CoMaps shares core functionality with Organic Maps. It allows users to plan and navigate trips entirely offline. It’s entirely free to use, with no ads, and it collects no personal data. Additionally, its efficient design ensures minimal battery consumption, making it suitable for travelers seeking private, uninterrupted navigation.
What sets CoMaps apart is a fully transparent governance approach. All decisions about the app’s development are made publicly, with users and contributors having a voice in its future direction. This focus on community engagement aims to deliver value for its users rather than prioritize profit.
Already deleted organic maps and downloaded comaps instead and used it yesterday. Works great for navigation showing intersections and turns at a nice zoom level and clear guides. Love it over Google maps already.
Only major downside is live traffic and also that map changes for closed roads doesn’t seem to update the navigation. The navigation still takes me down a temporary closed road that as far as I can see on osm.org is marked as closed but I’m not sure who’s fault it is because the road is also still visible on osm.org and only by selecting the road and looking at metadata can I see that it is closed. Not sure how and where to report this bug.
CoMaps (unless they’ve diverged from Organic Maps already) only updates map info once a month. Once a month they “cut” whatever is latest on Open Street Maps (OSM) and update their database. if someone updates OSM today, you may not see it on CoMaps until the monthly update is available.
osm seems like a mess. your comment got me poking around my local area to see if they had marked a recent road closure i was aware of. They hadn’t, and the Walgreen’s next to the road was marked as a generic building. I dug into the editing tools, made an account, and made some edits. Then I tried asking OSM to give me directions to that pharmacy, and it just says it can’t find a route. lollll great thanks OSM.
It seems interesting as a hobby to keep up with. Feels like editing Wikipedia articles but you’re getting in on the ground floor, so your individual contribution is way more valuable.
We don’t map temporary features: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Good_practice#Don’t_map_temporary_events_and_temporary_features
If the road closure is less than a month long it shouldn’t be on OSM. A lot of people use the map offline, it’s better to have the default “open” state on the map for them.
Clients are free to mix the OSM basemap with their proprietary data. E.g. Magic Earth has some live traffic data from 3rd parties and from its users, and you can report temporary closures in the app as well and it displays them while driving. (Unfortunately it doesn’t consider them for routing)
OSM is not a map service like Gmaps, it’s a geospatial database and a community maintaining the database. OSM by itself is not really usable for end users, CoMaps and others should build their services on top of the data. This is the reason it’s not licensed by some kind of CreativeCommons, but it has its own special license ODbL. It allows easier commercial usage than CC-BY-SA, which was used by OSM before 2012. https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence_and_Legal_FAQ/Why_CC_BY-SA_is_Unsuitable
The routing was not working for the same reason. OSM does not route, as it’s just a database. It just displays a 3rd party routing engine which uses outdated data, from before your change.
This is an excellent explanation. I’ve always wondered how it all worked, now I see the map data is separate from dynamic data.
Wish these mapping apps would explain that, so people would understand the apps are providing the updated/dynamic data with the map data coming from OSM.
interesting. thanks for the info!
If you want to improve the map in your area, use streetcomplete. It’s incredibly easy and feels like a video game
great tip, checking it out now