StreetComplete is an easy to use editor of OpenStreetMap data available for Android. It can be used without any OpenStreetMap-specific knowledge. It asks simple questions, with answers directly used to edit and improve OpenStreetMap data. The app is aimed at users who do not know anything about OSM tagging schemes but still want to contribute to OpenStreetMap.
StreetComplete automatically looks for nearby places where a survey is needed and shows them as quest markers on its map. Each of these quests can then be solved on site by answering a simple question. For example, tapping on a marker may show the question "What is the name of this road?", with a text field to answer it. More examples are shown in the screenshots below.
The user's answer is automatically processed and uploaded directly into the OSM database. Edits are done in meaningful changesets using the user's OSM account. Since the app is meant to be used on a survey, it can be used offline and is economic with data usage.
Therefore scoping the claim being made with citations actually does improve the wiki's accuracy.
You can say bread is sold pre-sliced accurately in a colloquial sense, but actually making a claim - as an encyclopedia inherently does - should carry information on how general a claim it actually is.
I ended up digging through the OSM wiki for definitions and rules to argue my case but in the end it felt very much like people on a power trip insistent on getting their way. It has ruined the fun in StreetComplete for me and I haven't participated since.
Seems like you guys had two different perspectives, both arguably right. Maybe it needs to be split into technically-walkable and comfortably-walkable layers.
I don't want to attribute anything to how you expressed that you feel, but I believe that this is what's known as "Deferral of Responsibility" and it can actually _negatively_ impact the quality of the data you are claiming to want to help curate.
I'd personally never seen that quest myself, but looking at it now I can see why they're removing it.
I suspect one day at the top of HN's front page, will exhaust that.
That's a big reason I never mention my apps, here.
I prefer EveryDoor. It's oriented more towards stores and things I'm interested in on the map.
EveryDoor exist on the Apple store too.
Also open to feedback from anyone.
The only one thing missing for me is a small history of my past contributions. At some point, I made a mistake and entered the wrong information (nothing terrible, the surface of a walkway, it was 30% one surface, 70% another, I gave the 30% value instead of what I think 70% would be better). I would have been glad to be able to quickly "revert" this contribution.
But else, a really great tool.
(It only shows edits made in the last 24 hours IIRC, but this limit is chosen quite arbitrarily. If there is a use case for it, it can be extended.)
Edit: I had no idea that https://www.openstreetmap.org/history shows a list of the most recent changes in a sidebar, and there seems to be a similar trend too in terms of where OpenStreetMap is edited most often.
Here are some more views:
- https://live.openstreetmap.fr/
>forms can only be canceled with the back gesture rather than clicking anywhere on the map
Well for me not even the back gesture works, I just have to force close the app if I don't want to answer a survey lol
EDIT: Got it, swiping from left to right, starting from the very border of the screen. Not super intuitive but simple enough
Maybe Android's visual ←back button is the way to go after all instead of hoping someone will accidentally discover implicit gestures
Or maybe I have been using it too long so that I don't notice the awkward bits anymore.
Any specific parts you are after?
Generally, I'm very happy with the platform and it's only gotten better over the past couple years I've been deep in it.
- Maintaining a significant new moving part in the dev process. KMP updates, management, integration, futures awareness, this all takes non-zero time.
- If an iOS dev wants to work on a KMP project what's the ramp up time? How much less efficiently can they contribute compared to a pure native app?
- How much time is spent on problems, bugs, issues, related to KMP. This is guaranteed non-zero for any tool.
- Is there less benefit to KMP with coding agents? Previously with two native apps, a bug fix had to be done twice. Currently, say a fix in done on Android, it's quite easy to say "propose an equivalent fix for the iOS repo". I do not claim this removes all benefits of a single code base, just that some things are not as bad now.
> KMP stability
Regarding moving parts in KMP, I have the impression that it is quite stable now, and has been for some time. I feel it is less maintenance work than having an Android project that uses the Android UI framework and system APIs. Google loves to deprecate and invent new APIs every few years. I feel there is very little in the way of breaking changes that need changes in the code in KMP. Most of that comes from some third party libraries on major new versions. The biggest change recently was a change in the Android Gradle plugin that required to change the project structure. Arguably, that again was more of an Android than a KMP thing.
> iOS developers
Well, the app is Kotlin Multiplatform + Compose Multiplatform as UI framework. So, while it runs on iOS, the parts that would feel native to an iOS dev are near zero: There are about 50 lines of code in Swift in the project and about 1000 dealing with iOS APIs, but written in Kotlin.
As Kotlin and Compose is used in Android development, the project will always feel more accessible to Android developers. That said, Kotlin is somewhat similar to Swift and Compose is also a declarative reactive user interface framework, i.e. similar to SwiftUI. As for the setup, they need at least IntelliJ/Android Studio to compile all that Kotlin to native code before launching the app from XCode in a simulator. That's my setup at least. Certainly one could also just use gradle (the build system) from the commandline.
> KMP bugs
KMP bugs, none that I remember. About platform-specific issues we will see what will surface during the beta test. So far, one thing surfaced, but it was found easily and necessitated changing 4 lines of code.
Compose (the UI framework) is a different matter. At times, I feel it is quite unwieldy when not solving standard problems. Being designed primarily by Google, I also find that best practices change and deprecations happen fairly frequently. Certain features lacking in Compose Multiplatform I need to implement myself. For example, there are still no scroll bars.
> Coding Agents
I have little experience with that, but what I have seen, the agents have no problem generating working code for the platform-specific parts of the implementation. Some un-slopping is necessary as always.
And, as I wrote, the platform specific code takes up a tiny part of the whole code base. Of the 80k lines of source code in the production code, 2k lines of source code are platform specific.
I don’t know if that counts as it does or it doesn’t.
There is a limit to the type of quest you can fit into the mobile app. It also should have a fall back "leave a note" option.
You will then be led to another UI in which you can split the road into several sections.
Now I need to figure out if it's possible to merge my navigation maps with the deflock maps..
https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/5421...
However, it's lacking the nice example pictures for each option - so, with Go Map!! you need to know what you're doing.
I'd like to see native Apple sign-in, as opposed to via a WebView. When I used the WebView, the password text box was obscured and fiddly to fill in.
There should be an easier way to dismiss something I've clicked on, than having to tap "uh..." and then dismiss two dialog boxes.
Things that I've submitted (e.g. house numbers) should be visible on the map, to visually show my contribution progress (even if pending review or whatever). At present my contributions just disappear into the void.
Satellite overlay would be very useful to correlate houses.
Seeing some indication of other recent local contributions would be nice, to make the app feel more alive.
I tried to use it to list restaurants but the UI reacted like nobody had ever tried that before
For navigation there's Magic Earth (can route around traffic jams), TomTom, and Scenic. OsmAnd can also do routing.
However, in my opinion TomTom (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tomtom.spe... or https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tomtom-maps-traffic/id14381065...) is still the best way to use OpenStreetMap for navigation since it combines OSM data with their own real time traffic information without dark patterns or asking for an account like Waze or Maps do.
I can see most POIs i added with the exact name i gave to them, but the reviews and opening hours are pulled from Tripadvisor.
It's explicitly advertised for driving, not walking, so it's optimized to get you to places. CoMaps and even OSMand are much better for walking around.
And there's a simple reason for the search being so bad in most OSM apps: offline search.
The focus of all these apps seems to be a self-imposed "the app should never touch a server, ever, because what if the user is on a 100$/GB roaming plan in Africa", but indexing the maps is not easy.
I run a local Nominatim database (search engine for OSM) for Italy and it's ~57gb of data and indexes for one country only, and it barely supports fuzzy search.
https://cartes.app I can also recommend.
Both projects have a similar goal, to offer a more useful UI around using an OSM based map.
> Within the frame of Prototype Fund round 15 (March 2024 to August 2024), the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research sponsored Tobias Zwick to work on StreetComplete for iOS (see progress report)
And NLnet.
The current demo doesn't seem to cover many places worldwide, but what is there is really neat! To me this already looks better than modern city sim games, because they never seem to get the scale right, among other things.
Not sure what's stopping them from covering more places, since the idea presumably is to generate these tiles from existing OSM data. And in fact one of the easiest things to do with StreetComplete is add the height and type of a building.