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
I always felt drawn back to G-Maps until a few months ago when a friend recommended this app. Organic Maps is gorgeous!
It is great. But too bad for me - I live 40km away from the nearest town, in the forest of northern Sweden. So the coverage here is quite not so good. Practically all I see is the main road.
You can actually contribute to it. There areso.me great mobile apps for this. I recommend Vespucci for in detail changes(creating new structures or editing their properties) and Street Complete for filling missing information.
It’s open street map data. If there isn’t mapping info for your area, you can fix that.
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
I just started using it, and I would say it’s even snappier then G Maps. I was pretty skeptical at first, and it does have a few things I miss, like public transport live updates, but I can use the app of the local provider for that and in my experience G Maps can be quute inaccurate anyway. No way I’m going back now. You need some space to preload the maps though.
100% agree with this post. Mostly using google maps now for car route planning (still unbeatable in rerouting in case of car accidents etc. afaik).
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.
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.
You should open an issue with detailed examples including location so they can fix it
Yep, the best of the best :)
Specifically for Prague (ha! I’m here now) mapy is insanely good
In Berlin it was missing some public transportations like tram
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
Exactly …
Caffeine and nicotine are legit organic insecticides, that might be a deeper joke about coffee and cigarettes powering development
Great point of view
It’s also improving really fast. Organic Maps has a great community of developers.
so i opened this app for the first time just now and entered my address, but it only went to my street. when i tap my house, it just says “building”… is there no residential support?
Depends in where you live. For instance in Germany house numbers are associated with the building but in France house numbers are their own object. The Idea there being that one should map the location where the plate with the houseumber is, and not the building(s) its associated with. If you dig throug osm map forums or issue trackers you’ll find the dispute resurfacing every now and then.
After a few days of use - as a cyclist - I only have one note. I’m missing the cycling style option from OSM. That’s a real game changer right there.
Fuck me this thread really exploded
