this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2026
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Privacy
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Would switch Organic Maps to its fork CoMaps. (See: this open letter)
And I would never recommend Brave as the first choice; it's run by a shady corporation and reinforces Chromium's hegemony.
I think it'd also be reasonable to add ProtonMail to email and Mullvad to VPN since you can have multiple.
How about OsmAnd? Is that still a decent project without world domination plans? I actually have CoMaps as well, but have sort of stuck to using OsmAnd.
Yeah, OsmAnd is really good; it's what I use as my daily driver. CoMaps/Organic to me feel too limited, but some people may like that.
Excellent. Ty for the open letter too. I hadn't gotten around to understanding why there was a fallout, but now I know.
Its installed in my android head unit in my car, and it just works, and there's a lot (and I mean a lot) of stuff it can do, so I really enjoy it as my daily driver (ha! Get it?) in my car.
Except OsmAnd hiding functionality behind a cloud with paywall.
Try the OsmAnd open-source version, which has all the OsmAnd+ features unlocked for free: https://f-droid.org/packages/net.osmand.plus/
So this version gets all the paid cloud features, too?
I'm not sure if I know all of the paid cloud features in the current version (and I don't really want to download it). You can download unlimited maps, which made me switch back in the days.
I think OsmAnd is great, but I personally prefer the cleaner feel of CoMaps. Just preference.
Something I'd suggest if OsmAnd feels too cluttered for you is to change the settings; OsmAnd lets you change a lot, but one of the ones I do is to change "Map Style" to Osm-Carto.
Carto, for context, is the vector map that you'd find by going to the OSM website. Much cleaner color scheme, imo.
My problem with OsmAnd is that it's so very slow. Like, you zoom in and it takes seconds to display the map.
"Takes seconds" seems like a strange experience. I remember OsmAnd years ago performed like that for me – clearly, painfully loading in the individual tiles. But nowdays, it smoothly transitions between LoD and has no problem smoothly scrubbing over e.g. a major city.
I'm using offline vector maps, for context.
Edit: Trying online tiles again, I'm assuming your problem can be resolved by switching to offline. You can have the offline data update automatically such that you don't have to worry about it. CoMaps and Organic only use offline maps, which is why they're similarly snappy to offline OsmAnd.
This is under Configure Map > Map Source, and you only need to download for the region (usually e.g. a province) that you're using.