A potted history of mobile OSM-based mapping.

First there was Osmand. AKA OSMAnd or officially OsmAnd.

It was was powerful but complicated. Normies had never heard of it and preferred Maps.me, a user-friendly alternative with an opaque business model. Then something at Maps.me turned sour and the more privacy-minded normies turned to Organic Maps. Then something at Organic Maps turned sour and some of them moved to CoMaps.

During all this time (literally 15 years), Osmand improved steadily and became more powerful than ever. Even the UX got (a bit) better. It is by far the best mapping app, either FOSS or commercial. And yet somehow it continues to languish in relative obscurity.

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ihatehn 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We tell our users that OsmAnd is great if you want a mapping swiss army knife in your pocket: it does a little bit of everything, for power users. It has plugins and customizability.

CoMaps' mission is to be an accessible usable privacy-first FOSS map app for the entire world (average people) and so we always have our eye on the typical expected user experience and what obstacles remain between them and uninstalling those non-FOSS privacy-invading apps, but we're not going down the rabbit hole of adding all sorts of niche powerful features: OsmAnd already does that very well, and the world doesn't need two OsmAnds.

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gedankenstuecke 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

100% agree - I think even some of the CoMaps contributors use OsmAnd for the rare specialist use cases. I know I do: CoMaps is my main map app that I use basically every day and works perfectly for all of my common/normal use cases. but once in a while I have a map/nav need beyond that and then OsmAnd's customizability is great!

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andrewshadura 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Please please, fix the long-standing bug: make it possible to use the navigation in "north is always up" mode.

	▲	schubidubiduba 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That has been possible for a long time, by pressing the location button to toggle it. And recently some more edge cases regarding this were fixed.

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nkjvhb 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

OsmAnd is a great powerusers app. I use it daily.

However, I would not recommend OsmAnd to a normie. My family members, especially the older ones, all use CoMaps because it is much more friendly to them.

	▲	c0nsumer 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		100% this. I use OsmAnd very very frequently (it displays on my dash via Android Auto whenever I drive), but try and do something like load a GPX and show the line in a given color... Or add a pin at a specific point... It's not straightforward at all. Powerful, but very not straightforward.