Public transport routing is the only thing I keep Google Maps for. I'm currently Interrailing - on the ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn as we speak - and it'd be so nice to do my navigating in one app.

cartes.app has a beautiful interface that compares all modes of transit but it doesn't seem to do much outside of France.

can you share those reasons?

Remember to dump Organic Maps in favor of CoMaps because reasons

Yeah it's such an important feature to have. I don't drive a car and use public transport a lot. I use a regular old website for it which is fine, but having it included in a map app would be amazing.

I used to use Transportr

https://transportr.app/

but at some point it stopped working for the country where I live.

Organic Maps does already work for the tube in London and other metro systems. Not live information, but at least in London they run so often that it didn't matter to me. Having the route was most important and in fact multiple times gave better results than when my partner tried Google maps.

Good luck Organic Maps team! I really hope they can make it work and I'll definitely make a donation.

I wish them luck, so far no open source public transport app is on par with closed source ones. One of the key issues is lack of data from many cities.

The letter seems a bit meandering, it buries the important part half way down, and doesn't specify what those closed parts actually are.

a couple of months later in the team's internal chat he again argued against opening the de-facto closed parts of the maps generator code. It's still not completely open source.

You are a bit late to the party, but good reminder in case people missed it. Because of this a fork was created a few months back that is now the new cool kid on the block. There is even a well maintained community on here for it. The new fork is called CoMaps:

• https://www.comaps.app/
• https://f-droid.org/packages/app.comaps.fdroid/
• !CoMaps@sopuli.xyz

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Apart from the whole organization, governance, and openness, I haven't followed in much detail the code changes since moving to comaps, but this page has some initial changes since forking and I recall they removed the sponsored, kayak affiliate links from the fork.

And CoMaps is run by the volunteers who did majority of development on OrganicMaps anyway. Only after the fork did I start seeing actual meaningful commits in OM repo from owners themselves. For atleast a year before the fork all the big changes were made by developers who forked OM.

Has CoMaps diverged in any meaningful way yet? Apart from not having all the apps organic have, like desktop

Not a good look for OM in that mastodon thread. Happy to have moved to CoMaps.

CoMaps is a fork of Organic Maps that is also a fork of Maps.Me.

CoMaps is meant to be more transparent than Organic Maps since it turned out to be a company owned by 3 individuals doing questionable things in the background.

I had never heard of CoMaps before. Is it another fork of the Kremlin-controlled Maps.ME without Russian spy code? Or something else?

Is there a specific reason it needs an alternative, or is it just good to have an alternative for everything in case that something about a program is not okay for some user?