What you’re asking for is fairly unrealistic. The only way this could work sustainably would be for something to exist where you host your own tile server and routing service and patch that into OSM. Otherwise, even if the app itself is open source, the backend will cost money to run and will be proprietary.
The reason that OSM is able to be fully open source is because you host the tiles on your phone and do the routing calculations locally.
I can’t think of any reason the backend can’t be open-source too.
It costs money to host something like that. You want low latency, real-time routing and tile-rendering? Even more money. Sure, it could be funded by donations or something like that, but I’m not holding my breath.
That doesn’t have anything to do with whether it’s open-source or not.
The correlation is high.
Could be self hosted
If you’re willing to spend all the money on setting up and running a server, why not just spend way less money to get more phone storage and use OSM?
Setting up a server just for this is clearly overkill, but if you already have a homeserver it would be great to be able to deploy the backend. Sadly there is no such thing currently
I totally agree. Running a server on a home machine that’s already running 24/7 is trivial. I don’t know why this guy is acting like it’s a big deal. I’ve got a $100 mini-PC running multiple servers already. What’s one more?
It’s not a BIG deal. I self-host a ton of stuff. It’s just a bigger deal than spending a bit more for phone storage for the vast majority of people.
What is the cost of hosting a server like this? I’d imagine someone could cloud host it at a cost of $10/mo and sell the online service at $1-$2/mo, which would take very few users to turn a profit. If the code is FOSS, some people would be willing to pay for the service.
https://wcedmisten.fyi/post/self-hosting-osm/
The main problem is that this type of service requires way more RAM and disk space than most other popular self-hosted services. You CAN do it, it’s just not practical.
You’re right. There is (are?) an open source web interface to OSM. Technically, someone could host that themselves, and the app is just the web browser.
The real reason that it’s not common is because there’s no demand; or, at least, not enough for anyone to take the effort to package it up in an easy-to-deploy, well documented release. And demand is low because having offline, local tiles is almost always preferrable to nav or maps that require relatively heavy, constant internet access.
OSMand~ has an online mode…
No
The current FOSS offerings do the calculations on your device, so you’d need the maps downloaded locally. The small apps that stream their tiles from OSM/Jawg/ESRI/Mapbox etc. don’t support navigation because of this
Not FOSS but the closest thing you’ll get to this is GMaps WV on F-Droid, made by the DivestOS team. Even that does not support navigation though, it only provides directions (usable for me, your mileage may vary…)
Not under 50MB but there is: https://organicmaps.app/
And
I find Organic Maps best for driving and OSMAnd+ best for walks.
Organic maps can’t even handle addresses. How is this useful for driving?
Yes it can. You need to download the necessary maps first before you can search for addresses though.
It does handle addresses.
Not in the US. I have the world map and the los Angeles maps. It is incapable of recognizing any address that I give it
Is the area properly mapped in OpenStreetMap? Organic Maps uses OpenStreetMap data, if addresses are not present there, then it’s up to the users to add them.
This is the address for the belasco in Los Angeles. It knows the names of the street but not the numbers. Without addresses it’s basically useless.
Clicking on any of these results will simply take you to that street at a random location on it.
For the UK, it doesn’t have house names/numbers, but streets + towns work fine.
Not in the US.
I’d be careful of making sweeping statements about 3.7m square miles of land from your doorstep in LA.
I’m in the US too, and here in Atlanta I use Organic Maps frequently to find specific street addresses. It works quite well. I would agree with the other responses here suggesting that maybe you could contribute some data to OSM for the areas you encounter that are missing street numbers. You’ll be helping yourself and others!
Street address data isn’t available for the US. I find the POI in Google Maps in Firefox and then go to Share and open the coordinates in Organic Maps or OsmAnd.
I am in the US and street addresses are visible and searchable in Organic Maps for me. I don’t know if it depend on the area or something.
It handles addresses well
I like organic maps cause it does shit locally, offline. It has to download the maps though which is certain to be larger than 50mb. What you are looking for is a cloud based maps solution like google maps and you aren’t going to find that in foss space
I don’t know the size, but Organic Maps may be rather small
Then there are these two:
https://android.izzysoft.de/repo/apk/io.github.janbar.osmin
https://f-droid.org/packages/com.junjunguo.pocketmaps/
But I have no experience with them
Looking for the same thing for Linux fwiw, with live turn by turn navigation and GPS support.
Under 50mb is a very hard ask. Maps have a lot of data.
Gmaps WV on F-Droid?
Not foss but magic earth is a great app that does not rely on google maps. It can also work as a dashcam.
