-
Community data like OpenSteeetMap rely on voluntary submissions, so the data can be either obsessive-level complete or non-existent. Especially businesses don't put themselves on OSM so their location/name/info are somewhat old or just don't exist
-
Search algorithms are incredibly complex to make it work well, Google (the king lf search engines) has likely hundreds of people working on an algorithm, Apple the same way
-
Offline search is also very taxing even if tue app implemented such algorithms, google maps searches with their billion dollars servers
this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2025
58 points (98.3% liked)
CoMaps
870 readers
49 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 7 months ago
MODERATORS
None of that is true anymore. Fuzzy searching is incredibly easy, you don’t need billion dollar servers, and there are open source libraries that do it right out of the box. It has nothing to do with community submissions and everything to do with how they implemented search.
What’s most likely is that they don’t have a ranking system for each poi, so liberty bell just defaults to whatever is closest rather than whatever is most likely.
I don't know much about the topic, but I guess even if that's the case, it's likely most open source projects just don't have contributors knowledgeable or willing to invest the time
Yes of course that is the underlying reason, for example i contribute to a lot of open source projects and even if i have the expertise on any given thing i can only put my knowledge in so many places at once. And not only that but interests wax and wane and oss contributors get shit on quite often.
Just to confirm #1: moved to another city, and pretty much any address within the city is now searchable and correct. POIs are a bit off, but I try to update them.
Some places publish address data with a compatible license, some even directly importable to osm. But e.g. here where I live, we got an official address list for each residential addresses (no offices, factories, etc.), but without coordinates. So we can only use it to check if we still have to survey something.
The biggest open address db I know of is openaddresses, you can see on their coverage page it's a hit or miss if they have data: https://batch.openaddresses.io/data#map=0%2F0%2F0
Another address source list is on the Overture maps attribution page, you can see in some places they don't even have country wide sources, they had to ask from city level governments: https://docs.overturemaps.org/attribution/
Openaddresses shows my county as green, but my area only has block-level addresses in OpenStreetMap. What's up with that?
They may only have that block level addresses. Or simply no one imported that data to osm yet. Or maybe its license is not compatible with ODbL, the license of OSM. There may be a lot of reasons, the easiest was to know it is to contact local mappers and ask them, you can find your local community here: https://openstreetmap.community/
You know, that's like the third time I've been given that exact advice. I just really don't want to make a whole new account on Slack or whatever just to talk to OSM people.
Use the forum then, you don't have to register, you can login with your OSM account: https://community.openstreetmap.org/c/communities/us Most top mappers usually follow multiple channels.
You can also use IRC or Matrix or one of the bazillion other options. The OSM people are happily fragmented across various communication platforms, but each of them has people who are able to help :)
I can't find the link from my phone, but there is a website for adding your business to OSM. It has options for things like the business name and opening hours. That could be helpful for surveying businesses and adding them to the map yourself, just ask the business owners for the details.
If I can find the link later I'll post it here 👍
So what you're saying is, if I want an actually functional map, I have to use Google or apple?
If you're on Android, try GeoShare, it allows you to share location from Google Maps to CoMaps, so you could easily use CoMaps for navigation.
Very neat, thanks for sharing! I just gave it a test and it works perfectly.
Interesting, thanks!
You can also use GWMaps
It's up to you to define "functional" based on your use case. If you are unhappy with the current state of Comaps or other open source map apps, then of course you are free to use Google or Apple.
Edit just to expand somewhat: For what it's worth, I find Comaps great for my use case, so it is more than "funcional" for me. That's what I was getting at.
I would prefer to get away from Google, and don't have an iPhone so apple is not an option atm. Looking into it a bit more, and I am learning that it's a community built map from OSM, so I am understanding why it is the way it is. I will work on contributing and customizing it to my liking.
Contribute with money or your time. Google spends gazillion of money on maintaining their map data, on osm only several thousand people, mostly volunteers work on it WORLDWIDE.
With comaps you can report problems you find on the map, I frequently solve issues in my area reported by comaps users.
Another option is that there are several other navigation apps on Android: MapQuest, Magic Earth, Sygic, HERE WeGo, TomTom GO, MapFactor. I don't know how they compare, but I've seen them offered as non open source Google Maps alternatives. But yes, contributing to the community maps data is awesome if you can.
Frankly, they all suck, a LOT compared to Google Maps. And I don't particularly like Google Maps functionality (let alone their draconian data gathering).
I really, really want to use something more open, and I've tried every app you've listed. I even own a lifetime license for CoPilot.
No one has a search that compares to Google in any meaningful way, so I have to use GMaps for search. If I have to do that, I may as well just use GMaps even though it sucks in it's own ways.
I really want to not use GMaps, but there really aren't any competitive products (and I have seven mapping apps on my phone I keep trying, they just all suck).
I get that. It's difficult to beat Google's money. Have you tried the app someone suggested elsewhere on this thread that lets you search in Google Maps but get the navigation from one of the Open Street Maps based apps? Maybe that would provide a decent compromise.
Not at all. I love Organic Maps/Comaps and I think in many aspects including usability (GM is trash to navigate and drains batteries like hell), it's much better than GM. However, when I want to reach a place I either find the address online, or search on google maps and then navigate to it with a better, lighter, offline, more beautiful app.
I'm just saying that open source maps usually are heavily lacking on the search functionality, and that's sad but understandable.
No street numbers, either. just the whole street. which is also a problem in organic maps
It's a problem no matter what interface you use because the real issue is the underlying data.
I have the same issue where I live and I keep getting tempted to do an ad-hoc fix for myself, but the correct thing to do would be to find and upload a dataset that actually has parcel-level address data instead of only block-level data.
At least in my town, if I search for an address with a house number, I do get the precise house as result, not only the street.
But maybe the people adding data to Openstreetmap in your town haven't included the houses' numbers. That's something you can fix by yourself, though! Just go to http://openstreetmap.org/ , create and account, press Edit and go to the house that is missing the house number. And enter the number.
If I zoom in on a map, all the numbers are there. But the search function only suggests roads, despite the number being included in the search field and existing on the map. I'm in a major u.s. metropolitan area
Hm... Try downloading the map of Helsinki, Finland and searching for "Tatti 5" or "Tatti 11". At least to me the app shows different houses.
off-topic blahblah
(I chose Tatti as the example, because it's the shortest street name I know in Helsinki. And it's a funnily ridiculous name for a street! Boletus. Not "Boletus street", but simply "Boletus". Everything else is Something Street, but this one is just Something. As in, it isn't really a street at all, but a mushroom that you might accidentally mistake for a street!)
Giving voluntary people ability to create maps by giving them software for free is very different from trying to write software that can compete with commercial products. To fix it you need a team of developers / machine learning engineers that would create search model from existing data. You also need big computing power and money to run efficient search and doing so with free hosted products is nearly impossible.
A lot of FOSS software is able to compete with commercial products.
If a problem exists, it should be fixed when possible.
Yeah I can't use them for this reason. Switched to ~~Organic Maps.~~ Magic Earth.
As the other commenter said, it has the same issue. Anything based on OSM does. Like I said in another thread though, it is user generated, so I am going to contribute however I can.
Just a quick note, Magic Earth will become a subscription from 2026, $0.99 per year: https://www.magicearth.com/pricing
But I stopped using it, because they added ~~Overture Maps~~ Foursquare dataset, and it contains a lot of very very low quality POIs in my city, so it became unusable for me as an OSM contributor. From the huge noise it's hard to find the actually existing things. So from no POIs on the map they quickly switched to too much non-existent POIs on the map...
That seems very fair. I will gladly pay it as long as it doesn't require a Google account.
Yes, I would pay for it if the fake data wouldn't be there. Currently it's the only osm based navigation app with live traffic data
i find that it has the same issues
Sorry I mean Magic Earth 😅