Since the #39c3 in December, every first Sunday of the month has been a “Digital Independence Day” for trying out alternatives to dominant/big tech platforms.
If you’re looking to explore alternatives to Google or Apple Maps, why not give CoMaps – or any of the other open source map-applications that are based on data from #OpenStreetMap – a try!
You can learn more about the #DIDay here: https://edri.org/our-work/didit-edri-members-spark-movement-for-alternatives-to-big-tech/
#DIDit
happy DIDay everybody 😋
You know what, I’m going to give it a shot, and at least use it as my backup offline maps.
Love CoMaps. But until there’s a efficient streaming option to skip asking the user to download maps, it’s going to be hard to offer as an alternative to Google Maps.
Komoot does streaming and it’s annoying :)
That’s going to be extremely expensive for them to host a server (probably multiple all over the world), isn’t it? Streaming images would probably not be as bad as video but still quite a lot of bandwidth / CPU usage, no?
(Personally I don’t understand why you’d want to do that instead of downloading for offline use but I know I’m weird with not having mobile data anyway, so …)
Not weird. I keep my phone on airplane mode unless I’m actively making a phone call, for privacy reasons (here in the USA, cell tower data is sold to anyone with money through data brokers). Using a mobile map app (Google, Bing, HereWeGo, etc.) with location services on would be pretty bad for privacy. I like the fact that CoMaps works even when the location service is off (unless I don’t know where I am and I need the current location) and the airplane mode is on.
I don’t “want to do that” but I tried to make the point that many users heavily rely on that. I can work with offline maps, but I’m not above admitting it’s a tad more work that, for most, is a real deal breaker
In a perfect world, you’d have both.
First, instant streaming as you browse the map while internet connected, so you don’t deal with delays, don’t have to wait for the map to download before you can do anything with it. And while doing that, also download offline maps in the background, without interrupting the user.
But, yeah, I can definitely see why a open source project with limited resources wouldn’t be able to make streaming available.
Actually it should be fairly trivial to host this in a peer to peer fashion, in the background. Depending on how much you want cached in your device, you could have in local storage all the maps that cover, lets say, 100Km from your position. Satellite would be more data intensive, but the same concept applies. All data would be distributed, and since most have unlimited data plans, hosting and bandwidth would essentially be free.
Trying it out a little so far.
My only real thing so far is that it would be nice to have a web interface that doesn’t require installing anything on any device. Something that runs in the browser without needing to download maps first. But that would probably have to run quite differently than the app, so it might be well outside the scope of this project, at least for now.
(Windows and Mac OS versions would also be nice to have, and seems like porting them shouldn’t be too hard if you just half-ass it by using the Linux version with a compatibility layer. But, again, yeah… If development resources are scarce, I can definitely understand skipping those.)
The web interface is the official OSM at https://openstreetmap.org/ - it works well in both desktop and mobile browsers. The CoMaps app is mainly useful to those without mobile data plans or prefer not to, as it stores the maps offline/on-device.
