this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2024
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Organic Maps (Unofficial)

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Organic Maps is a free Android & iOS offline maps app for travelers, tourists, hikers, and cyclists based on top of crowd-sourced OpenStreetMap data and curated with love by MapsWithMe (Maps.Me) founders.

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I tried two fairly basic searches and both had pretty fundamental flaws that make it very hard to consider using OM as a main navigation app.

First: it doesn't seem to be able to use common informal names for places. If I search "Maccas" on GM, it correctly shows a number of McDonald's restaurants, as well as Maccas competitors like Hungry Jacks. In OM I get a few places literally named "Macca's", followed by a bunch of much more tenuous results. No actual Maccas shows up.

Second, and probably more serious: it doesn't tell me where something is. I typed in my street name, and understandably a number of results with that name came up. It tells me the city and state they're in, but doesn't get more fine-grained than that. With multiple of the same street in a given LGA, it is basically impossible to search by street address if the search result doesn't narrow it down to suburb. This seems like an incredibly small fix to make, but also a mind boggling error to not already have.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

You say it seems deeply flawed, but these are not very deep issues to fix?

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

You know what, you're right. They're extremely big issues in terms of how big their impact on it experience is, which is what I intended to convey, but at a technical level they're likely very surface issues that could be fixed quite easily. Especially the second one, which also happens to be the bigger issue for UX. I could have phrased myself better.