[nunobrito]

Anyone here has been using coMaps and care to share their experience, especially in comparison to OrganicMaps?

My only complaint to OrganicMaps was the slowness to calculate a direction, which in part is certainly because the path is calculated locally instead of some cloud server but old garmin devices also weren't online and can calculate paths on far less powerful hardware. So I'm guessing there is room for improvement on that part.

[TheLNL]

Comaps and organic maps are very similar (they forked very recently). The only difference I can think of from the top of my mind is that organic maps is not fully open source (map files and generator are proprietary) and has some kayak sponsored suggestions/reviews

[JumpCrisscross]

> organic maps is not fully open source

Organic Maps is a for-profit venture that accepts donations. That's sketchy. Management also seems to have prior Kremlin links. Which is sketchy.

[WinstonSmith84]

> Management also seems to have prior Kremlin links

You mind sharing links / sources / etc. ?

[ponkipo]

> Organic Maps is a for-profit venture that accepts donations. That's sketchy.

I don’t understand why it is “sketchy”. Also do you have any proof on “Kremlin links”?

[mcv]

My biggest issue with OrganicMaps is that the search isn't very good. It really struggles to find my destination sometimes. That's the one thing I'm afraid Google will always be better at.

[maelito]

It doesn't take so much to enable a good server search on top of OSM + openaddresses.

Local search will always be slow and bad.

But server search doesn't need that much. It's just that OS initiatives are severely understaffed. OS apps that have a Photon instance are already rare to find. Let's not talk about having an Overpass instance...

What is very hard to reproduce is Google's place review data.

It's golden to enable good search.

[tcfhgj]

> What is very hard to reproduce is Google's place review data.

fake anyways (quite easy to get negative comments deleted), and even for bad reviews.

Best look elsewhere or not at all.

[maelito]

I'm not talking about stars, we don't care about stars for search engines.

What's important is people talking about "has air conditioner" in a hotel review or "has vegan" in a restaurant. OSM has none of this data.

[baumschubser]

I just checked (in CoMaps): A restaurant around the corner is listed as "Pizza, Vegan, no wheelchair access, outdoor seating". No opening hours, though (but other places have).

[drnick1]

It's not like Google reviews can be trusted.

[dopidopHN2]

I have the same grippe.

I was talking in deep in the weed OSM signal group and apparently its a split between the address data not being present, and OrganicMap / CoMap being bugged.

The way to triage is asking nominatim, the geocoder from OSM. If it can resolve : its on the client side, if not, its a data problem.

I'm just parroting here. Happy to learn more.

This is THE only issue I have with those OSM client ( I don't care about traffic )

[maelito]

For good (server) search, one needs many layers (Photon, Pelias with OpenAdresses, Overpass, in-house pmtiles, etc.) using many DBs, each needing server ressources or expensive paid APIs.

It's obvioulsy expensive in terms of ops + dev, but also just to host.

It can't scale with only 0,0001 % of users donating to the app.

Fortunately, NLNet's there to fund work, but it's still nonethless only a tenth of what would be needed.

Plus map applications and general search engines don't talk to each other... I don't know why, but it is so. Maybe because all the well-known search engines are closed-source ?

[seb1204]

This can be due to missing address information in OSM. I also find the grouping sometimes odd, e.g. searching for a street, the place names are from one level higher.

[shrinks99]

I prefer CoMaps' tile styling, they did a bunch of updates to it early on to differentiate it from OrganicMaps, IMO it's much nicer.

CoMaps also has a better system for distributing map data now which isn't bound to app updates. Not sure if this has made its way back to the other app, but it's quite nice.

[goobatrooba]

Been using Comaps for a while, mainly for cycling, and it works very well. Before that I used also organicmaps and it was fine as well but I think made a few more mistakes in routing. That said, obviously this is not a parallel test but rather successive. Of course the split happened with drama, but I just like the Comaps vibe and am happy with it.

[femto]

I used to use OrganicMaps. When coMaps forked, I changed to it. From my perspective there were no negatives. If anything, coMaps looked to be under more active development.