Hopped aboard, gave it a little poke around as a first time user. Definitely much more friendly user experience compared to OSMand! I was able to pin my home location and set 'avoid highways' very intuitively.
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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CoMaps
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82 users here now
Cooperative community open-source fork of Organic Maps, an offline privacy-respecting not-for-profit OpenStreetMap GPS app for your phone.
founded 1 month ago
MODERATORS
It's a really nice app for openstreetmap data, beautiful even. I also find the UI really nice and uncluttered and intuitive to use. Best of all: allows you to contribute to openstreetmap directly inside the app!
Hope you enjoy it as much as I do :)
For someone, who never heard of CoMaps why is it a big deal?
I guess it's not a big deal to someone who wasn't using / aware of OrganicMaps, but it is huge to us who loved OM.
The community is incredibly disappointed of the owners of the project (shareholders, original developers) when the volunteer force of the open-source map application wrote a revealing openletter to the owners.
The owners had been misusing the donations / funding of the project - as well as possibly (honestly, most likely) planning to sell out after years of people giving the project their free time (there is much more to this, but I'll keep it short. See the openletter for more info)
CoMaps is a community fork of OrganicMaps, so it is incredibly exciting that the FOSS volunteers have been able to fork the project, set up and organize everything, and are going forward at this speed!
It truly shows the power of FOSS and how companies can't just take something away from all the people who contributed for free and out of passion.
Hope that answers your question! :)
Edit: added more context.
Really appreciate the detailed answer. I'm not a power user of Organic Maps (mostly using Magic Earth for driving), but I have it installed for over a year now and was not aware of whats going on with it.
As Im a huge fan of FOSS I will definitely give it a try.
Glad I could answer!
Yeah I had no idea either how bad it was until another user on lemmy pointed out the company that has been set up by the owners, and then one day @Sunshine@lemmy.ca posted the open letter in !organicmaps@sopuli.xyz.
And other good news: the community fork developers (who also were trusted and long established contributors of OM) allowed us to make the lemmy community !CoMaps@sopuli.xyz an official community! They participate in that community too!
Didn't come up in a search of the fdroid app
I use Droidify and its there
I had to go in Settings > Include Anti-Features and enable Tethered Network Services for it to show up.
Tried that and it didnt work. What does that feature mean btw? Is it in fact something to avoid?
It's just that the app relies on an external server to retrieve the data, as you likely won't need or want to download the entire map dataset inside your phone every time the data is updated.
Update your repository?
As in add more repositories? I'm not sure what this means, sorry
As far as my understanding:
Repositories are like lists of available programs. F-droid will update periodically, but will not catch a fresh update or new program until the repo is updated.
🎉
Massive news!