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CoMaps is by far one of the best offline navigation map app available.

They forked from Organic Maps project which seems to have gone evil.

CoMaps calculation is very fast, map update is constant, it is very lightweight, it has a very clean layout, usability is top tier. CoMaps can find places by the business name, there is still room for improvement but it works.

I was using EarthMagic before that, it was the perfect 10/10 opensource app until they went greedy, and the app now has tons of problems.

I went back to Sygic which is an awesome offline map app, I have a lifetime Premium licensing and as expected, now there is a Premium Plus license which some features were moved to like TTS and limited map update.

CoMaps also works really well with Android Auto and I am running GrapheneOS, it was actually somebody within GOS who recommended it to me.

CoMaps also display trains line, buses stops, public toilets, even motorcycle parking. If you are tired of dramas, give CoMaps a go.

CoMaps is available via Codeberg opensource alternative to GitHub and they are pretty active towards reporting issues.



What happened to Organic Maps?


The community forked and created comaps because the organic maps maintainers were unwilling to listen to the community, taking decisions that the community disapproved of.

Comaps seems to be more active than organic maps today


That is what I gathered tho, Organic Map seems to have lost not just the interest of the cummunity but everything in between.

When you have an option like CoMaps that is opensource friendly and very active, I got 2 maps updates within like 2 weeks, you already lost it all.

What I am impressed with is the app, it is so clean, polished and well designed so is the map.


That’s why I switched from map.me to Organic Maps. This one too?


It'd be funny if it wasn't so sad, right?


I "fell" for Comaps but switched back to Organic Maps (where the original real good devs are). Comaps felt a bit too much like fork, "fabricate" nice media and beg for donations. Both are imho inferior to (non-foss) Magic Earth but consume much less power.


We've actually massively held off on begging for donations -- for example we removed the ability of the app to dynamically insert ads into the menus or change the home button to a icon, and massively scaled back our end-of-year fundraising post because we actually have a decent amount of money in the bank. Instead we've chosen to thank contributors for funding our ability to afford better servers etc. What we need more than more money is more volunteerism, which we're happy to see increasing every day!

Stay tuned to CoMaps, we've been releasing two updates with maps per month lately and soon will be able to release maps as often as our servers will allow!


If you would make the effort to compare commits, you'll see that contributors for Co are mostly fiddling with:

- the UI (pixels here, different label or color here - just check the commits by "Yannik Bloscheck"!)

- adding objects to the map, which are not often justified (like rendering single(!) trees and tree rows, which is from a performance POV insane)

- translations / strings

They rarely touch navigation, the engine, or sensible refactoring tasks.

The whole project lacks organization and clear, structured goals. Ever heard about too many cooks?

It was, especially to the agitators like Konstantin "Pastbin", more important to obtain increased authority and power and their own branfing, while complaining about financing and perceived transparency issues; this were huge contributing factors for the split.

I couldn't give a rats about how donations are spend or if there's a "community council" or a registered entity behind a tradematk / app, if the outcome / product is suitable.

What i care about is an organized vision and structured approach by founders.

PS: The CDN middleware ("map generator") was made closed source due to too many freeloaders hogging onto their map CDN. Get your facts straight.


Making map generator proprietary won't help to solve "freeloaders hogging onto their map CDN" issue. In fact, it actually forces potential forks to use their CDN because they can't setup their own map generation (as its closed source).

The OM's map generator was made proprietary in order to hinder the right to fork and enforce vendor lock-in. Later, a proprietary "Data License" had been introduced for binary files (incl. maps) with the same goal - effectively one can't build/fork OM without these files anymore.


[flagged]


Hi Alex! Talking about yourself in third person again? Sorry I haven't made enough new features for you lately, I've been a little busy. I'll do better for you, I promise. I wish that our attempts to formally communicate and resolve concerns weren't considered "pathetic" but c'est la vie.



IsItReallyFOSS has recently summarized concerns about Organic Maps in regards of FOSS values, check isitreallyfoss.com/projects/organic-maps/


The same that happened with Ubiquiti, pfSense, Ubuntu and Earth Magic recently.

They all start "for the community", become too big, go greedy, and forget that projects/company is nothing without users.


They also made their map generator closed source


How do they do routing? Is it alsothis fast?




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