The Organic Maps project was advertised as community-driven, but shareholders were making a number of decisions without community input, and without community being aware decisions are being made. While the use of donations is concerning, it wasn’t the main problem. When people contribute to the project so that it can be for the entire community, but the shareholders are open to selling the contributors’ work for their profit, that becomes problematic. Maps.me was sold and it added paid subscriptions and a crypto wallet, which destroyed the entire experience. And it appears Organic Maps risks the same problem.

The Organic Maps shareholders closed parts of the code, added Kayak advertising and there is a risk that they will sell the project for their own profit.

There was discussion about this, it’s a good conversation to have. The path for CoMaps is that it will be a general purpose navigation app, that can replace apps like Google Maps, and is good for several scenarios. Although there is still work to do until it gets there, for example estimate route time estimates. The idea is that while we work on making this app for general purpose, the focus is on narrower use cases like hiking, where people often need to be offline. And as the experience improves, the focus will also change.

CoMaps is moving quickly, it appears much faster than Organic Maps did, so I’m really excited about what we will accomplish! Thank you to everyone’s support and contribution!

The 3rd choice could potentially work. It doesn’t sound unique, but it does carry the message of openness and similarity to OpenStreetMap.

Great question, we do have plans to create it! Since we have not yet incorporated as a non-profit, there are extra steps to set this up, and we’re working on it right now. Thank you for your support, we appreciate you very much!

Voting for names is now open:

https://codeberg.org/comaps/Governance/issues/34