Sadly there is no browser view, but they have selection of app stores on their page for the app (and IIRC they are working on a desktop version).
It has routing, searching, more map details (e.g. park benches, trash bins on the map), OSM editing, and pretty slick look in my opinion.
I recently switched to Organic Maps after learning about it here on Lemmy and haven’t touched Google Maps as much. I know it is not a perfect 100% replacement, but while it lacks certain things (e.g. public transport, but I use local public transport app anyway for better accuracy), it has so many features google lacks:
- hiking trail overlay that is more up-to-date
- stores maps on your phone in vector format (offline use is so much nicer)
- privacy focused
There is more to this than I know and write here, and probably many here already know about Organic Maps since there was the whole fiasco of google removing this app from play store awhile back, but thought it’s cool that the company behind it is in Estonia (man I still remember Skype, thanks Estonia ❤️ I’ve spent so much time on skype before it was aquired by Microsoft).
Edit to add extra info from website: Company is based in Tallinn, Estonia - Organic Maps OÜ
The company is Estonian in that absolutely anyone can start an Estonian company if they really want to. We’re like the Delaware of Europe.
The two owners are Russian and Byelorussian. They have close to no social media presence, even their LinkedIn and Github accounts are completely empty. According to public records, one lives in the UK and the other in Argentina.
There are 39 other companies registered in the same office space (not the building - the same exact office in that building) in downtown Tallinn. Total of 1424 companies registered in that building.
Interesting, well at least the code is open-source and I’ve myself also skimmed through some of their code and didn’t find anything suspicious. But didn’t know that about Estonian laws allowing anyone to spin-up a company even if they are living outside of Estonia. Thanks for the info!
Just to add my two cents about online presence: my online presence is also limited to lemmy, linkedin, and github. The only one with my real name and picture is linkedin.
Github I only use for work and doesn’t have any of my personal info and linkedin pretty much has one photo of me and works as my online CV.
I also try to keep my own visibility online low and don’t see problems with that. But these kind of mailbox companies are always bit suspicious…
Nevertheless, thank you for looking into this and posting about it.
Yup, it’s called an e-residency.
Well yeah, but are you trying to market a SaaS company? If you were, it’d make sense to have more of an online presence. If not, you’ve got everything you need, but a lot of people also run personal engineering blogs to non-invasively advertise their companies, etc. Hell, one of the folks who used to work in Toggl’s marketing team has a really awesome online comic that pretty much put the company on the map for a lot of people. A lot of the software engineering and business or time management related comics had a Toggl watermark.
It’s organic (heh) marketing, pretty much. If you have a growing company, it seems to help a lot.
Ohh, okay have to check better whether a company is just a mailbox company from now on, thank you for bringing this to my attention!
Well, I guess that makes sense. I would definitely limit my online presence and try to keep myself private still even if I started my own SaaS company and use the company/product channel to communicate and market, but then again maybe that is why I’m not a marketer or have my own company, and would probably not succeed in a small startup lol.
Good insights and very well put. Learned some new stuff and it never hurts for me to go through the code again :) (was planning to check some of their code anyway because of interesting implementations!).