Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gst 907 days ago
For day to day use I use Apple Maps, but when hiking Organic Maps is my absolute favorite. A lot more useful than Apple Maps or Google Maps (as it includes routes that are missing in the other two) and it allows to add custom tracks which is super useful for navigation.
1 comments

Organic Maps is great, especially for planning hikes, but I'd be careful about relying on the OSM topos for wilderness travel. I got burned pretty hard in the Alps by OSM when a trail didn't actually exist. Since then, I like to use Organic Maps for a digital "reconnaissance" of OSM points of interest and then a country-specific topo map like USGS or IGN for backcountry navigation or route finding.

Note: AlpineQuest is a great app for this and is one of the few apps that doesn't charge a subscription to access our taxpayer-funded maps.

I had a similar experience using Organic Maps for hiking. I was hiking on a forested hill near an urban center. Both Google and Apple Maps only had a couple of the biggest trails while organic maps showed an extensive network. This was really helpful for exploring but I ended up having to take a pretty long detour to get back since the trail I had planned to take didn’t exist. I also encountered a trail marked on the map that had obviously been closed for years and was extremely overgrown. I really like the app but I wouldn’t trust the data for backcountry navigation at all.