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Maps.me co-founder tries to close down Organic Maps open-source fork - HN
(news.ycombinator.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2024
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A good opportunity to remind everyone that a vastly superior alternative to Organic Maps already exists: Osmand.
Organic Maps is better for "normal" users if you ask me. Osmand is better for pro users but quite clunky.
Yes, Osmand is definitely clunky by comparison. But the UX is getting slowly more intuitive. I see no reason why Osmand's easy-peasy defaults mode cannot end up equal to to OM. They're not far off, and at that point its superiority would be clear as day.
Personally I wish the OM devs could have contributed their talents to making Osmand better. Really feels like wasteful duplication which benefits nobody benefits except the egos of a handful of developers. A common problem with FOSS and this is a great example IMO.
I wish Organic maps would add some of the features from OsmAnd. I want the ability to select a part of the map to avoid.
Did osmand change its rendering engine to make it as smooth as OM?
Something changed to that effect a while back, yes. OM continues to look and feel a bit better (possibly a subjective experience) but it is so feature-poor by comparison.
I just tested it again on my Fairphone 5 and it's still slow. I'm not talking about the UI but the rendering of maps. Unless they somehow manage to fix that, it'll keep being a poor experience.
@przmk
Nope.
@Pleat1752
Osmand has a terrible user interface
It is also only open core and hides features behind a paywall.
I don't think this is true in that sense. You can get the full experience for free by - either building it your self - or simply on FDroid. If you still use Gruesome Playstore, then yes, it is "soft paywalled".
Or do you mean other features that are not even in the FDroid build? (Which could be some proprietary features.)
I doubt they gift you accumulated hundreds of dollars yearly worth of premium features plus all the stuff hidden behind the paywall just because you didn't load from the Google Play Store.
If you have a fully open source product (with a permissive license) you can't just "paywall" it, as FOSS licenses allow you to build and often redistribute the product.
When you have a fully open source product and want to build a valid business model from it, you have to work WITH your license. The OsmAnd team chose an interesting way to do this by "paywalling" the Playstore version "OsmAnd+". But you still can get all the stuff, as it is open source.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OsmAnd#Licensing
Welcome to the world of FOSS. 🌍
Gross
OsmAND is not superior at all. It is unintuitive and prone to crashes.
Or perhaps it's your software stack. I've used it constantly for well over a decade, every day, on multiple devices, and crashes have been vanishingly rare.
"It works for me"
"It doesn't work for me." Your argument is also just an anecdote.
Personally, I love OsmAnd because of the power features. In the best sense "it works for me". However, I would recommend OM to not-so-nerdy friends and family as it is just simpler to use and understand due to the fewer features.
I would disagree. I have both and use each for different tasks.
OSMAnd is clunky and unintuitive. I have learned it well and have it setup for land navigation type stuff. It's incredibly good at displaying every last detail of the topography.
Organic Maps is fantastic for city navigation. It's smooth and quick and ever since the addition of turn-by-turn voice navigation I'm in love. I use the Sherpa Onnx voices and they sound so lifelike.
Interesting perspective. I too have used Osmand (or "OsmAnd" or "OSMAnd" or whatever unpronounceable official name it is) for years. 13 years to be precisely, without a break. I've contributed numerous bug reports and feature requests. It's clunky and unintuitive yes, but I've seen worse in other power apps of this kind.
But Osmand is still lacking a couple of features on my personal wishlist, so I naturally gave Organic Maps a decent audition, navigation included. I found that it did only one thing better: rendering of subway lines in dense cities. But this has now been largely fixed by a new setting in Osmand (cleverly hidden, obviously). In everything else, OM just felt to me like a poor man's alternative to Osmand. With a busy hive of developers earnestly working towards feature parity sometime in the next millennium.
These two projects have the exactly the same objectives. I continue to wish the OM developers would just put aside their egos and help fix whatever it is they don't like in Osmand. That's the point of FOSS.
@JubilantJaguar @sic_semper_tyrannis
The developers pronounce it "Osmand" like the fairly common name.
https://youtu.be/SPab09kaWPc?t=47
Everyone does. If only they would drop the fussy spelling conceit and just write it like that.
Same problem that Osmand is dependend on their backend for map data download
@redd @JubilantJaguar not really.
OsmAndMapCreator is a free download and can process raw OSM data into what you need.
I used it all the time for quick updates before their "live" updates
@JubilantJaguar @sic_semper_tyrannis if I want the advanced capabilities and to wait 50 seconds for the map to load I use OsmAnd
For most things Organic Maps is better.