I’ve also used CoMaps and love it. I occasionally go to places that use non-Roman alphabets, and Organic Maps and all the other maps using OSM maps always always always suck at things like addresses and romanization of the alphabet. CoMaps seemed to do it just fine, so that alone sold me.
Its directions don’t include any traffic data, so it’s obviously not at the level of Waze or even Google maps. The “shorter route” might lead you straight into 3 lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic. But all things considered, love it so far.
Right now, I can’t justify using Organic Maps because it is just not usable enough. 99% of my navigation involves searching for place names and navigating with turn by turn directions which never seems to just work with Organic Maps. If I am on the interstate driving across country, I want to be able to search for a Chiotple or Fast Food or something along my route. I can’t search for addresses in a clunky interface. I am not sure if I am missing something, but I use Waze even against my privacy judgments.
Maybe I’m missing something, but CoMaps doesn’t appear to be meaningfully community-driven either, and just because you say it and put Co in your name doesn’t make it true[1]. Even if it does prove to be true (which requires a track record), I fail to see what bearing that has on whether CoMaps should replace Organic Maps. For now, both apps have feature parity, making the biggest and most important differentiator Organic Maps’ maturity and track record as a project.
CoMaps also isn’t on Accrescent which is a direct and significant downgrade from Organic Maps and makes it a non-starter for me.
So far, the only demonstration of being community-driven was the vote for the logo and name. That said, public voting on such trivial things has zero bearing on whether a project is community-driven. That’s without getting into the fact that “the community was not included or even aware” given that it happened so soon after Co-Maps was announced, long before any significant portion of the community was aware of its existence. ↩︎
Was more the reason to know why I should use comaps instead, I’ll consider it.
Suggestion if CoMaps was to add a privacy respecting way to do real time traffic, that would definitely be a real headstart, maybe an end-to-end encryption signal group fashion allbeit if they can keep up with the users’s real time location their servers on top of the encryption but @CoMaps something of a suggestion to get a leg up, the amount of people I’ve seen wanting real time traffic, yeah, would be amazing. Edit on this: may be planned? Making sure you're not a bot! would still be great to add a encryption layer otherwise with real time.
If you want me be I can do a python example, albeit with just strings instead of real time location
uh literally they said, the vast majority of contributors have moved to CoMaps, these contributors literally contributed to the Original Organic Maps themselves.
They also are going to be transparent about their finances unlike Organic Maps.
Also just because it’s not on Accrescent doesn’t make it bad, Obtainium for example is an option
Joined just to comment here! I do not speak for CoMaps, but I’m a CoMaps user and occasional volunteer. I used Organic Maps for about two years before I heard about the trust issues surrounding Organic maps and switched.
Long post warning. TLDR: The CoMaps community is really pulling together, and really giving Organic Maps a run for it’s money!
Some of you have questioned how many volunteers have really switched projects. I think it’s helpful to compare the repository activity.
there were 53 contributors to CoMaps between Apr 25 2025 17:04:24 GMT-0500 and Aug 10 2025 00:35:06 GMT-0500
there were 29 contributors to Organic Maps “Weekly from Jan 26, 2025 to Aug 2, 2025”
Also compare the number of commits since late April. The results are staggeringly in CoMaps favor. Please compare the open data yourself.
It’s important to note that some of the commits to Organic Maps since the fork have been by the same people who are leading the CoMaps project. This is because when a pull request is already being worked on in Organic Maps, the CoMaps leadership has encouraged the rest of us not to duplicate work, and to finish the work in the Organic Maps repository so they can pull the finished work into CoMaps later. (Both projects are licensed under the same Apache licence.)
Another thing to note is how many people there are who are now contributing to CoMaps who never contributed to Organic Maps, despite using it. The atmosphere is totally different between these two projects, and CoMaps is very inviting and open to new people just jumping in. I’m one of those people.
Regarding finances, you can see that in their profile on Open Collective. The CoMaps team has hardly even used any of the money raised yet. I personally think leadership is paying for things out of pocket and many people are donating resources like servers already being used by members of the community. Plus I’m sure freemium services are used wherever possible anyway.
Just wanted to review some things discussed as it’s been nearly a month since we initiated this discussion and there hasn’t been any momentum in the last few weeks:
Many community members report the experience on CoMaps is as good or better than Organic Maps. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone complain about a usability downgrade.
CoMaps is waiting on Accrescent for inclusion in their app store. In the meantime, security-conscious Android users can install it via Obtanium among other options. (Interestingly, Organic Maps doesn’t promote Accrescent as an option on their website.)
As far as I can tell, there are largely only positives of switching from Organic Maps to CoMaps. I think we mainly have 2 items to follow-up on:
It seems like it’s a matter of when (not if) CoMaps will be recommended in place of Organic Maps. Should we wait for the project to reach a certain age? As discussed, we probably shouldn’t need to wait for the project to be 1+ years old before recommending it, but if not a year, how old should it be? Alternatively, we can pick a concrete step such as waiting til the formation of a legal entity is complete. (Perhaps @CoMaps or @IXVG47QZ have some insight as to when that may happen?)
It’s been over a month since the last update regarding progress with Accrescent. It seems like their financial situation has improved since then so I wonder if now is a good time for CoMaps to reach back out? Anyone who’s on Codeberg can ask about it under issue #52.
Aside from forming a legal entity (which is a work-in-progress) how else could they be more community driven?
I guess what I meant is regardless of how we calculate it, their reputation or maturity doesn’t need to be nearly as well-proven as browsers for example. I think it’d be overkill and counterproductive for us to wait an extended period of time for them to re-prove a reputation they’ve already earned by being Organic Maps contributors who jumped ship over to an objectively more open and transparent alternative that has been going strong for months ever since its inception.
i installed it yesterday. but i live in the middle of nowhere, small rural towns. It has no address data, so the only way i can drive with it as a gps is if i pin point on a map, or knows the grid coordinates.
By actually having the community be involved in real decisions instead of silly votes. Which was what was originally mentioned as their issue with this claim of being community driven. So far, it seems, most of the “community driven” aspect is just paperwork.
I think if its new leadership they need to be re-evaluated on their own merits, not on the merits of the original project. I can’t think of one project where PG did not re-evaluate it if the old project is removed and a fork is suggested as a replacement. There is no precedent to evaluate a projects reputation via osmosis.
I tend to agree this makes sense as a recommendation but, from a process perspective, I think users are in way to much of a rush to get something recommended. This is not a vital category or an emergency, we can take the time to be diligent. Users can still read about it on the forum and feel free to use it, regardless of it being recommended.
I think figuring out if Organic Maps should even still be recommended, if it really has lost a significant amount of contributors, should be a higher priority. I am a bit surprised a suggestion to remove hasn’t been made.
I think it is implied by this suggestion, but I haven’t heard many reasons Organic Maps is bad here. It seems to me to be a difference in project vision more similar to Gogs vs Gitea vs Forgejo (to use an example I’m more personally familiar with), where really none of these three options are terrible, but the FOSS community clearly just favors one more than the others. I think this could be a fine reason to swap them, but I agree this does not seem like an emergency.
Frankly, maps are not really in the realm of things I care a lot about personally either, so I would love to hear thoughts from the people who were pushing for the original maps page in #2827 about this whole thing, which will probably be better than whatever I have to say…
That being said, after catching up on this thread again it does seem like @phnx has a good case against CoMaps which I am still leaning towards agreeing with even after reading the subsequent replies, personally.
There seem to be two separate questions: 1) Adding CoMaps. 2) Removing Organic Maps.
CoMaps is not a replacement for Organic Maps, they are distinct products. CoMaps has added a number of features which Organic Maps doesn’t have, and Organic Maps added features that CoMaps doesn’t have, for example the hiking stats (Organic has not released code for this feature, so we we’ll see if they plan to continue being open-source).
The track record for Organic Maps is that they tried to secretly change licenses on the server code to hide it, and added a Kayak ad which exposed Organic Maps users to Kayak’s data collection.
On the other hand, CoMaps has complete transparency on finances, anyone can join the Zulip chat organization, and decisions are made together publicly. These are vastly different organizations and CoMaps seems to be leading in how a community project should run.
