while I have a map/nav need beyond that and then OsmAnd's customizability is great!
Please please, fix the long-standing bug: make it possible to use the navigation in "north is always up" mode.
That has been possible for a long time, by pressing the location button to toggle it. And recently some more edge cases regarding this were fixed.
OsmAnd is a great powerusers app. I use it daily.
However, I would not recommend OsmAnd to a normie. My family members, especially the older ones, all use CoMaps because it is much more friendly to them.
100% this. I use OsmAnd very very frequently (it displays on my dash via Android Auto whenever I drive), but try and do something like load a GPX and show the line in a given color... Or add a pin at a specific point... It's not straightforward at all.
Powerful, but very not straightforward.
This is nice to see. I've been a long-time contributor to OpenStreetMap and a long-time user of applications in the ecosystem. I recently tried the CoMaps fork of Organic Maps and was surprised by a few quality of life improvements. For example, the one named in the article about being able to receive periodic map updates outside of the monthly application update cycle. Another subtle example is the color scheme in CoMaps being slightly more pleasant.
Funny to see this app pop up on Hacker News.
I recently started tinkering with CoMaps to make it more useful for bikepacking, since I do quite a bit of it. I don’t plan to turn this fork into a product, it’s mostly something I’m building for my own needs ; but I figured it might be interesting to share:
https://github.com/r0xsh/CoBike
I use this regularly when I go on long walks out of the city (including the couple of times I've done stretches of the Camino de Santiago). The offline map support and being able to load and display GPX tracks are really helpful there. Not only because you can sometimes find yourself with spotty reception in remote areas, but also because if you are out all day and your phone battery is not the best, you can just stick on airplane mode which massively saves on battery.
CoMaps also makes it quite easy to edit information about businesses etc, so if you spot something that isn't right you can correct it right there.
Also, for long walks/hikes, OSM is excellent. Most people tend think think of OSM as "Google Maps but worse" but IMO it is clearly superior for this use case (at least, for reasonably popular routes). It will display a lot of paths that Google Maps won't and also has far more granular detail, so you can use it to find nearby water fountains, picnic benches, even bins and so on.
> OSM as "Google Maps but worse" but IMO it is clearly superior for this use case (at least, for reasonably popular routes).
for less popular areas it may be worse, but Google Maps often will be degraded even more
I have yet to find case where for hiking/cycling Google was better (I am kind of cheating as I edit on OpenStreetMap and fix problems if found)
Even neater, I use CoMaps on my linux laptop, with a USB GPS receiver.
It beats using IP based Geocoding.
Another alternative to geoIP could be WiFi-based location detection (comparing which WiFis are near you to a database). https://beacondb.net aims to replace Mozilla's shut-down location services, with public data releases once a proper anonymisation scheme has been figured out to avoid another Mozilla event. Google and Apple apparently also have usable back-ends: afaik it's not documented or meant for public use so ymmv, but the reverse engineered API is apparently super stable and not requiring any auth.
In case you have a second device where you'd like location, or ever don't have the USB GNSS receiver on you or something :)
Yep. When I was screwing around getting geoclue to play around with NMEA sentences, I ran across beacondb. I might replace geoclue's back end with it next time I feel like messing around.
Recently noticed it is on flatpak as well, so can use from my tablet.
This is very cool and inspiring.
it's a great app, I use it whenever I have bad Internet coverage or when I want to use open street map, for example when hiking. It's really a competitor of commercial apps.
after about 6 years of using OSMAnd, i’m pivoting to CoMaps for a hike through switzerland that i’m leaving for tonight. i don’t actually need all of the features of OSMAnd and just downloading maps costs a subscription now. id pay outright for it but i just can’t justify a subscription for how infrequently i use it
You can download Osmand~ from F-droid which doesn't limit downloads. Or you could even download the map from another provider like bbbike or geofabrik, use osmandmapcreator (needs java) to convert the pbf to obf and then import it into the phone.
Come on, OsmAnd's subscriptions are super cheap for the value you're getting.
maybe. i use it every other year though and otherwise simply don’t. i never said that it wasn’t super cheap, i just said it wasn’t cost-effective for my usage profile.
maps.me was my goto for years, but that has since devolved into a mess with ads and upselling. I recently discovered CoMaps, and it is excellent for my needs.
I love it for hiking, walking in cities and driving a bicycle.
CoMaps is the best. They recently integrated Panoramax into CoMaps, which gives street view in many locations.
Pretty sure the stretview part is still WIP
Pocket Earth Pro also provides off-line OSM maps. That's what I use. I'll check out CoMaps as well.
Its Organic Maps fork.
which is a fork of MAPS.ME
Nice idea ♥