Maps.me co-founder tries to close down Organic Maps open-source fork - HN

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.

Did osmand change its rendering engine to make it as smooth as OM?

It is also only open core and hides features behind a paywall.

Or perhaps it's your software stack. I've used it constantly for well over a decade, every day, on multiple devices, and crashes have been vanishingly rare.

Interesting perspective. I too have used Osmand (or "OsmAnd" or "OSMAnd" or whatever unpronounceable official name it is) for years. 13 years to be precisely, without a break. I've contributed numerous bug reports and feature requests. It's clunky and unintuitive yes, but I've seen worse in other power apps of this kind.

But Osmand is still lacking a couple of features on my personal wishlist, so I naturally gave Organic Maps a decent audition, navigation included. I found that it did only one thing better: rendering of subway lines in dense cities. But this has now been largely fixed by a new setting in Osmand (cleverly hidden, obviously). In everything else, OM just felt to me like a poor man's alternative to Osmand. With a busy hive of developers earnestly working towards feature parity sometime in the next millennium.

These two projects have the exactly the same objectives. I continue to wish the OM developers would just put aside their egos and help fix whatever it is they don't like in Osmand. That's the point of FOSS.