Organic Maps is less powerful than OSMAnd (on Android), but it's much more straightforward and easy to use. It's the go-to app I recommend to all casual map users that want offline maps.
You can also download map files from the server manually via, e.g., a web browser and get unlimited downloads that way. Don't need to pay for the standard functionality no matter where you downloaded the apk.
OsmAnd is free-as-in-beer if you want it to be, though imo that's not fair to the developers unless you truly can't afford a few euros (which can be, no judgement, especially in countries with lower incomes or high income disparity).
"Our sponsors - Mythic Beasts ISP provides us two virtual servers with 400 TB/month of free bandwidth to help our users with maps downloads and updates."
Mythic Beasts are absolutely great, on that note. One of the truly old school hosts in the UK. They pay their employees a share bonus, they're technically excellent, and their services are reliable and well priced. I've been using them for years (since Bytemark got eaten by IOMart) and love them.
Also consider that with Google you have to redownload your area of the map almost constantly since they're online maps, whereas it's only even possible to download a ~100mb map file from OrganicMaps monthly-ish when they release app updates and most people don't update. 100mb per user is nothing.
It's less powerful, but also orders of magnitude less bloated and faster. OSMAnd has that quintessential kitchen-sink application feeling where features is the main concern and cohesive design an afterthought.
They rewrote the renderer so OSMAnd speed is tolerable now. There's still no real replacement for it for more advanced use, only alternatives for certain use cases, like Organic Maps.
Importing GPX tracks and displaying it on the map. For my bike trips I do my planning in advance on a computer using brouter or openrouteservice, then import the created file into OSMAnd.
- Good contour lines and hill shading! I live in Switzerland and it's considerably harder to understand the terrain without these features.
- Configurable POIs. In Organic Maps I can show POIs for a few common categories, but many are missing (for example EV charging stations). And I can only show one type of POI at once on the map. In OSMand, I can show POIs for "drinking water, EV charging stations and public bathrooms" at the same time.
- Track recording and especially live tracking (OSMand has a very nice plugin for that, which works with services like Traccar).
- I miss the ability to make Wikivoyage articles (and their associated POIs) available offline, which is really useful when travelling.
- OsmAnd's flags feel more ephemeral, whereas in Organic Maps I'm just adding them as regular bookmarks under "My places", which make them harder to distinguish from bookmarks I want to keep long-term.
- Bus lines and stops are pretty useful if you're taking the bus somewhere unfamiliar.
But those are pretty minor; I've still switched to Organic Maps just because it's so much easier to use (ironically, that probably is because it has fewer features).
Also, I just keep both installed just in case, so I can always fall back to OsmAnd :)
Oh also, OsmAnd's bicycle routes seem better (shorter/prettier routes)? Though I'm not even sure if Organic Maps's directions are for bicycle - the icon looks like a motorcycle, so they might be motorcycle directions.
Other people have already written that it's a fork of OrganicMaps by original authors.
I'll just add that for me OrganicMaps is much better than current Maps.me which is getting worse and worse after it was sold to some Korean (or Chinese, don't remember now) company.
The UI is much simpler and in recent months you can really start to see that OrganicMaps is becoming more detailed. I used to check from time to time the difference between Maps.me and OM and and it used to not be much of a difference, but now you have: more POIs (point of interests, like physiotherapist, specific kind of shops, etc.), better rendering of walls, fences, cliffs, embankments, hedges, better rendering of parking places (very recent update!), and more!
OSMAnd tracks users using a secret supercookie by default because the developer wants metrics. This is done without consent. The defensiveness of the developer with regards to such unethical tracking means that I will never use any software they ever release.
I took the time to go through the whole thread. Your tone was pretty aggressive from the start and throughout the whole conversation. On the developer's side yeah, they did minimize the issue at the beginning and then eventually modified how it works to increase privacy (rotating the UUID every 3 months, permitting to disable it anyway, clearly state it in the TOS etc). You are still downloading a tons of data from their infra, and for free, I think it's fair for them to have some sort of control to avoid abuses.
And even if it sounds harsh, their initial suggestion is always valid: use another software, or fork it and maintain your own version. It's GPLv3.
Where does it sound aggressive? I read the whole thread as well and was more astounded that harmless messages were marked as "abusive". Maybe if you read into it he sounds a little pissed
> It seems unlikely that this is an accident.
> It appears that this spyware tracking feature was added by @vshcherb (Victor Shcherb) back in 2015 and has been leaking users' data and travel history (via client IP geolocation) to the OSMAnd index server ever since.
but to be honest there was a hidden tracking feature for many years and he only called it by its name and didn't get aggressive in any form.
The original author didn't acknowledge a problem and all his messages were hidden (or are it at least now) to logged out users. This doesn't seem like a healthy discussion, but I disagree that not the reporter, but the other users/developers seem to be aggressive. They deny any problem and don't appear to understand or care to understand the "allegations" brought forward.
He insinuates that this is a feature to track users and acts in this respect in "bad faith", but assuming the worst (it saved a unique identifier and time of use and ips...) which is understandable in this situation.
For everyone reading my reply until now, but didn't read the github thread - the issue is fixed and you can now disable the identifier in the settings.
Thanks for reading, sorry for the rant, have a nice day :)
> but to be honest there was a hidden tracking feature for many years and he only called it by its name and didn't get aggressive in any form.
The alleged "calling by its name" is the whole point. You are already judging something as ill-intended from minute 0. That's pretty aggressive in my book.
> was more astounded that harmless messages were marked as "abusive".
I was too, at first, but then I saw that this person refused to acknowledge any misunderstanding on their part or engage with any of the clarifications provided, and continued to spout their one-dimensional rhetoric. There's no "misinformation" marker on Github afaik, so unfortunately the "abusive" marker seems to be the tool available to fade those out.
I'd absolutely find this excessive if this was about a proprietary product, but I'm in support of FOSS developers standing up for themselves and drawing a boundary on how much mental energy they're willing spend on people like this.
> You are still downloading a tons of data from their infra, and for free, I think it's fair for them to have some sort of control to avoid abuses.
I agree with you 100%. The issue of client tracking is completely orthogonal, as a client-generated and client-reported identifier does nothing to avoid these abuses. All it does is allow them to track users of the software.
It's possible to disable it now in the app settings as the last message in the issue states.
The app does enable it and telemetry by default without any warning which I think is wrong.
