Some Canadian websites, including for the federal government, displayed maps with Lake Ontario renamed as Lake America on Sunday, a day after Google Maps announced the change to align with an executive order by U.S. President Donald Trump.
This is why we need to use more open source stuff not tied to a closed US company like; Apple, Google, Microslop, Twitter, Meta, and whatever else.
Just checked out OsmAnd and managed to blow through the “free” downloads just downloading the maps local to me before even learning that it limits how much we can download of the free community data before charging… It’s a bit off-putting that they’re charging for open source data, unless I’m missing something…
On the Play Store version, you’re able to download seven offline maps, where a map is either (your choice) a country or a state/province/etc. (some smaller countries don’t have the state/province/etc. level and just give you the whole country). I haven’t pushed it, but I think you should be able to have seven countries(?) available for offline view (maybe the world map counts as one, so six?).
OsmAnd is a BV (besloten vennootschap, effectively an LLC), so similar to something like ProtonMail, there’s a “Start” (free) tier, a “Maps+” one, and a “Pro” one, where both paid tiers unlock unlimited offline map downloads. (You’re able to use online maps as much as you want.)
The maps are stored on and downloaded from OsmAnd’s site in a
.obffile, which is OsmAnd’s own format. So they’re essentially charging for open-source data that they’ve converted and are hosting as a way of incentivizing users out of the free tier, which as far as businesses go, I see no real problem with. They’re making that open-source data more accessible with a powerful app and making features that encourage people to contribute back to it, not parasitizing it.OsmAnd, to my understanding, is well-liked among OSM’s contributors for having a great app and a healthy business model.
Anyway, with that out of the way, the “Maps+” and “Pro” features are free on F-Droid. It is, after all, free and open-source.
I’ll have to check it out on fdroid then
The free downloads, BTW, isn’t even enough to cover my entire state (California), but it’s a pretty big damned state.
It’s still a little off-putting to me that they are charging for freely available data from someone else, but if part of that is their processing and formatting of the data, then I guess that’s not quite as bad