[z3ugma]

Just downloaded CoMaps. Why does it start with a zoomed out view of the entire world, especially given that I gave it location services and it shows my current location (in North America). The very first UX experience this app gives is "I am primarily for people interested in maps and geography"

Contrast this with Apple Maps - when you open it, there are 4 big tap controls for actions like "Home" "Work", a search bar, and a map that covers a 1-mile radius around you .

I'd encourage your UX flow to go something more like: request location services > if granted, immediately start downloading their local tileset in the background > zoom to a 20-mile radius around the user

[CircuitSeuss]

Unfortunately I have yet to find an OSM app that offers a properly usable modern interface. Most are passable if you are a nerd who doesn’t mind being inconvenienced and can work around the quirks; my non techy friends open the app once and immediately delete it. We really need an Apple or Google maps clone.

[flaburgan]

Murena (the company behind the /e/ mobile OS) is developing a FOSS app, maybe it will suit your needs : https://murena.com/en/murena-maps-your-questions-and-answers...

[Tooster]

And the online mapping ecosystem is completely fragmented. Half the apps out there demand a $25/month subscription, creating these hermetic, proprietary silos. They are gating and monetizing trails, hikes, and routes that were crowdsourced by the community in the first place. I’m not paying $300 a year to buy back data that I personally contribute to. There are gazillion similar apps, with slight variations, and the more powerful ones look like something straight from 2000s.

Instead of a pay-to-access model, a sustainable consumer map ecosystem could look like Wikipedia, or better yet, a peer-to-peer network like IPFS where you trade compute (route calculation) and storage. It could be a barter: you get to use the collective resources of the network because you are actively hosting tiles, routing data, or contributing metadata back into it. But that requires a critical mass to take off (like bitcoin did).

OpenStreetMap is great, but what we actually need is a modern consumer frontend built on top of an open, distributed layer: decentralized public registry for user-generated content, keeping your routes and trip itineraries discoverable by any client app rather than locked inside VC-backed silos.

Furthermore, current open-source projects miss a lot of quality-of-life features that commercial apps have—things like crowd-sourced opinions and reviews about places, public transit schedules, real-time traffic alerting and reporting, location sharing, street-view, and dependable speed limits during navigation. Without these active, live-data layers, the map looks stale and lagging behind the real world.

The user interface also needs to shift from a passive viewport to a high-contribution editor. Right now, if you want to make serious geometry edits, you’re forced into JOSM. It’s hard to boot, clunky, and quite clearly has never seen a proper UI/UX designer, scaring away everyone but the most hardcore power users. I'm a person who doesn't give up easily, but when I tried adding parking zone regions for the city I gave up after 2 days of trying to make some sense of this software. A modern mobile UI should let you freehand draw a route that snaps to paths, edit regions on the fly, or drop advanced metadata — like parking restrictions — in just three obvious taps, without a steep technical learning curve.

Finally, the client app itself should be a pluggable core. Instead of building every feature from scratch, it should allow users to plug in open modules for whatever they need, whether that's live public transit routing, traffic estimates, location sharing, or advanced 3D metro overlays. The data is there, and the rendering tech is there; we just need a shared, distributed network structure so companies can't charge us a premium to gate the social and metadata layers. I wish there was an EU initiative to have a fully featured app like that, unifying all the existing ones in place of N abhorrent, barely functional implementations in all of the different local public transport apps (looking at you italian AMT genova or you, french IDF mobilites).

[schubidubiduba]

CoMaps does have this exact UX flow actually. Unfortunately it is somewhat flaky and frequently falls back to not doing it.

[MaxMatti]

When I downloaded it via F-Droid earlier today it did what wanted. Unfortunately Android Auto is only enabled in the Play Store Version, so I downloaded that and there it went the same as for you. At least it immediately prompted me to download my local tile set when I tapped the geolocation button to zoom in.

[ihatehn]

It should zoom in and automatically download.

[palata]

Disagree.

[xigoi]

> if granted, immediately start downloading their local tileset in the background

Nope. I do not want any app to start downloading hundreds of megabytes without my permission.