Pick and fund a maps app

i have tried many, virtually all maps on android, and honestly i never saw a trulyᵗᵐ free one as good as organic. i use it instead of google for everything.

it does miss photos, reviews, street view, and such other features that might still take a long time before the free community will make it real, if ever, routing for over 100km do take a long time, and navigation might never include traffic information, but i also never really use gmaps by myself anymore, as i rather feel like i live away from traffic, distant from big cities, and enjoying the serendipity of finding places closed or unexpected things.

i just need a map that help me navigate outside (i don't even have any big computers such as a laptop ever since 2019), and organic has done it wonderfully. from what i read about the alternatives, they don't come even close.

i wished they all simply could collaborate among themselves into 1 app only!

Adding links for reference:

• GNOME Maps: https://apps.gnome.org/Maps/

• Pure Maps: https://rinigus.github.io/pure-maps/

• osmin: https://github.com/janbar/osmin

• Organic Maps: https://organicmaps.app/

• mepo: https://mepo.lrdu.org/

• GPS passthrough for Waydroid (issue): https://github.com/waydroid/waydroid/issues/226

I haven't really used these (except Organic Maps a bit) so will need to know more before making a decision. It looks like a tradeoff between:

• Best looks/integration (GNOME Maps)

• Most features (GPS passthrough for Waydroid, unfortunately)

• Quickest to get going (probably Pure Maps)

Ideally I would choose GNOME Maps since it uses GTK and is already designed with our ecosystem in mind. But that would mean implementing many features, including adding navigation from scratch. So that would take a lot of time and effort.

On the other hand, enabling Waydroid passthrough will give us access to a substantial number of Android mapping applications (including contribution-oriented apps like Street Complete and Vespucci). This will open up many more options with just one (albeit difficult) task. The trade-off is we are not developing native apps, instead we are still dependent to some extent on the Android ecosystem.

Pure Maps and Organic Maps would be a compromise between the two since they have most commonly desired features but need work on the interface (Pure Maps) or tweaks to run properly on the Mobian (Organic Maps). Organic Maps has the best visual appearance, although it might look more out of place in Phosh than it does on Android.

Other thoughts:

• Maybe "not easy to install" is not such a big issue for osmin? If it has the features we need, then building it/simplifying the install process for Mobian might be our only job. So we can consider it as a similar option as Organic Maps

• mepo looks appealing to me when I'm using sway! But it might be too "technical looking" for some. "Bad design" is a common criticism of free software projects so if we are trying to get more people onto mobile linux we should choose something more visually appealing to ordinary users

Personally (i.e. for my own use case) I would go with Waydroid passthrough. Currently I don't use a smartphone (Linux or otherwise) and if I get one, one of the main purposes apart from messaging would be to contribute to OSM. Since the mainline options are currently limited, having access to Android apps would make running mainline Linux more viable.

In general we should decide how much effort to put on Android app compatibility vs. developing native apps. Maybe we can have a "stepping stone" approach? So, first we (a) support ways for Android apps to work "well enough" on Mobian (i.e. GPS passthrough for Waydroid in this case), and then (b) choose one native app and focus on developing that so the Android apps are no longer necessary.

One thing I noticed about Pure Maps today, it needs creating an account/add API key with a map tiles provider before it can be used. Organic Maps, GNOME Maps or osmin don't need this.

Just opened GNOME Maps and Organic Maps and remembered how cluttered the former looks. Organic Maps folks have done a good job in making it less cluttered. Attaching screenshots below (both are from laptop, with Organic Maps on Waydroid. I'm trying to build the desktop version of Organic Maps to get a screenshot of that too).

It struck me that while UI is on the edges, the main part of the map application is the map itself! So how that's displayed is also important. If I had to choose between GNOME Maps and Organic Maps on desktop based on looks, even though GNOME Maps technically has a "better fitting" GTK theme, Organic Maps still looks nicer due to the rendering of the map itself. It has better features too (apart from bus routes; there seem to be very few apps displaying those for some reason I haven't yet figured out)

If anyone has a screenshot of Pure Maps (and/or other options) to compare with, please share!

GNOME Maps (desktop version)

Organic Maps (Android version, running on laptop Waydroid)

Maybe a dumb question but what would to happen afterward? I.e. whom do you expect to change the mapping application as a result? A pick would likely depend on the available funding and the goals of the funding. E.g. if the maps app doesn't have offline capabilities would those be added? What about routing? Is the goal to get a usable app with minimal funds? All of these would influence my order of preference.

as i can't try the other apps except organic, i wonder if any of them allow at all to contribute back to osm, or if they actually use any other map source.

organic has limited options to add places to osm, but it does work wonderfully when matched with comments and engagement with osm community. i only ever use vespucci if i feel adventurous or have enough time to dedicate to all the extra options offered.

ps: i only have android devices for now, but i used to have a linux phone and will get back to it as soon as i find one stable enough!

If we use this snapshot as a basis to evaluate the apps and assign a score, then

Top 5 features: (assuming full points even if the feature is not perfect yet)

GNOME Maps gets 133 (adapted to mobile screen) + 105 (Easy to use) + 89 (public transport) = 327

Organic Maps gets 131 (Offline Maps) + 123 (turn by turn navigation) + 89 (public transport) = 349

Pure Maps gets 133 (adaptive) + 131 (offline) + 123 (turn by turn) + 105 (easy to use) = 492

Note: this is a rough approximation, we can probably look at more sophisticated calculation once the poll closes

Since first two apps are very very close (Organic Maps has 111 points and 4.83 mean; GNOME Maps has 108 points and 4.7 mean), we can try and implement missing features in both? We can also talk to both upstream and see if they are in alignment with the other priority features poll (like if we manage to send them a merge request, would they accept).

I have an FLX1 now and it came with waydroid preinstalled. It also had F Droid, so I could install Organic Maps and it got location and works well, except for notification. Phosh tells there is notification from Organic Maps but can't display it. So we still need to integrate waydroid notifications to phosh I think (all android notifications need to be mapped).

Just tried Organic Maps on Poco F1. The Waydroid app UI elements work, but there are some graphic issues with displaying the map itself that I'm yet to debug; here's what it looks like at the moment:

I also tried the QT version installed from Flathub. The UI is unresponsive and looks horrible, but I'm trying to figure it out so that I can test the features. If the features work fine then it may be relatively easy to adapt the UI:

As you can see the main window itself fits the screen, but the popups are not responsive.

Also there is unfortunately no way to tell Phosh to forcibly scale down the popups to match the screen size, as you can with other apps. I suspect this might be due to the fact that it's using Qt rather than GTK. The popup doesn't show as a separate entity (as it does in Dino, for example), and even if I apply the force-scaling to Organic Maps itself the popup remains too large for the screen. A workaround is to switch to landscape mode, which is enough to handle any popups I've encountered so far. This is likely to be a temporary issue till the app is mobile optimised, but it highlights how Qt doesn't fit in as well as GTK.

I'm yet to try the Qt version extensively. Let me know if you want me to test anything specific and I'll report back!

NLNet is funding this project https://nlnet.nl/project/OrganicMaps-ConvergentUI/ so one less item for us to worry about.

Juno Computers is also working on a navigation app: https://gitlab.com/junocomp/car-navigation