MAPS.ME users now can edit OpenStreetMap by themselves | Hacker News Reader

MAPS.ME users now can edit OpenStreetMap by themselves

blog.maps.me

142 pointschippy27 comments

MAPS.ME is an awesome product, and probably the best alternative to Google Maps: great performances, free and open source and not trying to track you everywhere.

Allowing user to contribute back to OSM makes it even greater.

The fact that start and endpoints of calculated routes are uploaded to a server (and until recently unencrypted[1]) doesn't inspire confidence. The app also collects analytic statistics and serves ads by default. If you're interested in a maps application that is not "trying to track you everywhere", OsmAnd[2] is a better choice.

Also, Maps.me is owned by mail.ru which has a similar business model to Google with arguably more lax security practices.

[1]https://github.com/mapsme/omim/issues/1073 [2]http://osmand.net

From the issue referenced it seems like this is only done when the regions needed for routing are not already downloaded to the device. They do admit that the source/destination is sent to the server rather than just the regions, that might have been a reasonable balance. I was able to create a route from my current location to a new location, one I have never search for before going into airplane mode, across multiple regions already on my device.

The app statistics and ad delivery can be easily turned off.

OsmAnd looks pretty nice too.

I use OsmAnd and am currently evaluating Maps.Me.

One thing OsmAnd can do is to set multiple waypoints before the destination then plan a route that hits the waypoints before the destination. This is good for planning routes from A to B to C, etc.

I don't think Maps.Me can do this yet.

As far the analytics, there has been discussion on this as it relates to having an FDroid FOSS version. https://github.com/mapsme/omim/issues/85

Edit: Sorry, didn't see orblivion's comment.

OsmAnd is a great project, but the rendering performances are awful, even on high-end devices.

I didn't know the application is open source, too. Very cool indeed, I'll give this a try as the main maps application.

It has been open-sourced in October 2015: http://blog.maps.me/2015/10/mapsme-goes-open-source.html

This is great news for OpenStreetMap. It makes it easy for millions of people to make fixes and additions that will quickly show up in the mapping system that they are using day to day.

Maps.me saved my trip to Okinawa where Here and Google had no offline maps available. I would have donated if there were a button.

This is a gamechanger, not being able to make changes to OSM easily (and if it's not easy, I don't do it, like the lazy fuck that I am) was the only thing that bugged me about maps.me. Actually it could be fun now to start mapping expeditions to not-so-well covered areas like rural Mongolia.

If you are interested in making large contributions to OSM, I still recommend the dedicated tools like JOSM. I think you'll find that significant editing will become very tedious on a mobile device.

How long does it usually take for http://maps.me/apk/ to update?

I like to avoid major app stores when possible, especially for open source apps (I'm not quite ready to build for myself for all the apps I use though), so I've been getting the app direct from the source for previous releases.

For me, this has been one of the key apps in migrating from Google apps to open source.

Check out the discussion here:

https://github.com/mapsme/omim/issues/85

In summary, Maps.me includes a few binary blob analytics libraries. The F-Droid fork removed them, but they have to sort out how to make sure the fork plays nice with their data servers, or they have to host it on their own.

relan, who created the Fdroid fork, unfortunately deleted that fork.

I like very much the Maps.me and I have recomanded it to several people. I would like to know if it's possible to search in London by the postcode or how could I add myself the postcode database (into to my phone).

The UK postcode data is not freely available.[0]

[0]http://www.freethepostcode.org/

Postcode centroids have been freely available since 2010. freethepostcode was set up before then (as was npemap, a similar site I was involved with: http://www.npemap.org.uk/FAQ.html#whatIsIt ).

Postcode boundaries, however, are still not available openly.

I wonder how much absolute error there is between the actual boundary and a Voronoi boundary. While I'm sure there's some massive IV postcode for which it wouldn't work, if most postcodes are tiny, then the fact that you're off by under a kilometre isn't so bad for routing.

But there are open alternatives that OpenStreetMap draws on.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_UK_Postcodes

Maps.me now lets you edit OpenStreetMap directly, so you should be able to add your own postcode directly. I don't know what kind of UI they've added, this can get kind of deep, but nothing that someone reading HN can't figure out.

> Update 2010-05-10: Post code data from OS now freed

I done some OSM the entry level is low-level (for me). There are quite a bit of rules to OSM to map properly. So I am not entirely sure this is a good thing. I'd be happier with bug-reports and pictures personally.

There's billions of buildings to map, millions of POIs, anything that makes the long tail longer is a good thing.

Maps.me is a cool idea, but the search functionality is unusable.

Is it done entirely based on OSM data or are they referencing some other data set?

Searching algorithms were completely redone in this release. Give it a try.

Still are very, very bad.

As an OSM data consumer I hope this gets more people adding nodes, particularly house numbers for geocoding.

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