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
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.
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.
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.
But I don’t think Magic Earth is that widely used. How precise is it really?
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! :)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
