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.
Honestly, I uses organic maps and if its not mapped I just go on the business website. Fuck google, thats why!
Could just use yelp or a browser for business hours.
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.
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:
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.
Honestly, when a road is closed for a weekend at irregular intervals without a schedule in advance its not reasonable to map it. I contribute to OSM from time to time and thought about it as well but the general consensus is to map regular closures or road closures that go on for like more than a month. OSM is a general purpose map and not for mapping road closures as current data will be used long after now on offline navigation gps devices. We would probably need an open street closure map that aggregates all the databases for road closures and interact with osm. For the major ones I know I’ve just been blocking what I know locally to not route through it, as I can’t be bothered in starting a project like that
Given they are working with third party for traffic data, it should be theoretically possible for them to exploit ad network or work with google for mobile locations.
My experience with Waze was inferior to Organic Maps.
Interesting. How so?
Will check this out, thanks for the recommendation!
is it on fdroid or do I need to go to github
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.
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
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/
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.
They don’t
I don’t want my location tracked all the time always
Do you carry a cell phone at all?
I use Organic maps which runs local
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.