Organic Maps

Organic Maps is organized as a for-profit entity. CoMaps is not. This is a real difference, and the former asking for donations makes it look like a scam.

The hardest thing about any effort that is two or more people is the interpersonal, coordination, consensus, and organization aspects. Everything else is easy in comparison.

Some places live traffic information gives you a choice between a 10 minute way and 40 minute way though, if you get stuck in the wrong spots it really truly sucks, and for us who live in these places, being able to easily route around those spots saves us a bunch of time and energy.

I want to use any client app that uses OSM for car navigation, as I contribute both money and map fixes, but currently nothing seems to come close to either Wave or Google Maps when it comes to traffic information, which ends up being pretty important (for some), so I end up using Organic Maps only for when I walk on foot.

Saved me a lot of speeding tickets on the interstate.

The tone of this comment is quite different from the text of the open letter to which you refer. Specifically this section. I don't have any personal knowledge either way, but this stood out to me.

> As it was revealed by Roman @rtsisyk it wasn't unusual for the Shareholders to use project's donations as their own money e.g. Alexander @biodranik paid for his personal holiday trip expenses this way. At the same time all other contributors were consistently denied any access to any financial information (even to the totals of money donated/spent). (It's fine for developers to be reimbursed for their hard work, but it should be done in a fair, transparent and accountable way.)

In fact, nowadays there are many more closed parts in OM's map generator - many OM's bigger new features like hiking, cycling and bus routes depend on closed source improvements to the map generator. And some binary files required to build the app (e.g. packed_polygons.bin) are nowadays distributed under a custom non-FOSS data license. I.e. nowadays its basically impossible to fork OM as is with all its features - and the "right to fork" is a cornerstone of FOSS.

Also ref to: https://isitreallyfoss.com/projects/organic-maps/

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:surveillance:type%3D...

So you can just add them using a normal OSM editor like EveryDoor or Vespucci

app: https://maps.bpev.me

source: https://tangled.org/bpev.me/maps

Based on results from indexeddb pmtiles work:

https://github.com/jtbaker/pmtiles-offline

https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles/issues/395

Which can be done with tiles. Or maybe I don't understand what you mean by "tiles"? What do you describe as "tiles"?

https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/pulls/4604

That's not really GPS anymore so when discussing the topic it would be worth being exact on this.

If by AGPS you are referring to the use of nearby WiFi and cellular networks and querying a service for that (there are ways to have that info purely offline, but I do believe such databases rely on many people leaking their positions to exist at all), I'm not convinced your approach helps much:

1) if you run stock iOS or Android with the Google services, I believe you are already screwed anyway: I wouldn't trust them not to constantly leak stuff about you in the background even if you don't actively use the GPS, at least to build their traffic info and to keep their access network-based location database updated. If you are concerned about the privacy aspect of this stuff, you should be getting rid of the Google services anyway. That leads to the next case:

2) If you are running a phone without the Google services, then you don't have that kind of AGPS. Unless you go the extra mile of explicitly configuring microG to enable network-based location. I used to do this, but on my current phone, getting the position purely from GPS has been so reliable and quick that I didn't bother setting this up (I suppose it could provide some battery saving, but there are privacy concerns indeed, and not relying on such databases that basically depend on people giving up bits of their privacy is always nice). Your main concern there would be the shady blobs most phones run that could be doing you don't know what behind your back, but that's regardless how you use your phone.

If by AGPS you mean the download of the data about the positions of the GPS satellites (MSA) then yes, indeed, I agree, you will leak to your service provider (but not more than if you are not already fully offline - so basically if you use your phone like a phone you already leak as much) and to the server providing the data (which is probably Qualcomm (XTRA) or Google, or possibly your service provider). Then the solution is fully offline, and your current options are non assisted GPS, which can take 10 minutes in good conditions to get a fix if you haven't used it in a while, and reading the map. From what I understand, your current strategy is to help with the latter, which needs to be better than eventually getting a GPS fix (which feels somewhat niche, but I can see some advantages).

(There's also AGPS MSB where you basically ask a remote server to compute your location from what your GPS receiver gets and nearby cellular networks, the leak here is obvious but from what I've read this is quite rare nowadays, it was more useful when GPS receivers didn't have enough compute power to do the compilations themselves, so that would be mostly irrelevant.)

All in all, if I'm not wrong (happy to be proven wrong): as far as privacy is a concern, depending on what you mean by AGPS, your approach only applies to, respectively, devices without the Google Play Services or similar stuff, or to fully offline devices. It needs to be better than, respectively, GPS assisted with the satelite positioning data (which can be good for up to 7 days and then updated through regular GPS if I'm not wrong), or regular GPS. I believe your angle of attack can be battery usage, or better than the time to get a GPS fix. That seems quite tough especially that your approach as I understand it is intrinsically scoped (works mostly in cities where it's easy to ask about what's around).

I believe a stronger angle of your approach is resilience: less dependency on the GPS system which can indeed be jammed or which can fail (although there's redundancy: we do have several constellations of satellites from different countries, so a general failure seems unlikely, and a GPS failure would be catastrophic because many critical things depend on it).

Now, there are devices or places (especially in dense cities with high buildings) where the GPS simply doesn't work well, so a convenient, privacy-preserving alternatives to the GPS would be great in those situations6!

Some apps show raster tiles. Which means that if you want a different style, you just cannot share them. If you want the same style but you don't want to show exactly the same data, you can't share them. "Ok, you say, I personally don't care about raster tiles, I believe that everybody should be happy with vector tiles". That is wrong, but let's assume it.

Vector tiles are much more compact, but at the cost of the rendering engine: it has to read the information stored in some format and render the map according to different things like the style. How do you load the data to access it and rendering rapidly? Maybe you want to remove data so that it's more efficient and doesn't lag, or maybe you really want all that detail and more phones will lag when loading. Maybe you want to optimise the storage, so you remove the information you don't want to show, etc. Those requirements are incompatible, it's a tradeoff. Different apps choose different tradeoffs and therefore don't share resources.

Don't get me wrong: some apps could decide to share resources, and that would be fine. But it's not like all apps have the exact same needs and should obviously be sharing all that.

If you think that maps are "obvious" and a "conceptually simple problem", then you surely don't know much about what goes under the hood when you load a map in your phone. It's is actually quite complex.

Edit: hmmm I don't think I understand that wiki. Most of those are not the type of heatmap I was thinking of. I'll keep looking into it though.

Some OSM contributors go brand-by-brand/operator-by-operator in making sure OSM features have the most up-to-date opening hours added to them from matched ATP features. As such, OSM may be fairly accurate for chains too.

For a standalone shop or restaurant the opening hours situation is usually still better with Google Maps rather than OSM. There aren't enough OSM contributors who care enough to check and maintain opening hours for every shop, restaurant, fuel station, etc.

Google has the benefit of having their own street-level imagery for house numbers and street names, Android devices for real-time traffic info, and the ability to simply scrape web pages for shop data including opening hours. but in places with a reasonable number of active mappers, OSM is so much richer and more up to date.

Organic Maps didn’t accept my PR with it…

https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/issues/688

I'm sure it annoys the stores that keep their website and Yelp etc. updated but there is no way to know who is reliable.