> Within the frame of Prototype Fund round 15 (March 2024 to August 2024), the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research sponsored Tobias Zwick to work on StreetComplete for iOS (see progress report)
The current demo doesn't seem to cover many places worldwide, but what is there is really neat! To me this already looks better than modern city sim games, because they never seem to get the scale right, among other things.
Not sure what's stopping them from covering more places, since the idea presumably is to generate these tiles from existing OSM data. And in fact one of the easiest things to do with StreetComplete is add the height and type of a building.
Usually government data is CC0 or public domain while OSM is not (maybe Germany is different?), so I thought they'd be allergic to OSM's licensing. OSM actually has a lot of problems ingesting data b/c a lot of map data can't be relicensed under their license.
Ironically.. you can't contribute map data that requires attribution to OSM... even though they require attribution..
It's a great project.. but I think they really messed up the licensing in a misguided effort to make the project viral. Maybe trying to emulate Wikipedia. But text and map data are just fundamentally very different. It's really unfortunate. I hope an alternative emerged eventually
> For practical reasons we require that users of OpenStreetMap data attribute the project as a whole and we in turn provide attribution to third parties via the "Contributor" pages. Licences and terms of use that require attribution of the third party data source directly on derived works are incompatible.
"require attribution of the third party data source directly on derived works" is exactly what OSM requires. It's hypocrisy of a sorts
I would say biggest issue with licensing comes from clear attribution being problematic at the scale of OSM not the virality or relicensing problems. That and OSM aiming for being squeaky clean, far away from any ambiguity in terms of third party data licensing.
It is simply impractical to attribute all the sources anywhere in UI or printed copies of map. And whether an attribution hidden somewhere deep in wiki is considered acceptable is grey zone.
The fact that OSM themselves want attributions is another reasons why they have high standards for what's considered an attribution which they can't achieve for third party data sources.
In case of software License.txt and Help/About is considered standard practices. But that doesn't necessarily translate to other mediums of copyrighted work. Something like books or research papers have their own generally accepted practices of how attributions are handled. For maps digital and physical text in the corner is often used practice. You can see it even for something like a building plan posted next to construction site, listing additional map sources used for preparing the drawing. So it's not exactly unique invention by OSM. Back to comparison with software, software can't exactly be printed out so the concerns about attribution are different. Also software licenses typically require listing including a copy of license text not just attribution , which is simply impossible outside separate file or dedicated UI.
In practice the OSM aiming for better than good and thousands of unverified contributors being uncontrollable lands it somewhere in the middle. But if they aimed for barely acceptable all the contributors would definitely push the bar bellow legally acceptable.
On the topic of government data, CC-BY is also common which is somewhat problematic. But more often they have no idea under what license they are releasing their data. They come up with complicated schemes of metadata, which never gets properly filled or parsed, thus resulting in conflicting information about license being used. And if you ask them to clarify they will just say, "yes yes it's open data you can reuse it", with the government employee having no understanding about differences between various licenses and that not all open data is equal.
I understand that there is precedent and there is a logic to it... but to me it rubs me the wrong way. I think text and code are not very analogous situations. If I think in terms of software licenses..:
- I sort of respect the copyleft ethos. You put out a thing with the understand everything it touches is also going to be openly available. I think attribution isn't really part of the central idea there.
- I also respect the MIT/BSD style thing where you're just putting stuff out there in the public domain and it's part of the corpus of human knowledge. You leave your mark so to speak.
The middle ground of "You can use this but you gotta promote our service and stamp our name on it" just feels icky. I don't want to contribute to that. I feel I'm helping OSM the organization and.. I don't know them .. are they good stewards of the data I'm giving them? Are they going to be good stewards in 10 years? Hopefully that kinda makes sense? I guess the same can be said for Wikipedia, but Wikipedia for better or worse is very siloed. You have to attribute stuff you copy from Wiki but ..
A: Realistically nobody is actually copying wiki articles other than lazy high school students. It's just not very reusable outside of Wikipedia
B: This is more of a plagiarism issue. It encourages people to disclose it's not their own words (this is not an issue with maps.. nobody thinks you surveyed your city to draw the map)
If Wiki became CC0 tomorrow nothing would really change. If you needed to fork Wiki and put an attribution in the footer, it'd be very innocuous..
I don't get why you consider MIT/BSD fine when both of them have "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software." but when OSM does the same it somehow becomes "you gotta promote our service".
StreetComplete is an easy to use editor of OpenStreetMap data available for Android. It can be used without any OpenStreetMap-specific knowledge. It asks simple questions, with answers directly used to edit and improve OpenStreetMap data. The app is aimed at users who do not know anything about OSM tagging schemes but still want to contribute to OpenStreetMap.
StreetComplete automatically looks for nearby places where a survey is needed and shows them as quest markers on its map. Each of these quests can then be solved on site by answering a simple question. For example, tapping on a marker may show the question "What is the name of this road?", with a text field to answer it. More examples are shown in the screenshots below.
The user's answer is automatically processed and uploaded directly into the OSM database. Edits are done in meaningful changesets using the user's OSM account. Since the app is meant to be used on a survey, it can be used offline and is economic with data usage.
This is great! I wish more knowledge bases realized their barrier to entry. Eg even Wikipedia can be scary to edit the first time, if you want to present things like citations the right way.
Wikipedia is fine. Just make sure the content itself is good and appropriate for Wikipedia (such as no original research) and formatting citations is really least of your worries. When you do it wrong, some other editor will come and fix it.
In practice it is murkier. On one article, I see an editor has removed some material for not having enough references, and yet on the same article he has removed other material for being "ref-bombed" as he puts it, i.e. having too many references.
This is one of the worst Wikipedia rules. It gives way too much power to institutions giving them free reign to publish misinformation as long as they don't care about fact checking each other, which is common for niche subjects where corrections are not going to get as many clicks as "drama" would.
You accidentally found a good example reason for the rule to exist. It's only relatively recently (2019-2021-ish) that Germany had more pre-slided bread move than unsliced loaves.
Therefore scoping the claim being made with citations actually does improve the wiki's accuracy.
You can say bread is sold pre-sliced accurately in a colloquial sense, but actually making a claim - as an encyclopedia inherently does - should carry information on how general a claim it actually is.
That doesn’t in any way invalidate that bread is sold sliced. That is the assertion, that sliced bread is available for sale. Even in places where bread is typically sold unsliced, the concept of sliced bread exists.
Or are you claiming that you are completely unaware of unsliced bread and need a citation to verify its existence?
Would it be appropriate for the Wikipedia article on "milk" to mention that it's sold frozen, unqualified, simply because that has happened?
Bread is usually sold sliced in some places, and usually sold unsliced in others. For a claim about this to be useful for wikipedia it should be specific and cited.
In rigorous academic contexts things that are generally accepted or common knowledge do not need to be cited. Nobody is disputing the existence of frozen milk or sliced bread for sale. They are commonly known and accepted facts. We do not need a peer reviewed citation for those claims to be believable.
The claim is not that sliced bread is always available in every place on earth. Nor is it that bread is usually sliced. That is a different claim that you have added. The claim is that sliced bread is available for sale, nonspecifically. It is a commonly known fact that bread can be purchased sliced in some places.
If you make a specific claim, like: sliced bread is not usually available in Nordic countries, I could see that needing a citation. You have made specific claims about sliced bread availability and market preferences. I am making the general case that it exists.
The point is that there is some basic level of knowledge that we don’t need to validate with a third party source. People drink water. I’ve never seen a scientific study or source for this, but it is universally accepted as truth. Bread is sold sliced sometimes is a similar fact.
> rather than simply wording the statement to more accurately reflect the situation?
I'm arguing that this should be done, and yet a citation is still important. You didn't answer my question about milk. In what situation would it be appropriate to mention milk being sold frozen without a citation? For example, human milk banks actually do freeze the milk for transport, but if this is mentioned in a wikipedia article, it should be cited! Same goes for making a claim about whether bread is sold sliced or unsliced (even if both are encountered more commonly than frozen milk)
I love the project idea, unfortunately I had bad experiences with the community. I had lots of fun walking my neighbourhood to perform quests in the app until like one or two other users started reverting my edits. I checked their comments and it was some weird pedantic arguments, like I shouldn't mark a street as not walkable because there is no official sign that prohibits walking; the fact that it's basically a highway with no sidewalk would not matter.
I ended up digging through the OSM wiki for definitions and rules to argue my case but in the end it felt very much like people on a power trip insistent on getting their way. It has ruined the fun in StreetComplete for me and I haven't participated since.
This has been the most controversial quest in StreetComplete for a while. Following several discussions about it, I have now removed it for the upcoming version (i.e. v64.0).
Can you steelman the case of the users who reverted the above commenters' edits?
In most countries, walking on a controlled-access highway[1] is specifically illegal. Why should it not be marked as non-walkable just because there's no signage?
> it's basically a highway with no sidewalk would not matter.
"Basically a highway" and "a highway" is different!
In my experience all highways have markings explicitly banning walking (among other things). So it sounds like OP was making a judgement call based on the fact that there's no sidewalk.
I have the unfortunate experience of walking alongside certain roads without sidewalks. It's not fun by any means but I wouldn't want OSM to outright say that it's not walkable.
OSM originated in the UK so it uses UK norms for most things. You wouldn't need to tag a motorway as not allowing pedestrians because that's already implied by the fact that it's tagged as a motorway.
What OP was (probably) doing was tagging roads that aren't motorways and that have no sign banning pedestrians with `foot=no`, which is only supposed to be used in situations where walking is illegal or impossible. Eventually more experienced mappers noticed what OP was doing and reverted a bunch of his edits, which isn't a great feeling, particularly if you've been mapping that way for a while before anyone noticed
(If OP was using StreetComplete I'd blame StreetComplete for this more than the OP. They used to have a quest for pedestrian walkability that was poorly worded, which they've since removed because it was leading to exactly this kind of confusion.)
In Taiwan they mix "positive" and "negative" indication signs.
So for example, you'll see a sign indicating cars are OK for a freeway. That means, heavy motorcycles and scooters are NOT ok. You can only take your heavy motorcycle on it if it also has a heavy motorcycle sign. But SOMETIMES they'll use the slightly different motorcycle sign which means scooters ok. Well, if it's ok for scooters, it must be ok for heavy motorcycles as well, right? Wrong! Heavy motorcycles must then take the car lane, if there's a lane marked for scooters.
Also sometimes there's a road marked no cars! Scooters ok. Heavy motorcycles? Who knows!
Time to head back to Taipei proper after hanging at e7play, let's cross the river... oh wait, there's 600 cars behind you blaring their horns as you enter this intersection, which way are you going? Can you go straight?? Who knows! https://www.google.com/maps/@25.0722621,121.4934581,3a,75y,4...
I've had plenty of friends bicycle into places they apparently aren't allowed to. There's no sign that says no, but the bicycle isn't allowed by the implication of some combination of allowed-vehicle signs that are lacking a bicycle-allowed sign.
Just tag POI, they get stale so quickly. Everybody wants to tag the roads, but the real gap in many places is stale POI, or missing tags like opening hours. You'll get much less attention from these gatekeepers there too
Aren't there many places where a highway with no sidewalk is the only walkable option? So if someone saw your not-walkable, they might think not walkable at all.
Seems like you guys had two different perspectives, both arguably right. Maybe it needs to be split into technically-walkable and comfortably-walkable layers.
Rather than compressing a judgment about reality into a single boolean, it seems more natural to break it down into smaller observations and evidence, then derive conclusions from them. Users wouldn't need to touch the ontology directly; they'd just answer small, concrete questions like "Is there a sidewalk here?"
FWIW this is exactly how it works on OSM, and probably why OP is complaining people were being pedantic by telling him he "shouldn't mark a street as not walkable because there is no official sign that prohibits walking".
"Would an ordinary person want to walk here?" is pretty subjective. "Are people legally prohibited from walking here?" is pretty objective. Generally only the latter would be recorded in OSM.
The trouble is you start getting into subjectivity. Some people are comfortable with vie ferrate, many are not. The only thing you can do is tag with objective features that can be verified on the ground, including physical features and legal restrictions that are indicated by signage.
I actually feel better about making edits if I know people may revert them. I don't have the time or interest to dig in deeply to what exactly they want, so I normally wouldn't contribute. But if I know people double check and fix mistakes, I'm more likely to try and be helpful with the app.
"I feel more comfortable contributing to huge open source projects through the use of AI because I know that the maintainers will review my code for me and catch the issues I didn't"
I don't want to attribute anything to how you expressed that you feel, but I believe that this is what's known as "Deferral of Responsibility" and it can actually _negatively_ impact the quality of the data you are claiming to want to help curate.
Please don't use quotes in this context, you're putting words in someone else's mouth that the person did not say and did not mean. In this case, the contributor is making a good faith effort to help, providing data that no one else is in a position to provide, and worries less because any issues can be corrected. In the AI case, anyone can run the slop generator and massive changes can be produced that overwhelm the ability of maintainers to check. It's not the same.
Respectfully I disagree. The purpose of quoting is to present a hypothetical statement that I believe is comparable to what the original person wrote. This is a common and well-known method of communicating such a comparison in a concise way.
As I wrote in my original post, I am not attributing any intent to what the person wrote, and am focusing on how what they are describing is equivalent in nature to the hypothetical statement I presented and can actually be harmful, even if the intentions are pure.
While the scope of the issues being compared is not equivalent, you're excluding from your rebuttal the scores of low-experience developers submitting changes to open source projects with their own pure intentions.
To borrow your own words; those contributors are making a good faith effort to improve the open source project by providing AI-generated change requests that they believe no one else is in a position to provide (time, priorities, etc), and worry less because any issues with their submissions can theoretically be corrected by the maintainers.
Please take some time to understand the nuance in the statements I am making. I assure you I chose my original words with intent.
I could have framed it better through the use of "It's like saying..." or something equivalent. There's clearly a spectrum in how folks handle nuance in a text post online. I should have accounted for that in my original post.
It’s tricky and maybe locale specific. A lot of roads near me have no pavement. You have to anticipate pedestrians, cyclists and horses on the road. Not at the same frequency as motor vehicles but not completely out of the ordinary.
Are they actually checking for said signs? In the US, freeways have explicit no-pedestrian signs at on-ramps from other roads and streets. But those can be miles apart while potential places for a pedestrian to approach the freeway might be more frequent.
It's not pedantic, it's just the way it is. For OSM to be valuable it needs to be consistent. There are many tags available but the "you can't walk here" tag is about whether you have a right to walk there. There are many highways you wouldn't want to walk on, but there are other tags to indicate that, like speed limit and presence of footpaths etc.
Saying a path can't be walked has pretty large consequences since routing apps will refuse to use them for walking directions. A highway with no footpath does seem extreme enough to warrant refusing to route for walking directions, but otherwise it's best to not block walking unless it's literally impossible or illegal to walk there.
If you were using StreetComplete I don't think you would have run into that. StreetComplete is very beginner friendly, and I don't think you can use it to mark a road as prohibiting pedestrians (which, as you discovered, is easy to get wrong if you don't understand what you're doing). You can use StreetComplete to mark whether there's a sidewalk or not, but I don't think anyone would object to you marking roads without sidewalks as not having a sidewalk.
Nevermind, I was wrong. Looks like they added a quest for this recently, and they're removing it now because it the wording of the quest didn't really match the tags it was applying when you solved it.
I'd personally never seen that quest myself, but looking at it now I can see why they're removing it.
I wonder if it's by design. TestFlight apps have a hard user install limit, I remember waiting around for someone to leave previous betas to try them out.
StreetComplete is regularly cited whenever OpenStreetMap is mentioned on HN, and with excellent reason (this is a really good introduction to mapping with OSM). Congratulations to the team for the beta!
Indeed, I've been following the issue since it was mentioned here last time and was positively surprised about how quickly they progressed and got the first version shipped.
That's Apple's native way of going back across macOS and iOS no? I'm not an Apple user and even I've come across this when handling a family member's device for a few minutes
Maybe Android's visual ←back button is the way to go after all instead of hoping someone will accidentally discover implicit gestures
It’s only intuitive when you see a page slide from the right to the left. Then you know you can go back to the previous page with a left to right slide. I’ve never seen it used to close a modal
Do you already know the one where you swipe alongside the bottom of the screen from left to right, or right to left? If not it's probably one of my most used gestures to swipe between apps.
Every Door has a very confusing UI (lots of unlabeled buttons with unclear icons), unfortunately. I would love to use it, but even the web-based iD editor is so much easier to figure out!
The Street Complete UI is just perfect for mobile. If I'm walking down the street with a phone, I don't want to edit polygons or accidentally move a road. I just want to fill in missing data on existing mapped points.
I agree and I've been thinking about making something similar to Every Door but that takes advantage of AI to let you snap a photo or just send a voice note and then have the appropriate tags generated for review based on some very strict schemas. Would something like that be of interest to you?
I was thinking it would be ideal to have something that lets you walk down a street holding your phone out, capture a series of images and then process that in to changes you approve manually at home. Could even be processed locally on a computer after the fact.
Being able to process it later on the computer would definitely be great! That's kinda what I already do via notes but it's fairly painful to match up the photos I took to the notes and times.
You can choose the type of questions you want to get asked about in StreetComplete. If you want to only enter store names and timings, then go into Settings and pick those.
The name probably just references the street in OpenStreetMap (OSM) as StreetComplete doesn't only collect street data as the sibling comment already noted.
I have been using StreetComplete on Android thanks to a comment here some weeks ago. This is a really great tool, the barrier to contribute is brought to nearly zero.
The only one thing missing for me is a small history of my past contributions. At some point, I made a mistake and entered the wrong information (nothing terrible, the surface of a walkway, it was 30% one surface, 70% another, I gave the 30% value instead of what I think 70% would be better). I would have been glad to be able to quickly "revert" this contribution.
As someone who has enjoyed playing GeoGuessr-like games in the past, I find it a bit fun to enter/guess a completely random username and see what edits it has made. Interestingly, quite a few of them are concentrated in the Germany/Switzerland/Austria region (the US is popular too)
Edit: I had no idea that https://www.openstreetmap.org/history shows a list of the most recent changes in a sidebar, and there seems to be a similar trend too in terms of where OpenStreetMap is edited most often.
You can actually split the road into multiple segments and answer each separately if you don't mind the extra effort. I think there should be something like "differs along the way" button which then asks you to pick a point where to cut.
I am incredibly excited for this -- while I love doing StreetComplete quests myself, the lack of iOS support has prevented me from grabbing my friends / random strangers and turning mapping my city into a social outing. I'm going to wait until it's officially available, but this is so wonderful... gosh, I can't wait. First style of quest I'm going to get ppl coordinated with is accurate hours on local businesses :^)
StreetComplete is great. For me it made Openstreetmap much more approachable and now thanks to me there are a few more public toilets and one small road in osm. Especially with the road it was really interesting to see how quickly Google maps also took in this path. But they still also have the old road in the app. So it's linked but not 100%
It's a great app, been using it on Android for years. It has a really low barrier of entry (except maybe OSM account creation) and makes improving OpenStreetMap really easy even for people that have no experience with map editing. There's simple questions, e.g. about road surface or accessibility, with illustrated multiple-choice answers.
Overall, my experience has been pretty smooth. Just look at how little platform specific code is found in the streetcomplete repo and how straightforward these connect with the common code.
Or maybe I have been using it too long so that I don't notice the awkward bits anymore.
I've been building https://maplibre.org/maplibre-compose/ in my spare time for the past two years and helped with this port; happy to answer any questions you have about KMP or CMP
Generally, I'm very happy with the platform and it's only gotten better over the past couple years I've been deep in it.
Yes, to be more specific, every tool like this has benefits offered and then taxes to be considered. For example, what's the tax for:
- Maintaining a significant new moving part in the dev process. KMP updates, management, integration, futures awareness, this all takes non-zero time.
- If an iOS dev wants to work on a KMP project what's the ramp up time? How much less efficiently can they contribute compared to a pure native app?
- How much time is spent on problems, bugs, issues, related to KMP. This is guaranteed non-zero for any tool.
- Is there less benefit to KMP with coding agents? Previously with two native apps, a bug fix had to be done twice. Currently, say a fix in done on Android, it's quite easy to say "propose an equivalent fix for the iOS repo". I do not claim this removes all benefits of a single code base, just that some things are not as bad now.
Regarding moving parts in KMP, I have the impression that it is quite stable now, and has been for some time. I feel it is less maintenance work than having an Android project that uses the Android UI framework and system APIs. Google loves to deprecate and invent new APIs every few years.
I feel there is very little in the way of breaking changes that need changes in the code in KMP. Most of that comes from some third party libraries on major new versions. The biggest change recently was a change in the Android Gradle plugin that required to change the project structure. Arguably, that again was more of an Android than a KMP thing.
> iOS developers
Well, the app is Kotlin Multiplatform + Compose Multiplatform as UI framework. So, while it runs on iOS, the parts that would feel native to an iOS dev are near zero: There are about 50 lines of code in Swift in the project and about 1000 dealing with iOS APIs, but written in Kotlin.
As Kotlin and Compose is used in Android development, the project will always feel more accessible to Android developers. That said, Kotlin is somewhat similar to Swift and Compose is also a declarative reactive user interface framework, i.e. similar to SwiftUI.
As for the setup, they need at least IntelliJ/Android Studio to compile all that Kotlin to native code before launching the app from XCode in a simulator. That's my setup at least. Certainly one could also just use gradle (the build system) from the commandline.
> KMP bugs
KMP bugs, none that I remember. About platform-specific issues we will see what will surface during the beta test. So far, one thing surfaced, but it was found easily and necessitated changing 4 lines of code.
Compose (the UI framework) is a different matter. At times, I feel it is quite unwieldy when not solving standard problems. Being designed primarily by Google, I also find that best practices change and deprecations happen fairly frequently. Certain features lacking in Compose Multiplatform I need to implement myself. For example, there are still no scroll bars.
> Coding Agents
I have little experience with that, but what I have seen, the agents have no problem generating working code for the platform-specific parts of the implementation. Some un-slopping is necessary as always.
And, as I wrote, the platform specific code takes up a tiny part of the whole code base. Of the 80k lines of source code in the production code, 2k lines of source code are platform specific.
(for context, I helped with the streetcomplete port, and have build and maintained a KMP / CMP maplibre sdk for the past two years, but otherwise consider myself a polyglot proficient in most common tech stacks at least to a moderate degree)
> Maintaining a significant new moving part in the dev process. KMP updates, management, integration, futures awareness, this all takes non-zero time.
If you're already doing that for Android, any additional tooling/infra churn for KMP is pretty negligible, except for a one-time cost of separating common kotlin code from android-specific code. KMP updates are just Kotlin updates.
> If an iOS dev wants to work on a KMP project what's the ramp up time? How much less efficiently can they contribute compared to a pure native app?
Two answers here:
1. Kotlin, the language, is quite similar to Swift, and can call ObjC APIs (or Swift annotated with @ObjC) directly via cinterop, so you're calling the same iOS SDKs. Compose is a declarative UI framework in the same vein as SwiftUI and React (and IMO with fewer footguns and quirks than SwiftUI, though there are some). It renders more like Flutter (via Skia) but it's not hard to embed as a component of a SwiftUI app.
2. KMP libraries can also export ObjC or Swift APIs, called in Swift. It's fairly common for there to be a shared business logic / service layer within an app, perhaps even shared view models, and leave the UI layer itself to SwiftUI and Compose for each platform.
Compared to something like React Native, I find that KMP is much friendlier and less opinionated about how you use it and how much you integrate it. You can use it to share a small module, or the whole app, or anywhere in between, and the seams at the boundary are not nearly as painful as you'd expect crossing languages.
> How much time is spent on problems, bugs, issues, related to KMP. This is guaranteed non-zero for any tool.
Hard to quantify, but in my time working on MapLibre Compose for the last two years, I've run into a handful of Androidx bugs, and much fewer KMP / CMP bugs. Even the same APIs, on the Compose Multiplatform side tend to have fewer pitfalls and bugs in my experience than on the Android side.
That said, the time I've spent dealing with _IDE_ bugs in JB IDEs has been far too much. These days, I spend much less time in an IDE, so it hasn't mattered as much, but I'd _like_ to spend more time there as ideally, even if agents are generating code, I want to read and navigate it in a nice environment.
> Is there less benefit to KMP with coding agents? ... just that some things are not as bad now.
Probably depends where you are on the vibe coding vs ai-assisted engineering spectrum. I'm a heavy AI user these days, close to 100% since Fable/Sol/Astra, but on code I care about, I don't vibe code, I still spend time to understand and refine at least the architecture, if not the line-by-line code. So still I prefer the single codebase because that's one fewer set of abstractions, of failure modes, of guardrails, of test harnesses, etc to worry about.
But if you care deeply about the native UI, using Compose on Android, SwiftUI on iOS, and then KMP for a shared core is an excellent architecture. The opposite, a shared Swift core, I think is also becoming more possible as Swift targets Android, though I'm unsure what the kotlin-on-android -> swift integration experience is like.
Maybe I don’t understand how it’s supposed to work, but the very first question I was given had three choices and none of them were correct. What are you supposed to do then?
It’s very confusing to me too. I clicked an icon to see what it was, and it was opening times of a supermarket, which I had no idea about. But I couldn’t find a way to just get back to where I was before. My workflow now is to keep force killing the app frequently when I get stuck.
Same here, I can't believe there is no way to go back. I have to s of things around my house that I can just add because I live here, but I don't remember everything, and once I hit a question that I cannot answer from memory, I am stuck.
Same here, but the GitHub thread actually calls that out as a known bug. Swipe from the left. Intention is that clicking sonewhere on the map closes the dialog.
No, there’s only the listed options (street has a sidewalk, or it doesn’t - no option for “sidewalk extends for half the street but not the other half”).
I don’t know if that counts as it does or it doesn’t.
Aha. If you click 'Uh' exactly on its text, it works. If you click even one pixel away from the actual text, you get the chooser with not enough options.
First-time StreetComplete user here. I just answered a few of these "street has a sidewalk" questions myself. Upon first clicking on one of them, I was able to answer this question for each side of the street individually. The visual selection that you mentioned only applies to one side.
I can tell for sure the current version of StreetComplete for Android does allow specifying that only one side of the road has a side walk. I solved a few of these quests just last week. No idea what's the state on iOS though.
That's when you hit "uh..." and leave a note with details. In an effort to keep things simple on a small screen it doesn't include every possible option. You can read the wiki to find the best way to tag it. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/
I click a quest and answer it but the app seems to be stuck on that quest and I can't figure out how to get back to all of the quests available near me. Is that a common experience?
OSM editor Go Map!! also has a "Quests" overlay that is very similar to Street Complete (even uses the same icons). And you can also define custom quests for data you want to easily gather.
However, it's lacking the nice example pictures for each option - so, with Go Map!! you need to know what you're doing.
I'd like to see native Apple sign-in, as opposed to via a WebView. When I used the WebView, the password text box was obscured and fiddly to fill in.
There should be an easier way to dismiss something I've clicked on, than having to tap "uh..." and then dismiss two dialog boxes.
Things that I've submitted (e.g. house numbers) should be visible on the map, to visually show my contribution progress (even if pending review or whatever). At present my contributions just disappear into the void.
Satellite overlay would be very useful to correlate houses.
Seeing some indication of other recent local contributions would be nice, to make the app feel more alive.
> Things that I've submitted (e.g. house numbers) should be visible on the map, to visually show my contribution progress (even if pending review or whatever). At present my contributions just disappear into the void.
edits are immediately applied to live database (with delay if you have chose to do so or internet connection is not available). Once a minute update is published to data consumers.
if you want to see house numbers you can enable house number overlay (left circle in top right, select blueish icon with address label next to it)
and why it is not visible immediately on background map? because it is also OSM data, but processed OSM data and updates with delay
(why processed? because globe-spanning map requires some simplification, rendering from raw OSM data is infeasible on a phone)
OpenStreetMap is a database, not a map application. The map on the official openstreetmap website is more of a demo to show some of the data. There are many different map apps that use OpenStreetMap data though.
It's a... mix. I can see all the shapes of the roads and areas i mapped in my area, but they seem not to trust OSM naming so they either have no name or the name TomTom gave to the equivalent street.
I can see most POIs i added with the exact name i gave to them, but the reviews and opening hours are pulled from Tripadvisor.
It's explicitly advertised for driving, not walking, so it's optimized to get you to places. CoMaps and even OSMand are much better for walking around.
And there's a simple reason for the search being so bad in most OSM apps: offline search.
The focus of all these apps seems to be a self-imposed "the app should never touch a server, ever, because what if the user is on a 100$/GB roaming plan in Africa", but indexing the maps is not easy.
I run a local Nominatim database (search engine for OSM) for Italy and it's ~57gb of data and indexes for one country only, and it barely supports fuzzy search.
I tried the TomTom app (on iOS) recently but found it incredibly buggy, especially when connected to CarPlay. The speed indicator would often just show 1mph, the dark mode would work about 20% of the time, and searches would show results from other countries ahead of a place 4 miles up the road.
nice to see StreetComplete coming to iOS. Its question-based approach makes contributing to OpenStreetMap feel approachable even if you’re not familiar with the underlying data model
I think it probably could be done these days with Progressive Web Apps and Web ASM, but the fact no one is doing this makes me suspect something is wrong. Perhaps just the UX of adding a PWA to the home screen via safari is so hard that regular users don't do it.
There is nothing wrong with it, it's just people not trusting anything that they're not familiar with (whether they're right or wrong). Game streaming services are using PWAs by consumers just fine.
The trust problem is a general one, it even involves trusting yet another app (not just the installation method). This can be solved by providing a good value and good references / marketing.
For developers it is most likely a FOMO by thinking about anything other than App Store as "a lesser". But just being in the App Store doesn't achieve much as you're one among the millions, you have to market your app yourself anyway.
Some users have this weird association where web apps are considered as not secure while native apps are safe while in reality it's the exact opposite, web apps are nicely sandboxed and native apps siphoons out private information in bulk.
I don't think there is a genuine barrier if you have a really good app that adds enough value to the user. For example GeForce NOW (and other game streaming services) with millions of users use PWAs on iOS/iPad with success.
The installation process can be presented as a simple guide to the users (on Android it's even easier as you can just click a button directly). Of course a portion of users won't be able or be unwilling to follow it. On the other hand you'll get a higher quality users who can follow guides and you retain a direct relationship with them.
There are some annoyances, mostly by Apple when they sometimes add or change some feature that interferes with the web apps, but workarounds are quickly to be found. I would say it's not occurring that often, and native apps needs to adapt to Apple changes too.
It's also a good idea to not use the term PWA, but rather terms like "installable web app" / "add to home screen" or something similar. Almost nobody knows the PWA term (including the developers).
PWAs don't have all capabilities that the native apps have, but most apps don't need these. PWAs certainly can work offline, have push notificatins and other stuff. Some demos are here: https://whatpwacando.today/
> Within the frame of Prototype Fund round 15 (March 2024 to August 2024), the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research sponsored Tobias Zwick to work on StreetComplete for iOS (see progress report)
And NLnet.
The current demo doesn't seem to cover many places worldwide, but what is there is really neat! To me this already looks better than modern city sim games, because they never seem to get the scale right, among other things.
Not sure what's stopping them from covering more places, since the idea presumably is to generate these tiles from existing OSM data. And in fact one of the easiest things to do with StreetComplete is add the height and type of a building.
https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Licence_Compatibility
Ironically.. you can't contribute map data that requires attribution to OSM... even though they require attribution..
It's a great project.. but I think they really messed up the licensing in a misguided effort to make the project viral. Maybe trying to emulate Wikipedia. But text and map data are just fundamentally very different. It's really unfortunate. I hope an alternative emerged eventually
That’s not true.
> Licences that are not compatible
> Licences that require downstream attribution
> For practical reasons we require that users of OpenStreetMap data attribute the project as a whole and we in turn provide attribution to third parties via the "Contributor" pages. Licences and terms of use that require attribution of the third party data source directly on derived works are incompatible.
"require attribution of the third party data source directly on derived works" is exactly what OSM requires. It's hypocrisy of a sorts
Sadly, this is very often not true at all.
In some cases you are unable to legally get parts of law without paying for it. For example where law mandates following proprietary standards.
Government funded data creation is very often entirely proprietary.
It is simply impractical to attribute all the sources anywhere in UI or printed copies of map. And whether an attribution hidden somewhere deep in wiki is considered acceptable is grey zone.
The fact that OSM themselves want attributions is another reasons why they have high standards for what's considered an attribution which they can't achieve for third party data sources.
In case of software License.txt and Help/About is considered standard practices. But that doesn't necessarily translate to other mediums of copyrighted work. Something like books or research papers have their own generally accepted practices of how attributions are handled. For maps digital and physical text in the corner is often used practice. You can see it even for something like a building plan posted next to construction site, listing additional map sources used for preparing the drawing. So it's not exactly unique invention by OSM. Back to comparison with software, software can't exactly be printed out so the concerns about attribution are different. Also software licenses typically require listing including a copy of license text not just attribution , which is simply impossible outside separate file or dedicated UI.
In practice the OSM aiming for better than good and thousands of unverified contributors being uncontrollable lands it somewhere in the middle. But if they aimed for barely acceptable all the contributors would definitely push the bar bellow legally acceptable.
On the topic of government data, CC-BY is also common which is somewhat problematic. But more often they have no idea under what license they are releasing their data. They come up with complicated schemes of metadata, which never gets properly filled or parsed, thus resulting in conflicting information about license being used. And if you ask them to clarify they will just say, "yes yes it's open data you can reuse it", with the government employee having no understanding about differences between various licenses and that not all open data is equal.
- I sort of respect the copyleft ethos. You put out a thing with the understand everything it touches is also going to be openly available. I think attribution isn't really part of the central idea there.
- I also respect the MIT/BSD style thing where you're just putting stuff out there in the public domain and it's part of the corpus of human knowledge. You leave your mark so to speak.
The middle ground of "You can use this but you gotta promote our service and stamp our name on it" just feels icky. I don't want to contribute to that. I feel I'm helping OSM the organization and.. I don't know them .. are they good stewards of the data I'm giving them? Are they going to be good stewards in 10 years? Hopefully that kinda makes sense? I guess the same can be said for Wikipedia, but Wikipedia for better or worse is very siloed. You have to attribute stuff you copy from Wiki but ..
A: Realistically nobody is actually copying wiki articles other than lazy high school students. It's just not very reusable outside of Wikipedia
B: This is more of a plagiarism issue. It encourages people to disclose it's not their own words (this is not an issue with maps.. nobody thinks you surveyed your city to draw the map)
If Wiki became CC0 tomorrow nothing would really change. If you needed to fork Wiki and put an attribution in the footer, it'd be very innocuous..
StreetComplete is an easy to use editor of OpenStreetMap data available for Android. It can be used without any OpenStreetMap-specific knowledge. It asks simple questions, with answers directly used to edit and improve OpenStreetMap data. The app is aimed at users who do not know anything about OSM tagging schemes but still want to contribute to OpenStreetMap.
StreetComplete automatically looks for nearby places where a survey is needed and shows them as quest markers on its map. Each of these quests can then be solved on site by answering a simple question. For example, tapping on a marker may show the question "What is the name of this road?", with a text field to answer it. More examples are shown in the screenshots below.
The user's answer is automatically processed and uploaded directly into the OSM database. Edits are done in meaningful changesets using the user's OSM account. Since the app is meant to be used on a survey, it can be used offline and is economic with data usage.
This is one of the worst Wikipedia rules. It gives way too much power to institutions giving them free reign to publish misinformation as long as they don't care about fact checking each other, which is common for niche subjects where corrections are not going to get as many clicks as "drama" would.
Therefore scoping the claim being made with citations actually does improve the wiki's accuracy.
You can say bread is sold pre-sliced accurately in a colloquial sense, but actually making a claim - as an encyclopedia inherently does - should carry information on how general a claim it actually is.
Or are you claiming that you are completely unaware of unsliced bread and need a citation to verify its existence?
Bread is usually sold sliced in some places, and usually sold unsliced in others. For a claim about this to be useful for wikipedia it should be specific and cited.
In rigorous academic contexts things that are generally accepted or common knowledge do not need to be cited. Nobody is disputing the existence of frozen milk or sliced bread for sale. They are commonly known and accepted facts. We do not need a peer reviewed citation for those claims to be believable.
The claim is not that sliced bread is always available in every place on earth. Nor is it that bread is usually sliced. That is a different claim that you have added. The claim is that sliced bread is available for sale, nonspecifically. It is a commonly known fact that bread can be purchased sliced in some places.
If you make a specific claim, like: sliced bread is not usually available in Nordic countries, I could see that needing a citation. You have made specific claims about sliced bread availability and market preferences. I am making the general case that it exists.
The point is that there is some basic level of knowledge that we don’t need to validate with a third party source. People drink water. I’ve never seen a scientific study or source for this, but it is universally accepted as truth. Bread is sold sliced sometimes is a similar fact.
Bread is sold both sliced and unsliced, sometimes geographic location impacts which variation is predominant.
I'm arguing that this should be done, and yet a citation is still important. You didn't answer my question about milk. In what situation would it be appropriate to mention milk being sold frozen without a citation? For example, human milk banks actually do freeze the milk for transport, but if this is mentioned in a wikipedia article, it should be cited! Same goes for making a claim about whether bread is sold sliced or unsliced (even if both are encountered more commonly than frozen milk)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxU2eqZtYmc
I ended up digging through the OSM wiki for definitions and rules to argue my case but in the end it felt very much like people on a power trip insistent on getting their way. It has ruined the fun in StreetComplete for me and I haven't participated since.
eg "Earth: mostly harmless."
In most countries, walking on a controlled-access highway[1] is specifically illegal. Why should it not be marked as non-walkable just because there's no signage?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled-access_highway
> it's basically a highway with no sidewalk would not matter.
"Basically a highway" and "a highway" is different!
In my experience all highways have markings explicitly banning walking (among other things). So it sounds like OP was making a judgement call based on the fact that there's no sidewalk.
I have the unfortunate experience of walking alongside certain roads without sidewalks. It's not fun by any means but I wouldn't want OSM to outright say that it's not walkable.
Of course it maybe "actually" was a highway.
In the UK you can walk on any road except a Motorway. Non of this is signed.
In the UK there are many places to get somewhere you have to walk on a road (even A roads) that does not have a pavement (US sidewalk)
What OP was (probably) doing was tagging roads that aren't motorways and that have no sign banning pedestrians with `foot=no`, which is only supposed to be used in situations where walking is illegal or impossible. Eventually more experienced mappers noticed what OP was doing and reverted a bunch of his edits, which isn't a great feeling, particularly if you've been mapping that way for a while before anyone noticed
(If OP was using StreetComplete I'd blame StreetComplete for this more than the OP. They used to have a quest for pedestrian walkability that was poorly worded, which they've since removed because it was leading to exactly this kind of confusion.)
So for example, you'll see a sign indicating cars are OK for a freeway. That means, heavy motorcycles and scooters are NOT ok. You can only take your heavy motorcycle on it if it also has a heavy motorcycle sign. But SOMETIMES they'll use the slightly different motorcycle sign which means scooters ok. Well, if it's ok for scooters, it must be ok for heavy motorcycles as well, right? Wrong! Heavy motorcycles must then take the car lane, if there's a lane marked for scooters.
Also sometimes there's a road marked no cars! Scooters ok. Heavy motorcycles? Who knows!
As for pedestrians: lol just die
Cars ok, heavy motorcycles ok scooters not ok: https://taipeiscooterrentals.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/...
Cars ok, heavy motorcycles ok, scooters not ok by implication: https://blog.calebjay.com/posts/rent-motorcycle-taiwan/cars_...
Quick, google is telling you you need to cross this river, are you allowed on this road or not??? https://www.google.com/maps/@25.0756527,121.6435485,3a,75y,9...
Time to head back to Taipei proper after hanging at e7play, let's cross the river... oh wait, there's 600 cars behind you blaring their horns as you enter this intersection, which way are you going? Can you go straight?? Who knows! https://www.google.com/maps/@25.0722621,121.4934581,3a,75y,4...
I've had plenty of friends bicycle into places they apparently aren't allowed to. There's no sign that says no, but the bicycle isn't allowed by the implication of some combination of allowed-vehicle signs that are lacking a bicycle-allowed sign.
Maybe it was such case?
New to online communities, are you?
Seems like you guys had two different perspectives, both arguably right. Maybe it needs to be split into technically-walkable and comfortably-walkable layers.
"Would an ordinary person want to walk here?" is pretty subjective. "Are people legally prohibited from walking here?" is pretty objective. Generally only the latter would be recorded in OSM.
I don't want to attribute anything to how you expressed that you feel, but I believe that this is what's known as "Deferral of Responsibility" and it can actually _negatively_ impact the quality of the data you are claiming to want to help curate.
As I wrote in my original post, I am not attributing any intent to what the person wrote, and am focusing on how what they are describing is equivalent in nature to the hypothetical statement I presented and can actually be harmful, even if the intentions are pure.
While the scope of the issues being compared is not equivalent, you're excluding from your rebuttal the scores of low-experience developers submitting changes to open source projects with their own pure intentions.
To borrow your own words; those contributors are making a good faith effort to improve the open source project by providing AI-generated change requests that they believe no one else is in a position to provide (time, priorities, etc), and worry less because any issues with their submissions can theoretically be corrected by the maintainers.
Please take some time to understand the nuance in the statements I am making. I assure you I chose my original words with intent.
I'd personally never seen that quest myself, but looking at it now I can see why they're removing it.
https://testflight.apple.com/join/K1u3eUU5
I suspect one day at the top of HN's front page, will exhaust that.
That's a big reason I never mention my apps, here.
>forms can only be canceled with the back gesture rather than clicking anywhere on the map
Well for me not even the back gesture works, I just have to force close the app if I don't want to answer a survey lol
EDIT: Got it, swiping from left to right, starting from the very border of the screen. Not super intuitive but simple enough
Maybe Android's visual ←back button is the way to go after all instead of hoping someone will accidentally discover implicit gestures
I prefer EveryDoor. It's oriented more towards stores and things I'm interested in on the map.
EveryDoor exist on the Apple store too.
Also open to feedback from anyone.
I'll certainly keep this in mind though.
The only one thing missing for me is a small history of my past contributions. At some point, I made a mistake and entered the wrong information (nothing terrible, the surface of a walkway, it was 30% one surface, 70% another, I gave the 30% value instead of what I think 70% would be better). I would have been glad to be able to quickly "revert" this contribution.
But else, a really great tool.
Edit: I had no idea that https://www.openstreetmap.org/history shows a list of the most recent changes in a sidebar, and there seems to be a similar trend too in terms of where OpenStreetMap is edited most often.
Here are some more views:
- https://live.openstreetmap.fr/
- https://osm-in-realtime.jwestman.net/
- https://theplanetthinks.com/map
(It only shows edits made in the last 24 hours IIRC, but this limit is chosen quite arbitrarily. If there is a use case for it, it can be extended.)
You can actually split the road into multiple segments and answer each separately if you don't mind the extra effort. I think there should be something like "differs along the way" button which then asks you to pick a point where to cut.
Or maybe I have been using it too long so that I don't notice the awkward bits anymore.
Any specific parts you are after?
Generally, I'm very happy with the platform and it's only gotten better over the past couple years I've been deep in it.
- Maintaining a significant new moving part in the dev process. KMP updates, management, integration, futures awareness, this all takes non-zero time.
- If an iOS dev wants to work on a KMP project what's the ramp up time? How much less efficiently can they contribute compared to a pure native app?
- How much time is spent on problems, bugs, issues, related to KMP. This is guaranteed non-zero for any tool.
- Is there less benefit to KMP with coding agents? Previously with two native apps, a bug fix had to be done twice. Currently, say a fix in done on Android, it's quite easy to say "propose an equivalent fix for the iOS repo". I do not claim this removes all benefits of a single code base, just that some things are not as bad now.
> KMP stability
Regarding moving parts in KMP, I have the impression that it is quite stable now, and has been for some time. I feel it is less maintenance work than having an Android project that uses the Android UI framework and system APIs. Google loves to deprecate and invent new APIs every few years. I feel there is very little in the way of breaking changes that need changes in the code in KMP. Most of that comes from some third party libraries on major new versions. The biggest change recently was a change in the Android Gradle plugin that required to change the project structure. Arguably, that again was more of an Android than a KMP thing.
> iOS developers
Well, the app is Kotlin Multiplatform + Compose Multiplatform as UI framework. So, while it runs on iOS, the parts that would feel native to an iOS dev are near zero: There are about 50 lines of code in Swift in the project and about 1000 dealing with iOS APIs, but written in Kotlin.
As Kotlin and Compose is used in Android development, the project will always feel more accessible to Android developers. That said, Kotlin is somewhat similar to Swift and Compose is also a declarative reactive user interface framework, i.e. similar to SwiftUI. As for the setup, they need at least IntelliJ/Android Studio to compile all that Kotlin to native code before launching the app from XCode in a simulator. That's my setup at least. Certainly one could also just use gradle (the build system) from the commandline.
> KMP bugs
KMP bugs, none that I remember. About platform-specific issues we will see what will surface during the beta test. So far, one thing surfaced, but it was found easily and necessitated changing 4 lines of code.
Compose (the UI framework) is a different matter. At times, I feel it is quite unwieldy when not solving standard problems. Being designed primarily by Google, I also find that best practices change and deprecations happen fairly frequently. Certain features lacking in Compose Multiplatform I need to implement myself. For example, there are still no scroll bars.
> Coding Agents
I have little experience with that, but what I have seen, the agents have no problem generating working code for the platform-specific parts of the implementation. Some un-slopping is necessary as always.
And, as I wrote, the platform specific code takes up a tiny part of the whole code base. Of the 80k lines of source code in the production code, 2k lines of source code are platform specific.
> Maintaining a significant new moving part in the dev process. KMP updates, management, integration, futures awareness, this all takes non-zero time.
If you're already doing that for Android, any additional tooling/infra churn for KMP is pretty negligible, except for a one-time cost of separating common kotlin code from android-specific code. KMP updates are just Kotlin updates.
> If an iOS dev wants to work on a KMP project what's the ramp up time? How much less efficiently can they contribute compared to a pure native app?
Two answers here: 1. Kotlin, the language, is quite similar to Swift, and can call ObjC APIs (or Swift annotated with @ObjC) directly via cinterop, so you're calling the same iOS SDKs. Compose is a declarative UI framework in the same vein as SwiftUI and React (and IMO with fewer footguns and quirks than SwiftUI, though there are some). It renders more like Flutter (via Skia) but it's not hard to embed as a component of a SwiftUI app. 2. KMP libraries can also export ObjC or Swift APIs, called in Swift. It's fairly common for there to be a shared business logic / service layer within an app, perhaps even shared view models, and leave the UI layer itself to SwiftUI and Compose for each platform.
Compared to something like React Native, I find that KMP is much friendlier and less opinionated about how you use it and how much you integrate it. You can use it to share a small module, or the whole app, or anywhere in between, and the seams at the boundary are not nearly as painful as you'd expect crossing languages.
> How much time is spent on problems, bugs, issues, related to KMP. This is guaranteed non-zero for any tool.
Hard to quantify, but in my time working on MapLibre Compose for the last two years, I've run into a handful of Androidx bugs, and much fewer KMP / CMP bugs. Even the same APIs, on the Compose Multiplatform side tend to have fewer pitfalls and bugs in my experience than on the Android side.
That said, the time I've spent dealing with _IDE_ bugs in JB IDEs has been far too much. These days, I spend much less time in an IDE, so it hasn't mattered as much, but I'd _like_ to spend more time there as ideally, even if agents are generating code, I want to read and navigate it in a nice environment.
> Is there less benefit to KMP with coding agents? ... just that some things are not as bad now.
Probably depends where you are on the vibe coding vs ai-assisted engineering spectrum. I'm a heavy AI user these days, close to 100% since Fable/Sol/Astra, but on code I care about, I don't vibe code, I still spend time to understand and refine at least the architecture, if not the line-by-line code. So still I prefer the single codebase because that's one fewer set of abstractions, of failure modes, of guardrails, of test harnesses, etc to worry about.
But if you care deeply about the native UI, using Compose on Android, SwiftUI on iOS, and then KMP for a shared core is an excellent architecture. The opposite, a shared Swift core, I think is also becoming more possible as Swift targets Android, though I'm unsure what the kotlin-on-android -> swift integration experience is like.
I don’t know if that counts as it does or it doesn’t.
There is a limit to the type of quest you can fit into the mobile app. It also should have a fall back "leave a note" option.
You will then be led to another UI in which you can split the road into several sections.
Now I need to figure out if it's possible to merge my navigation maps with the deflock maps..
However, it's lacking the nice example pictures for each option - so, with Go Map!! you need to know what you're doing.
https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/5421...
I'd like to see native Apple sign-in, as opposed to via a WebView. When I used the WebView, the password text box was obscured and fiddly to fill in.
There should be an easier way to dismiss something I've clicked on, than having to tap "uh..." and then dismiss two dialog boxes.
Things that I've submitted (e.g. house numbers) should be visible on the map, to visually show my contribution progress (even if pending review or whatever). At present my contributions just disappear into the void.
Satellite overlay would be very useful to correlate houses.
Seeing some indication of other recent local contributions would be nice, to make the app feel more alive.
edits are immediately applied to live database (with delay if you have chose to do so or internet connection is not available). Once a minute update is published to data consumers.
if you want to see house numbers you can enable house number overlay (left circle in top right, select blueish icon with address label next to it)
and why it is not visible immediately on background map? because it is also OSM data, but processed OSM data and updates with delay
(why processed? because globe-spanning map requires some simplification, rendering from raw OSM data is infeasible on a phone)
I tried to use it to list restaurants but the UI reacted like nobody had ever tried that before
For navigation there's Magic Earth (can route around traffic jams), TomTom, and Scenic. OsmAnd can also do routing.
For cars : avoid highways, tolls. For cycling : follow rivers, less noise, less traffic, etc; for walking : no steps.
https://cartes.app I can also recommend.
Both projects have a similar goal, to offer a more useful UI around using an OSM based map.
However, in my opinion TomTom (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tomtom.spe... or https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tomtom-maps-traffic/id14381065...) is still the best way to use OpenStreetMap for navigation since it combines OSM data with their own real time traffic information without dark patterns or asking for an account like Waze or Maps do.
I can see most POIs i added with the exact name i gave to them, but the reviews and opening hours are pulled from Tripadvisor.
It's explicitly advertised for driving, not walking, so it's optimized to get you to places. CoMaps and even OSMand are much better for walking around.
And there's a simple reason for the search being so bad in most OSM apps: offline search.
The focus of all these apps seems to be a self-imposed "the app should never touch a server, ever, because what if the user is on a 100$/GB roaming plan in Africa", but indexing the maps is not easy.
I run a local Nominatim database (search engine for OSM) for Italy and it's ~57gb of data and indexes for one country only, and it barely supports fuzzy search.
Not sure is it doable in browser.
The trust problem is a general one, it even involves trusting yet another app (not just the installation method). This can be solved by providing a good value and good references / marketing.
For developers it is most likely a FOMO by thinking about anything other than App Store as "a lesser". But just being in the App Store doesn't achieve much as you're one among the millions, you have to market your app yourself anyway.
Some users have this weird association where web apps are considered as not secure while native apps are safe while in reality it's the exact opposite, web apps are nicely sandboxed and native apps siphoons out private information in bulk.
I don't think there is a genuine barrier if you have a really good app that adds enough value to the user. For example GeForce NOW (and other game streaming services) with millions of users use PWAs on iOS/iPad with success.
The installation process can be presented as a simple guide to the users (on Android it's even easier as you can just click a button directly). Of course a portion of users won't be able or be unwilling to follow it. On the other hand you'll get a higher quality users who can follow guides and you retain a direct relationship with them.
There are some annoyances, mostly by Apple when they sometimes add or change some feature that interferes with the web apps, but workarounds are quickly to be found. I would say it's not occurring that often, and native apps needs to adapt to Apple changes too.
It's also a good idea to not use the term PWA, but rather terms like "installable web app" / "add to home screen" or something similar. Almost nobody knows the PWA term (including the developers).
PWAs don't have all capabilities that the native apps have, but most apps don't need these. PWAs certainly can work offline, have push notificatins and other stuff. Some demos are here: https://whatpwacando.today/
At least in my area you often have highly degraded connectivity while seeing city center. For example forest park at https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/50.060283/19.845654
To say nothing about more rural areas or forests outside cities.
Also, it allows loading maps on wifi and editing as tourist without paying bajllion/KB roaming fees.
weird choice, from 2023, to code an iOS app. but it doesn't matter today in 2026. frontier models can manage weird software stacks