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Comment by okso | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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