this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
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CoMaps
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Cooperative community open-source fork of Organic Maps, an offline privacy-respecting not-for-profit OpenStreetMap GPS app for your phone.
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There's some duplication - but it's not that easy: Map applications like CoMaps and OsmAnd make their own choices on which types of data from OSM is included in maps and how it's displayed, and also how the data structure behind the scenes work. This is necessary to create maps that load fast and work well for route calculations etc. So having them compatible between apps is extremely hard.
Vespucci in contrast is a pure OSM editor, so this just gets the 'raw' data from OSM for a given region, as it focuses on only editing/adding data to OSM, but not on end-user search, can't navigate etc.
For that reason it's unfortunately not likely that a shared format will emerge, as different OSM data users and apps have different needs!
Ok, yes, Vespucci wasn't the best for me to select - similarly StreetComplete has a definitely different use case.
But, thanks for taking the time to lay it out for me, I had assumed that CoMaps would've just pulled out the same data from OSM...
No worries! It all is based on the same data, but then the processing can be quite different (e.g. the calculation of penalties for the routing algorithms goes into the maps during this processing), or which POI types are shown on the maps etc. Converting the raw OSM DB into something usable for mobile apps is quite a heavy processing step 🙂