Too bad, maps.me was by far the best maps application for non city use, and ideal for hiking. Commendable initiative to bring it back in its original version!<p>A few examples of why it was so great:<p>Simple, non social bookmarks. As in: place a bookmark so you don't get lost while hiking, or when you find a nice spot you want to come back to later. Yep, a utility feature that doesn't somehow map to some stoopid business OKR in advertising. I am sure this is possible with Google maps or Apple maps somehow, but only after you've created an account, logged in, and made sure you have the equivalent of a South Korean inner city internet connection.<p>Also, easily downloadable maps that just stay on your phone. I am hiking, I don't have internet and need the map on my phone.
I know Google Maps allows you to do that but it is tedious unlike maps.me, which is instant.
There is an existing f-droid version of Maps.me [1] and this looks like a separate effort. Despite having access to the source code, map hosting is a non-trivial problem [2].<p>[1]: <a href="https://gitlab.com/axet/omim" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.com/axet/omim</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://gitlab.com/axet/omim/-/issues/176" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.com/axet/omim/-/issues/176</a>
I don't have much simpathy for MapsWithMe: they were illegally using OpenStreetMap data by not providing attribution[2] to the project and never complied. I don't know if intentionally or not, but they didn't make life easy for the maintainer of the libre fork, which looks dead too.<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/matkoniecz/illegal-use-of-OpenStreetMap/blob/master/MAPS.ME/MAPS.ME.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/matkoniecz/illegal-use-of-OpenStreetMap/b...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://github.com/mapsme/omim/issues/11845" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mapsme/omim/issues/11845</a>
Wow, it looks like the new marketing department is trying very hard to provide people false promises looking at the last comments in the thread which were posted by very new users (bots?). And same pattern repeats on many public web sites where similar news appeared and caused a lot of discussion. It would have been better if they put the effort into the app instead of that.
> Thankfully, the original Belarusian engineers made the source code free. It is up to the community to pick up development of this app. Let's make sure that the MAPS.ME we know and love stays alive.<p>No link to the source code?<p>> If you like MAPS.ME, then please sign up. I will post updates on how it's going and will send instructions on how to get back the original app.<p>No, how about you give the instructions in the article?
The complete lack of any mention in the article of the long-running F-Droid fork effort is a bit disturbing if I'm honest.<p>If the author had already reached out to @axet to offer to help / become a maintainer I'd imagine it would've been mentioned up top.<p>I'm all for people creating multiple divergent open-source forks of things (diversity is great) but this doesn't seem to be divergent at all. The stated intent is to repeat @axet's work exactly...
I do not know if it's available on iOS (I suspect no) but on Android I am a really happy user of Osmand. It uses Openstreetmap as maps provider and I always use it when hiking. It gives you the altitude profile of your route which is very useful.
I once paid for maps.me, when it was a Swiss company before being bought by mail.ru. As it was fast, simple, offline and had no tracking. Mail.ru then decided for a different revenue stream, killed the pay option and added things I don't want, like booking.com ads and travel guides and other things ...<p>Quite sad, since it was a nice and slick tool, where I trusted privacy and faster than osmand or alternatives.
There is already an open source fork at F-Droid:<p><a href="https://f-droid.org/de/packages/com.github.axet.maps/" rel="nofollow">https://f-droid.org/de/packages/com.github.axet.maps/</a><p>Note: This is not new. F-Droid maintains this open source version since serveral years.
Source code for the mobile app here : <a href="https://github.com/mapsme/omim" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mapsme/omim</a>
But we have it back - Mapy.cz. It's basically like Maps.me but better across most dimensions.<p>I'm always confused why nobody know about it.
Could you please not use a centralized service like Telegram for organizing OSS.<p>I underand if you can't live with the limitations of IRC. But it's 2020 and we have Matrix.
Protocols, not platforms.
> They made another Google Maps - clearly, a map that highlights businesses makes more money than a map that is useful<p>Suddenly the recurring removal of more and more details from the Google Maps visual style makes sense. Earlier I thought it was just a case of overzealous minimalism.
Mine doesn't seem to have updated yet - no "wallet" that I can see, icons not the new colours, and I can turn 3D buildings on. I just disabled auto-updates for it.<p>I use Maps.me all the time. It has detailed offline maps, with bike paths mapped (where I am, at least).
MAPS.ME allowed me and my girlfriend to do a 16-day hike to the Everest Base Camp without a guide.<p>It had more off-road trails than I had ever seen on Google Maps, along with altitude information, lodge reviews, checkpoints, etc.<p>I vividly remember turning my phone on a couple of times a day to look at MAPS.ME before immediately turning it off to save battery (you can't easily charge your phone up there). Except for the camera, I basically haven't used any other app for a whole 16 days. I haven't experienced such digital minimalism in adulthood until and since this trip.
The article claims that they are sold to a south korean company “Daegu ltd.”, but I was not able to find any information on this company online. One site even claims that it is an American company[1]. Although I agree that it sounds very much Korean for it is a name of a big city here, it would be nice to see it clarified if needed because there’s already a comment with how greedy korean companies are.<p>[1]: <a href="https://mergr.com/daegu-acquisitions" rel="nofollow">https://mergr.com/daegu-acquisitions</a>
Is there a reason why all the OSM alternatives on iOS (like maps.me, osmAnd, mapout, etc.) require you to download the more zoomed in maps?<p>I think being able to download is a nice feature but I don't often need it and would like to use an OSM-based alternative to Google Maps and zoom into any city without having to download it first.<p>Like: "Where was that place in Lisbon?" - "Lemme check... oh I have to download the city, one sec..." [Adding another few hundred megabytes that I will not need for a long time]
This news surprises me, as I was just preparing a route in the (iPhone) app. Seems like it hasn’t been updated for me yet.<p>I haven’t used maps.me much, but generally it’s been a good experience. Other than being told multiple times to make a right turn to keep going straight on a highway, it’s been nice having directions and search that is entirely client-side and blazing fast.<p>Using it has made me want to contribute to OSM to improve the quality. To hear that it’s changing owners and becoming more of a product is unfortunate.
Very sad to see it go, it was great of road trips and walks out in the country where LTE was patchy and would drain your battery.<p>I really wish there were more OpenStreetMaps based iOS apps as competition against Google maps.<p>Apple maps is mostly pretty decent in Australia these days (I actually find it better than Google Maps in Melbourne now) but would love to see more competition - especially open source or at least community driven mapping clients.
The newsletter they linked to¹ has an atom feed² if, like me, you want to follow this but don't use Telegram or want emails.<p>1: <a href="https://mapsme.substack.com/" rel="nofollow">https://mapsme.substack.com/</a>
2: <a href="https://mapsme.substack.com/feed" rel="nofollow">https://mapsme.substack.com/feed</a>
I found this press releases [1] on the Maps.me wikipedia page with some details about the sale.<p>[1]: <a href="https://corp.mail.ru/en/press/releases/10761/" rel="nofollow">https://corp.mail.ru/en/press/releases/10761/</a>
Very sad to see. Maps.me has been invaluable when through hiking or bike packing. It will be missed. I would love to contribute to an open source version though, will check out the repo.<p>Edit: realised the developers open sourced it.
Wow, twitter blocks this link and you can't even share it through bit.ly<p>Agree with author, existing map design in Maps.me is by far superior to any other app I've seen and biggest reason I keep using it.
If any of the new engineers on any of the forks (?) read this, I'd donate my time on automation and server maintenance for the map tiles, if you need help. I'm an SRE so this is my day job.
There is <a href="https://maphub.net/" rel="nofollow">https://maphub.net/</a> which offers markers, waypoints, picture uploads and you can choose from different base maps!
The main difference between the two images the author showed seem to be the isometric buildings models.<p>Where do the data for these come from to begin with? I assume these can't be user generated.
Still works for me ... they just switched payment model from pay one time and enjoy forever to pay every year. Should have allowed old users to enjoy forever IMO ...
as for the original project, the hard part will be to build incentives to contribute updates to the maps.<p>that’s where I imagine Google’s commercial incentives to be hard to build, but I’m not really versed in the topic, so maybe that’s just an uneducated guess.
I wish openstreetmap used elevation data for hiking.
Say I want to climb to a hill back, it should calculate distance w.r.t elevation.<p>Right now it assumes a straight line be it on a road or up and down a mountain.