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
jech 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.)
flexagoon 52 minutes ago [-]
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.
olyjohn 5 hours ago [-]
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?
jech 3 hours ago [-]
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.
ihatehn 6 hours ago [-]
CoMaps lets you record a route, though it's somewhat limited
atkirtland 5 hours ago [-]
What website do you use for public transportation?
lucgommans 5 hours ago [-]
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
schubidubiduba 5 hours ago [-]
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
jech 3 hours ago [-]
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.
jraph 5 hours ago [-]
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!
zikduruqe 6 hours ago [-]
You can also do it directly from CoMaps if you have an OSM account.
amatecha 3 hours ago [-]
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.
nickspacek 6 hours ago [-]
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.
Contortion 5 hours ago [-]
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.
lucgommans 5 hours ago [-]
> 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
ihatehn 6 hours ago [-]
We're working on the routing UI! It's a common hangup.
goobatrooba 6 hours ago [-]
Best ist you can directly report the broken tap from the app. So the dates will be fixed.
matkoniecz 3 hours ago [-]
Even better is to edit directly at osm.org.
Reporting from within CoMaps generates note that will sometimes wait years for verification.
bluebarbet 6 hours ago [-]
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.
ihatehn 6 hours ago [-]
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.
gedankenstuecke 6 hours ago [-]
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!
andrewshadura 5 hours ago [-]
Please please, fix the long-standing bug: make it possible to use the navigation in "north is always up" mode.
schubidubiduba 5 hours ago [-]
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.
nkjvhb 6 hours ago [-]
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.
c0nsumer 5 hours ago [-]
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.
NoboruWataya 5 hours ago [-]
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.
matkoniecz 3 hours ago [-]
> 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)
r0xsh 2 hours ago [-]
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:
Recently noticed it is on flatpak as well, so can use from my tablet.
zikduruqe 6 hours ago [-]
Even neater, I use CoMaps on my linux laptop, with a USB GPS receiver.
It beats using IP based Geocoding.
lucgommans 5 hours ago [-]
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 :)
zikduruqe 5 hours ago [-]
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.
dariosalvi78 7 hours ago [-]
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.
swasheck 5 hours ago [-]
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
gentile 3 hours ago [-]
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.
andrewshadura 5 hours ago [-]
Come on, OsmAnd's subscriptions are super cheap for the value you're getting.
swasheck 2 hours ago [-]
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.
BlackRabbit1 6 hours ago [-]
I love it for hiking, walking in cities and driving a bicycle.
nkjvhb 5 hours ago [-]
CoMaps is the best. They recently integrated Panoramax into CoMaps, which gives street view in many locations.
schubidubiduba 5 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure the stretview part is still WIP
akeck 6 hours ago [-]
Pocket Earth Pro also provides off-line OSM maps. That's what I use. I'll check out CoMaps as well.
constantlm 4 hours ago [-]
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.
fluder 6 hours ago [-]
Its Organic Maps fork.
matkoniecz 3 hours ago [-]
which is a fork of MAPS.ME
Mohamed_Mansour 6 hours ago [-]
Nice idea ♥
aguacaterojo 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
legastenigga 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 02:07:20 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.)
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
I just discovered cartes.app can do this too!
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.
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.
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
Reporting from within CoMaps generates note that will sometimes wait years for verification.
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.
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.
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.
Powerful, but very not straightforward.
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.
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)
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
It beats using IP based Geocoding.
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 :)