this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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There is some serious crapitalist hate for organic maps. I never heard of it util is was taken off the play store for a bit. I side loaded it that day.
Organic Maps is not at feature parity with paid options but it is pretty damn good for FOSS. I use it almost daily for driving around city/suburban Australia and it very rarely gives me bad directions - certainly no more than the paid option i previously used (Sygic).
Its also a really great base project to build on top of. The routing system is a plug in library which can be easily replaced. That means if someone wants to build something that collects and utilizes live data for traffic/construction avoidance they can totally do that. Adding new map layers is also a big one that they made sure is going to be easy to do.
Has anyone actually created a traffic plugin yet? This is one of the main reasons I use Magic Earth still. I regularly bounce between that, Organic, and OsmAnd. They all have slightly different features.
The organic team doesnt wanna deal with collecting user data so they wont do it. Getting live location data from millions of people basically requires using and feeding into google services and thats a no go.
Ofcourse someone else could do it, but thats just a waste of time, if google can cut you off from their API at any point.
Even if you start your own project, no matter what you do, there will always have to be some company that collects all the data. That company no matter how cool and FOSS will eventually be forced to cooperate with law enforcement and then you are back to what we have now with google.
Location data is just too sensitive and impossible to anonymize properly.
But isn't there a possibility to fetch data from official websites (like https://stau.info/ in Germany) around your place? It won't be as good as google, but better than nothing.
As long as it only pulls data and doesnt share any its not as bad. But each of these local services most likely use different APIs and formats, so implementing it wont be so easy. For just large highways its realistic imo, but if you want data for inside cities it becomes impossible.
If the database of traffic info become so large that it's impossible to download it all at once it means you have to selectively download data for your location/route which makes it possible to infer user location again.
Well, now I know what will be my daily driver. Thanks!
Anything to reduce the advertising revenue of these jackasses
It works well, and I'm a huge fan and contributor to Open Street Maps (which it's bassed on). But it doesn't do traffic, which is unfortunately wha I need from my navigation apps 99% of the time.
If they had a paid option to cover the costs of using TomTom's traffic API, I'd make the switch.
But it is one of the best when it comes to cycling or walking. I've been using it for years now.
Why would it get removed? Can't have any competition for Google Maps or what? Well, it won't get removed on F-droid