A good opportunity to remind everyone that a vastly superior alternative to Organic Maps already exists: Osmand.
Organic Maps is better for “normal” users if you ask me. Osmand is better for pro users but quite clunky.
Yes, Osmand is definitely clunky by comparison. But the UX is getting slowly more intuitive. I see no reason why Osmand’s easy-peasy defaults mode cannot end up equal to to OM. They’re not far off, and at that point its superiority would be clear as day.
Personally I wish the OM devs could have contributed their talents to making Osmand better. Really feels like wasteful duplication which benefits nobody benefits except the egos of a handful of developers. A common problem with FOSS and this is a great example IMO.
Osmand has a terrible user interface
It is also only open core and hides features behind a paywall.
I don’t think this is true in that sense. You can get the full experience for free by - either building it your self - or simply on FDroid. If you still use Gruesome Playstore, then yes, it is “soft paywalled”.
Or do you mean other features that are not even in the FDroid build? (Which could be some proprietary features.)
You can get the full experience for free by - either building it your self - or simply on FDroid.
I doubt they gift you accumulated hundreds of dollars yearly worth of premium features plus all the stuff hidden behind the paywall just because you didn’t load from the Google Play Store.
If you have a fully open source product (with a permissive license) you can’t just “paywall” it, as FOSS licenses allow you to build and often redistribute the product.
When you have a fully open source product and want to build a valid business model from it, you have to work WITH your license. The OsmAnd team chose an interesting way to do this by “paywalling” the Playstore version “OsmAnd+”. But you still can get all the stuff, as it is open source.
A community-compiled version of the full OsmAnd+ named OsmAnd~ without Google Play services dependency is also freely available on F-Droid.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OsmAnd#Licensing
Welcome to the world of FOSS. 🌍
