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Comment by _fat_santa | Hacker News Reader

> (and big advantage) of functioning offline by default.

I don't know about others but that's the main reason I use it. My day to day mapping app is still Google Maps but I always keep a copy of Organic Maps with downloaded maps of wherever I'm going as a backup. While I do not use it often, it's gotten me out of a couple of sticky situations while camping and roadtripping.

Organic Maps (and other offline mapping providers) are far from perfect and the UX is just not the same as it is on Google Maps for example. But with it being a backup app, if I need to open it I don't really care about the limitations, I just need an offline map.

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I know this probably doesn't solve the same issue, but google maps has a offline feature. Click your profile picture (on mobile), pick offline maps, ....

It has a huge limitation in that it only allows you to pick a certain area to download and those maps "expire" after a period of time. The key advantage that Organic Maps (and other OSM providers) has is that I can download an entire state, province or even country and that data will never "expire".

same same. and I often find Organic Maps has hiking trails etc fairly well indicated where Google does not (even if I have cell service)

I think this is less Organic vs Google than OpenStreetMap's data set vs Google's. I don't know why Google does so much worse with trails than OSM, but it really does.

> I don't know why Google does so much worse with trails than OSM, but it really does.

I expect that Google never saw a market in trail mapping. I also assume no Google employee took an interest in trails as a 10% project. Google Maps doesn't really do much for topography either.

Google Earth can be good for trail mapping, but that has basically atrophied since it was acquired from Keyhole.

Yeah, but the thing is that I don't think any of this data is "self-collected". I suspect that OSM gets most of its US trail data (or at least western state trail data) from the National Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. I also suspect that incorporating such a data source into Google Maps is relatively trivial, but they just seemed to have done so.

I map many trails on osm from personal site surveys and a combination of sat imagery and my gpx files. No way google is doing that because there is no one to steal the data from. It was me, the enthusiast that put it in osm directly. That’s just me and the trails I load tho. Example - Latest was short one at monkeyface falls. https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/34.098058/-116.955639

I hike on trails in New Mexico, and I find the existing trail data on osmand/OSM to be astoundingly accurate. I had concluded that NSF/BLM must have data.

So few people hike these trails that I do not believe they were entered one by one. The one "trail" I hiked that was entered by someone I deleted later that day, because it should not have been shown as a trail.

And, one doesn’t have crap being pushed at you while you’re trying to find your way, or businesses filtered out because…

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