Comment by chickenWing
2 years ago
Seeing all the praise in this thread, I downloaded the app, and I must admit I'm disappointed and confused at the effusion, but maybe I'm doing something wrong.
I tried a very basic task of getting driving directions to a specific address and that doesn't seem to be supported. For some streets, it will give me directions to the street as a whole, but that's not useful for long streets. Other streets don't seem to exist in the map.
Then I typed in a simple query: "ice cream", and the closest result listed was 4 miles away, but there are several ice cream shops within less than a mile. Other business listings are out of date or inaccurate.
A lot of the effusive praise is from people in Europe, who navigate slightly differently (often directions are based on intersection, etc) and have a lot longer OSM tradition. My guess is that you're American (or at least not European) and so unfortunately the fact is that volunteers like ourselves have to do the work of adding addresses to the map. One easy way anyone can do that is with the RapID / MapWithAI address layer from the National Address Database, I myself have taken to doing large formally-approved imports as well.
OM's only data source is OSM itself and their volunteer dev team is already overloaded so that's the only option there for now (basically the same as with OsmAnd) but if you really want an OpenStreetMaps based GPS app with full address support ASAP you can try Magic Earth in the meantime. It's not FOSS, but at least it's not Google.
As for ice cream, it's a matter of checking to see if those closer businesses are mapped correctly or not. If they're properly tagged as "ice cream" in OrganicMaps but not displaying in the correct order then that's an OM bug to report, but my guess is that they're not entered properly into OpenStreetMap to begin with. Both are free open source projects though so we can make things better ourselves without begging a big corporation to do it for us.
Cheers!
Yeah I bought a new build in a greenfield community and so it was a fun first project to pull the new street and address data from the county auditor and create the streets and addresses for my community in OSM. I did it the “hard” way with JOSM I guess not knowing about the MapwithAI stuff.
Sounds like you have the opportunity to make the map better for yourself and everyone else. The data comes from Open Street Map which is community edited and maintained https://www.openstreetmap.org
Unfortunately your area may not be mapped very well in OpenStreetMap yet.
The map is maintained by volunteers and in some areas there aren't any.
If you are interested in contributing to OSM to make the data better in your region, you can even make basic edits from within Organic maps, including adding addresses.