Organic Maps Co-Founder on Building a Privacy-First Google Maps Alternative | Alexander Borsuk

Every time you open Google Maps, it knows where you are, what you searched, how long you stayed, and where you went next. Organic Maps collects none of that. In this interview, Henry sits down with Alexander Borsuk, co-founder of Organic Maps, to talk about what mainstream maps apps are collecting, how an entirely offline-first approach changes the privacy picture, and where Organic Maps is headed next, including live public transit and opt-in traffic data.

🔗 SOURCES & LINKS
• Organic Maps: https://organicmaps.app
• Organic Maps GitHub: https://github.com/organicmaps
• OpenStreetMap: https://openstreetmap.org
• OsmAnd: https://osmand.net

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS

• (00:00) - INTRO
• (02:26) - ORGANIC MAPS TEAM & STRUCTURE
• (05:53) - MAP PRIVACY IMPLICATIONS
• (12:19) - BUSINESS SEARCHING
• (14:42) - CLOUD-FIRST VS. OFFLINE-FIRST
• (17:05) - ORGANIC MAPS VS. APPLE MAPS W/ ADP
• (24:20) - OPENSTREETMAP
• (27:51) - GETTING INVOLVED & CONTRIBUTING
• (34:20) - USABILITY & TARGET DEMOGRAPHIC
• (41:02) - PUBLIC TRANSIT
• (45:24) - RESTRICTION OF NO REAL-TIME DATA
• (48:11) - LONGEVITY & BEHIND-THE-SCENES
• (51:56) - THE NEXT 5 YEARS
• (54:05) - TRAFFIC DATA
• (57:13) - POKÉMON GO DATA HARVESTING
• (59:48) - FINAL THOUGHTS
• (01:01:45) - HOW TO CONNECT & FOLLOW

🎥 VIDEO
Watch on YouTube

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Creators and Guests

Host

Henry Fisher

Runner, artist, musician and digital rights activist. Owner of Techlore

Guest

Alexander Borsuk

Organic Maps

T

Editor

Tori

Techlore

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Google and Apple had many technological solutions which have a lot of overhead.

We don't care.

We focus on pure map experience.

Welcome to Techlore Talks.

And today I am super excited to have on Alexander from Organic Maps.

He's going to talk about his journey of creating Organic Maps, which is an open source maps

alternative to something like Apple or Google Maps, how it is open source, how they maintain

it, all of the offline functionality and why he thinks, especially the offline experience,

is actually a lot better than Apple and Google Maps.

We also talk about what the problems are with these big tech alternatives, the challenges

of maintaining data quality, how people can support OpenStreetMaps, which is actually even

utilized for things like Apple Maps.

And we'll also talk about the future of organic maps and just maps as a whole.

I learned a lot of things about maps that I didn't think I would until today, as well

as more of the digital rights angle to a lot of it.

So I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did.

Let's get to it.

I want to welcome Alexander from Organic Maps on Techlore Talks.

if you want to go ahead and just say a few words about yourself.

Yeah, my name is Alexander Borsuk.

I'm one of the guys who created in 2010 Maps With Me.

Then we renamed it to Maps Me.

When the project was sold, acquired by one company, when we left it.

But before we left it, we pitched the CEO to open the source code of Maps Me.

and development continued when we left as an open source

under Apache 2.0 license.

And in few years, that company sold the project

to yet another company, which screwed up Maps.me.

And that's time when Organic Maps was born.

So we didn't wait for someone to fix it.

We took the latest available open source version of Maps.me,

forked it, called it Organic Maps

because we removed everything, cleaned everything up,

means removed all trackers, unnecessary stuff,

what people don't need, advertisement, some other things,

and left pure map experience.

And that's why organic and focused on this development

in our free time as enjoyable open source project.

Okay, so there was the original project.

It got sold and became another project.

And then it got sold again.

But then, so you took the middle one,

forked the middle one, made it open source,

and made it usable and clean.

Okay, very cool.

And then I read that your bio, you're the co-founder.

So do you want to talk about a bit of the structure

and where your role is and everybody else

who's kind of helped make this happen

and what your team looks like today a little bit

before we dive into this?

Yeah, so the name Organic Maps was born.

And today when we saw that failed release of the Maps.me

from the new owner,

And we created it together with Victor Gavaka, my friend and also founder of Maps With Me.

So we together created this project with some other people also.

And we decided to revive it and work on it.

And after that, we started to build community around it.

because developing open source project alone, at least in times when LLMs will not write the code for you,

was not an easy task, especially in our free time.

We had a business model in Maps.me before Organic Maps.

The free application and paid application, which costed $5,

and we got enough money to go to a break-even and slowly grew up our team from four people.

initially we started to up to 17 before we made the deal and the project was sold was acquired

and in organic maps we stick to similar strategy put a lot of our own efforts time and money into

the initial phase of organic maps and then continued development and open source and started to

help contributors people who were interested in it to to contribute and some of those contributors

became active contributors and active team members. We call them team members. They help us with

several tasks with development, for example, for iOS, for Android, with user support, with

promoting applications and doing all App Store optimization stuff and letting other people know

about organic maps and any other people who are interested of course are welcome because

it's not easy to do it in our free time maybe someday when we get enough donations we can think

about something more involved but so far donations are enough to cover server expenses to cover our

basic development thing but it's not enough of course so you get full speed and work on it

especially for me personally i live right now in switzerland so it's quite expensive country so

we'll see how it goes yeah now we can definitely talk a little bit more about i guess donations and

revenue models you guys have explored i think later i want to touch on that it's always an

interesting question because every open source project project approaches it quite differently

before we get there though i kind of want to start on you know what what i think what most people

think is probably one of the most sensitive applications they use, or maybe they don't

look at it this way.

But I think Maps is quite sensitive just inherently because it's a very well-defined place that

shows everywhere you go.

And people who use Google Timeline and all of these things can visually see everywhere

they go and that their phone knows everywhere they go.

So can we maybe discuss first what kind of data and privacy implications come with using a standard Maps program, whether it's Apple, Google, anything that's mainstream, just to kind of establish the norms so we can kind of compare and contrast your approach to it afterwards?

Yeah, that makes perfect sense to describe first, because now we see a growing interest to privacy, privacy focus from people, from users.

And not everyone understands what about privacy in maps.

And if you remember how Google Maps appeared and then Apple Maps, they were online first maps.

There were reasons, technical reasons for that, because it was hard and almost impossible to make

app work fluently fast enough on mobile device, especially when we started Maps With Me.

It was 2010, times of iPhone 3G, I think only appeared those years. And we did a lot of,

put a lot of knowledge and did a lot of tricks to invent our own super highly compressed map data

format, super fast OpenGL based renderer for this data format, super fast offline search index which

works offline contrary to bigger companies which started initially online and used powerful servers

for that. So and of course when we speak about online maps, the initial way of delivering maps

data was images not vector data like later technology allowed to do. So when you speak

about online maps it means every time you take a look on some place on the map you need to make a

request to the server and even if data location data which your device knows even if it's not

sent not uploaded for whatever reason but it is in most of the cases then at least

on the server side you always know which areas people are requesting, what are they searching for,

what you know, everything what person does in the app. And of course most of the apps also collect

other types of analytics and statistics with the goal, main goal to improve the product,

but there are some other shady goals in some cases. Use this data for advertisement, resell this data

and many many other use cases. So the unique thing about organic maps is that we collect zero data

from our users. The app requires only one thing: you need to download maps from our CDN server,

where we turned off logs. We don't collect any logs and we don't want it. We want to keep it

privacy focused. And on the device there are no any other network requests except when you want to

update the maps when you want to get fresh version of the map. So we don't know anything about our

users yet still we provide very good offline and privacy focused experience and we believe that

this is the future because devices become more and more powerful, we become smarter and can do

more improvements and for example some things which big companies can do only online you're collecting

data from their users and then maybe try to customize, for example, map experience for

their users.

We may think about customizing user experience locally on the device without even sending

or sharing this data because collecting data locally and not sending it anywhere is different,

right?

So we never ever access this data.

It stays on your device.

It's private, but we can use it, for example, to do better search suggestions or change their

behavior to make it more convenient for you.

This is about the future.

We're not there yet, but this is possible.

And how big companies are using collected data in many ways.

So if the product is free, then you're the product, right?

Yeah, and I want to touch on that too, because you guys are also a free product.

So we should distinguish how open source is a bit of an exception to that rule.

But I think it's really well stated and how it is, you know, just an all-in-one place of everywhere you travel.

So, you know, just to understand the infrastructure a bit more, what you guys provide, because in Apple and Google Maps, you can download an offline maps for a region.

So let's say I'm in California.

I just want to download all of California as an offline map in Apple or Google Maps.

That is the only web request your app makes, though.

Because when I download a California map in Apple Maps and I type in, you know, going to the gym, the directions, that's pinging a server, that's doing all these things.

Apple's probably collecting a lot of that data as well, where I go, how often I go, et cetera.

But you guys, it's just that one web request, which is download a map.

Yes, initial download.

And I would like to mention also that offline functionality has been added in Google and Apple Maps way later,

when our Maps.me was very popular or they had more than 100 million downloads all over the world.

Only then first Google and then Apple started to introduce download offline area.

So they are online first and offline functionality is kind of hidden.

And many users may even not know about it and not using it.

So in our case, we are the opposite.

We are planning to add some online features.

So we are offline first.

We have some ideas how to do many important features for users, like traffic

information, public transport, which we are working on right now.

Users also asking for photos, reviews and whatever.

It's possible to do in privacy friendly way.

We will focus on that, but we are starting offline first from privacy focused way.

So now you have some functionality in Google and Apple Maps, even in offline,

but not fully functional.

So it depends what and how are you using and how far you go from the area.

With organic maps, it's very easy.

You select what you want to visit country or region or even whole Europe or whole United States, download it.

And that's it.

So then only what you may need later update the app, update the map data.

That's it.

So how do you do, you know, do you handle business searching? Is that also a static file that you download as part of the map, like businesses and stuff?

All information is embedded in the map.

So when we first released the first version of Maps with me,

we compressed the whole world OpenStreetMap data into six gigabytes of data.

Of course, there were way less data than right now we have available in OpenStreetMap

thanks to many contributors, including our users and other users all over the world.

But we also embed search related information search index.

So you will be able to quickly find whatever you're looking for.

what was downloaded, of course, what's included in those downloaded maps.

To build a route, we need some specially optimized routing index, which helps to

build routes between downloaded regions. The data also contains Wikipedia articles in a number of

languages. In OpenSuiteMap, you can mark, attach a Wikipedia article to some place, to any place,

if it's relevant. And then we have a toolchain which checks this data and gets fresh Wikipedia dump twice per month.

Wikipedia Enterprise allows to get a full dump and use it in your products.

And we also embed elevation data, which is used to create ISO lines, elevation layer on the map.

And also we are embedding this elevation data into roads and tracks.

So when you build a hiking route, for example, you can preview its elevation

graph, how elevation is changed.

So this data comes from big resources, from Aster, from NASA collected data, SRTM.

There is one guy who combined detailed European elevation data in a database,

the loadable database Zonni.

So we also use his data.

You can check all copyrights and the things which we are using in Organic Maps app or on our website.

We have a special copyright button and page which lists everything, all open source libraries or projects or sources of data, including map data, including icons, fonts, whatever we're using in the app.

Very nice.

Yeah.

And then, you know, just kind of to round out, you know, the privacy discussion, just a couple more questions here.

The first one, I see this come up in a lot of interviews, which is this relationship between cloud first and offline first.

And we see this with very advanced features, like the more that you're able to move to somebody's device, typically the better it's going to be for their privacy in terms of control, ownership, etc.

And it's a philosophy difference.

You know, we have companies like Google who tend to opt to be cloud first.

And Apple still does cloud stuff for sure.

But they do tend to default to try to do things offline when possible, unless they can't make

the experience good enough.

And then they go to the cloud as well.

So you guys are all in on offline only.

You know, so offline LLMs, I think, you know, I don't know if that's what you were kind of

hinting at or similar functionality, but it seems like just the offline world seems to

be exploding in some ways.

So I don't know if there are specific technologies you guys are looking at that can continue to make this offline experience better.

Because as people's devices get more powerful, that gives them more control that only apps like you guys have can actually utilize.

So I don't know if there's a question in there, but yeah, I guess I'll just leave it open to you if you have something to say there.

Yeah, modern devices are quite powerful and have embedded chips which can do a lot of computational work.

And we have some ideas how those capabilities can be leveraged.

But at the same time, we're trying to support as many older devices as possible.

Now the lowest version of Android we support is Android 5.

Although we recently slightly updated requirements, we dropped OpenGL 2.0 devices, super old ones,

because we need OpenGL 3 or later, still Android 5 devices,

to properly render the map,

and we plan also to introduce the satellite layer.

So these features are also required by some people,

especially in areas where OpenStreetMap

doesn't have very good coverage.

So you have just empty map or almost empty map.

So that may be quite helpful,

especially if done properly, also usable in offline.

So we have some ideas there.

Very cool.

And then I had a question, actually,

from one of our Signal members in our Signal group.

someone asked why someone should choose organic maps and they're being like it's a genuine because

they said at the end here frame it as a genuine question not a gotcha so why would someone choose

organic maps over apple maps with advanced data protection enabled and i i think you know maybe

a step below that question is how do you feel about end-to-end encrypted privacy versus offline

privacy almost because that's almost what the question is in a way as well as the apple specific

layers to this? Because I think there probably are some Apple-specific issues that don't.

Yeah, Apple offers end-to-end encryption in many cases. And now the frame of Apple is that it

cares about users' privacy, but still it's a company and it should follow the law.

And if law orders something, then it should follow the law. It's a company in the United States,

right and then with end-to-end encryption it's harder so the company in many cases might officially

say we cannot provide you with data because it's encrypted but still as some recent stories showed

with other messengers for example some metadata can be extracted maybe ip addresses maybe something

else what's not encrypted so in some cases that may be enough so apple is quite good in that and

And I hope it will keep its privacy, not first, but embedded privacy in all these products

still as a valid value, as a feature of their products in regards of organic maps.

Why people would choose it?

So if you compare products, we're of course not there yet with many features, which online

maps, online first maps already have.

If you drop those online features, well, not drop completely, but keep in mind that if

get enough resources we will develop them faster if we have more resources. So if

you compare everything else then we're all the better way better. Why? Because we

don't have anything what we don't need to render maps. So Google and Apple they

also collecting a lot of data about how the products are used. They because of

being online first they had many technological solutions which have a lot

We don't care. We focus on pure map experience, no statistics collection, just how to render the map faster, how to make maps more compact, how to make user experience easy.

This is the critical thing. We think, we're sure that our usability in many cases is easier than in Google Maps.

We can build routes in fewer clicks, fewer taps on the screen than in Google Maps, for example.

And this was number one thing when we started the project many years ago.

We tried to keep it as simple as possible to make it usable by not geeks, not experienced computer guys, gurus, but by your parents.

And there was a famous story when we got a response from one of our users, 70-something years old, granny,

who was using maps on cruise ship and was advertising it

because they were visiting different countries for us

and he had all maps downloaded

and told everyone on board about the product.

So we have many cases like that.

And this is important to make it easy to use.

I still struggle a bit explaining how Google Maps work

for my parents, for example.

It's not easy.

Yeah, I mean, the way that you're almost, you know, I think that somebody can be a true,

you know, offline open source purist about this and only use organic maps all day.

But also what you're saying, you know, there's a real hybrid solution here, which is there

is no harm in somebody downloading organic maps, downloading the maps offline.

And then when they, you know, are going on a road trip in a place that has no cell service,

when they're going camping, when they're in any environment where they actually want an

better offline experience than what Apple and Google can provide with their offline experience.

There is no harm in maybe even using Apple and Google Maps here and there, but then having

organic maps is kind of a fallback for those offline environments. In many cases, it's not a

fallback. It's the first solution. The better for offline. Yeah. Yeah. Because of the map data

quality. This is important moment. So Apple tries to mix some bits of OpenStreetMap data into it.

Google has its own proprietary map database, and it lacks a lot of details, which you already

see in many places all over the world, because volunteers in OppositeMap are not limited.

They can add, you can add whatever you want on the map.

Of course, if something goes wrong, then there are ways to clean it up.

There's vandalism, of course, everywhere, but it's post-moderation.

So that means you have a lot of super nice details on the map, maybe not useful always,

maybe sometimes too overwhelming, but you have it there. And one of our struggles is to decide what

we actually want to show on the map, because users write to us, OpenStreetMap volunteers also write

to us, "Hey, I'm mapping on the map this unique row of trees or single trees, please enable them on

the map. I want to see them on the map." So it's hard to keep it simple, readable, usable. So we have

some ideas how to do it actually so maybe switch different for different use cases switch different

map layers but there's another story so good details super good details level especially for

hikes where volunteers collect a lot of routes a lot of tracks which are just absent on google maps

and on apple maps they are there in open street map and organic maps uses open street map and you

of course can contribute directly from organic maps too right now you can add features now on the

point objects, not roads or buildings, but maybe later we think about that too. Now you can update

the data directly even if you don't have any internet and then you get it, your data will

be uploaded to OpenStreetMap directly. So that's the synergy where we rely on map data from OpenStreetMap

and we support it, we contribute and this is actually one of our main goals to make the map

data quality in OpenStreetMap better than Google Maps quality everywhere, not just in places popular

by some active volunteers. How to make it? Increase the user number of organic maps, tell them about

OpenStreetMap, tell them how data is created, because many people are not aware about it.

They write to us as if we are drawing the map, and then they know how to draw the map, how to add

their own building on the map or other buildings or whatever objects there, then that's it.

It's super hard to compare.

You cannot pay billions to keep the data up to date compared to volunteers working for

free just because they like it all over the world.

So yeah, really well stated.

And actually, the next thing I was going to talk about was OpenStreetMap.

So if somebody's never heard of OpenStreetMap, they don't know what it is.

Do you mind just kind of giving a quick deep dive on what that is?

Yeah, that's very simple.

If everyone knows about Wikipedia, so OpenSuiteMap is like Wikipedia, but for maps, where everyone,

anyone can add or edit or update or remove whatever map data is there. You just need to register

and that's it, contribute the data. There are different ways to contribute, different applications.

You can do it from your browser, you can do from some mobile apps. We have a bit of information on

our website, but you can easily Google it. So there are some rules. There is a wiki, special OpenSuiteMap

Wiki, which says how and what should be mapped to make a consistent, more or less consistent database.

Of course, people sometimes do it their own way.

But yeah, so far the community survives for many, many years.

The data quality is, you see, good enough.

Facebook and other big companies also using it.

And there is this Overture project, which tries to get the best from OpenStreetMap and from commercial data by blending it together.

And many companies already using this data.

And this could not happen if this data was of bad quality, right?

Yeah.

I guess I was going to mention this later, but I feel like it's more relevant to bring it up now.

But how is that data protected?

It doesn't feel fair for free volunteers contributing to an open source project like OpenStreetMaps

and then having Apple, Google, all these other companies potentially scooping up that same data for their proprietary project.

So does OpenStreetMaps have a way of protecting that data?

Do they get some kind of compensation?

Or is that just how it works?

The license is similar to Wikipedia license.

So the license to contribute, you need to accept this license, the terms of this license.

And any of your contributions goes under the terms of this license.

And this license allows anyone to use the data, even in commercial projects, considering that you properly attribute it.

There are some restrictions, some points you can check.

For example, it's not easy to just take whatever you want and mix it with existing OpenStreetMap data.

The rule is you should somehow separate to make different layers of data.

But in general, there are no other restrictions.

And every contributor knows that when he or she registers at OpenStreetMap.

Very nice.

And so what's your relationship with OpenStreetMap?

I know it sounds like they're, are they your only and primary source in organic maps for maps data?

Do you guys have a close relationship with them behind the scenes?

Or do you just integrate the project on your own?

The relationship is we like the project, we support it.

We update maps, missing gaps on the map ourselves, of course.

And this is the only main source of map data right now.

We try to use some data sets for addresses.

For example, the United States Hikert database and the United Kingdom database of postal addresses.

We try to use them in our search.

But we don't have any other map data sources except OpenStreetMap at the moment.

Got it.

And then this is actually another question from one of our TechLorians.

How can the community get more involved and actually help organic maps grow?

I assume OpenStreetMaps could be a part of that, but I don't know what other contributions.

Of course, yeah.

There are many ways to contribute and to help.

So the first one is obvious one.

Go and update OpenStreetMap.

everything that goes into OpenStreetMap will automatically get into Organic Maps with next

data map data update. We, by the way, we now update map data once or twice per month

because it's quite a process, but we of course want to make updates more frequent, more easy,

downloadable, less size, more compressed data, more optimal experience here. So any contribution to

OpenStreetMap already supports Organic Maps and all other worldwide projects which are using

OpenSuitMap. Other ways to support report bugs: we have GitHub where we do collect all issues and

track them and do all our development and GitHub is a convenient place for many reasons to keep track

of the project and to have a lot of free resources because Microsoft supports open source projects

and covers a lot of CI. We run continuous development and check our code and test that it works

using GitHub. So contributing bug reports, code if you know how to code, if you have friends who know

how to implement the feature, you can check the list of our issues or features or requirements,

there are many on GitHub and contribute them. We are looking for people who will help us with

community support, with user support also in different countries, in different languages. We

now which is bridged with metrics so if you don't like telegram you can use metrics but we also

working on expanding in community focused channels in native languages not english not only english

for example other languages too you can donate if you don't know other ways to help you can always

donate and support the scaling of the project so our server expenses grow as our user base grows

Now we estimate that we already have more than six million installs of organic maps all over the world and a lot of active users.

We can only estimate the number of our users because we only get data from Google Play and Apple Store about some numbers they show us.

But we don't have any information about FDroid.

And of course, if people decide to download and install APK, a fresh version of Organic Maps directly from GitHub or using Obtainium or from whatever other source, we don't collect this information.

We don't know how many users there.

We can only guess.

Yeah, those are main ways.

And of course, you can help also by helping our users in our social media.

For example, we have many questions coming from different people.

And any support is helpful.

ideas maybe you have some your own other ideas share them so we are open to everything we're

doing it in our free time and of course we cannot scale ourselves so any help is managing this huge

project and it's huge actually if you can check the activity on github and the flow user questions

requests and feedback and features how many features users want how much time does it take

to test actually. One of the biggest issues is how to prove that some change, some improvement,

some bug fix didn't break anything. Because we release organic maps not only actually for Android

and iOS, but also it works on Macs and on Linux. We may also port it for Windows too.

But that implies that we need to test it everywhere and make sure that it doesn't break. Because if it

it breaks, we got flooded by requests of users. Hey, it doesn't work, fix it, it crashes, whatever.

So of course, we don't want to be in this situation because we don't have enough time to spend on it.

So we want to reduce the amount of user support requests, bugs, and whatever. And that motivates

us to make a better quality software. And to any help in this regard is highly appreciated also.

Yeah, I saw you're on TestFlight and also the, I think, the Google Play beta program as well.

Not on Google Play beta.

We used it in the beginning, but we found that it has some limitations.

And one of the limitations was in the beginning, it was interesting to discover that we got many five-star reviews in beta version on Google.

But they don't go to the main Play Store.

So we decided to use a separate TestFlight app.

And that became more flexible solution because here we don't depend on anything and we can deploy.

We have continuous builds.

Every commit on master, every change provides a build in the slide, which we can automatically test and change and see what's going on there without any dependence on Google Play Store.

But using this Firebase based thing.

And it also helps us to collect some data from crashes.

It's not super privacy friendly in terms that it still goes through Google.

And there were requests to make a beta program, which just goes as is as pure APK without any Google stuff.

Although it will be a bit harder for us to collect fresh reports, but that also should be feasible.

So it requires someone to spend time on that.

And any support here is also appreciated.

Yeah, I don't know if you guys have found this.

I found this maybe a few months ago because I was always curious.

There's this GitHub project.

It's called GitHub Release Stats.

and it tries to estimate the amount of downloads

that you get from releases on GitHub.

Because I know that's quite frustrating

because GitHub doesn't tell you

how many times your releases get downloaded.

So I don't really know the accuracy of it,

but it seems pretty accurate as far as I can tell

based on other things I've used it with.

But it's called GitHub Release Stats,

if anybody's listening.

It's somewhat useful if you have a project on GitHub

and you're curious how many downloads it gets.

So I want to talk a little bit about usability here

because organic maps, a lot of your identity is on this clean experience. It's on the offline

experience. It's something that I think a lot of different people could benefit from. And so I want

to start by just asking, what is your target demographic? Is it anybody who wants that

experience? Do you find that it's mostly people commuting to work? Is it people hiking? What do

you tend to see? And I know it's hard to maybe summarize this when you have such a large community,

but how would you describe that? The current state of our community is more shifted to the

hiking side, to cycling maybe, maybe less than hiking because of the nature of offline maps

and the open street map data quality and lack of online features. The idea is to also introduce

some online features, for example, like public transport, that will open cities for us.

People who live in cities, who commute, commuters, and not only in cities, of course,

but that will be a completely different category of users.

But at the moment, we see many people are using it also as a navigator device in their cars,

because CarPlay and Android Auto are also supported.

There are many things to improve there, of course.

We'll do it.

just question of time and resources.

But we see that many people historically,

when we were working on Maps with me and Maps.me,

we targeted the travelers first.

Because obviously when you go to some country,

there were times of expensive roaming also.

Now it's less critical,

but still there are some connectivity issues.

Sometimes roaming also costs money.

People prepare for the trip.

They plan the route.

They download maps.

They look for interesting places,

side things, whatever, and then go there, you rent a car, you have maps with you already prepared,

working out of the box without even depending on local SIM card or network or whatever, it just

works. So this case is still popular also with organic maps. We may need to tune more the app for

cyclists. We have many requests to improve the routing quality. Cyclists are very demanding in

in terms of which route to choose and how to go.

And there are different types of bikes, of course, MTB guys, one routes, city bikers,

electric bikes.

So we are thinking how to make it usable yet simple.

So this is the trickiest part because there is a product, a good example of solving every

problem.

There is an app called Osmond.

So we know those guys.

I was going to ask about them.

Yeah.

So we know these guys personally and we support each other also.

And they also have open source products under LGPL license.

That's a core difference.

In Organic Maps, we have Apache 0 to 0 license.

So you can fork it and do whatever you want.

Even if you don't want to share any changes, your local changes, you're allowed to do that.

With LGPL, you are not allowed.

You should publish everything what you do in your fork back.

But coming back to Osman, so it's like a Swiss knife for everything.

It can do whatever you want, but it's super complex.

It's hard to explain.

It's super complex, and Organic Maps is the opposite.

So we try to make it simple.

And if you try both products, you will see how big is the difference.

And we try to keep it simple, and it's hard to keep it simple.

It's fascinating, too, because the OSM, OSM, OSM is OpenStreetMap.

So you guys should be using the same exact maps data.

So it's actually controlled for.

The only difference is how you guys interact with that same maps data.

So it really is a good apples-to-apples comparison of kind of the usability differences and who the target demographic is.

How would you describe the target demographic between OSM and OrganicMaps?

Osmond is more for professionals who know what is needed, what's required, who needs those tuning settings, who is ready to spend time to learn how to tune up so it will perfectly do whatever the person wants in whatever custom way.

Organic maps is for people who, we have many users actually, Osmod users also using organic maps in

cases that they don't want to think, they don't, well they want just something simple, just find

something, go there or in few clicks, then they also use organic maps, we have those cases too. So

this is our main audience. Of course we want to cover more and more people by offering them more

functionality, but we try to do it in an easy way, in a simple way. We spend 80% of time thinking how

to make it easier and only 20% of time implementing it. Because the hardest part is to make it simple.

It's easy to make it complex, super easy to make everything complex. So you just put it on top of

something and then you get some monster which just doesn't work as you expect. In many cases,

you need time to learn how it works. That's not about organic maps. Here we target users who don't

want to think, who just wants to get somewhere, wants to find something, wants to mark something,

to do something easily, obviously, even without any experience with maps. And even if, I don't know,

there is no internet, there is nothing where you can find some help. So it should just work. And if

you have ideas how to make it simple, let us know. We are open to everything that simplifies, that makes

organic maps even simpler, even easier to use. The iOS versus Android experience,

is it exactly the same? Are there any differences that users should know about?

There are some differences, but not significant. So historically, we focused more on iOS first,

and Android was following it because of the audience and because we started first,

the first release of Maps with me in 2011 was in App Store because also in many cases iOS UX and UI

have user interface, user experience are better than in Android devices. And because it's easier to

start there because Apple ecosystem is monolithic, it doesn't have the zoo of different versions,

devices, vendors, issues, screens, whatever, whatever. So that's an easier start and then we polish it on

iOS, we try to implement something similar on Android. Although opposite cases there also

happened several times when we did something first for iOS and then ported it back. But

we try to keep apps in sync as much as possible. So they are more or less mostly in sync.

Very nice. And then you mentioned public transit earlier as something being in progress. What does

that currently look like? Is that an OSM limitation? Is that an organic maps limitation? Do you mind

just speaking on that? Oh, yeah, that's the topic. So, as I mentioned before, we want to open a new

audience, commuters in Organic Maps. And I'm personally using some other apps, including Google

Maps, including local traffic transit data maps, including some other things, and Apple Maps also,

to estimate when and how can I get my public transport to someplace. And I frequently observe

that the proposed routes are inefficient. Even those giant companies, big companies, even local

companies, local transport companies cannot always provide you with an efficient route, especially

it has many changes, not just one bus or one tram or train, whatever, but several changes. There is

a lot of space for improving there. And now we, of course, thinking about how to better implement it.

The initial idea was to do it also offline first, meaning that we would be limited by the frequency of map data updates.

And meaning that we in this way, we would not support live changes in traffic, which is quite important in some cases when transport is delayed or rescheduled or whatever.

So that's why we decided to go here and experiment with online live information about public transport in two steps.

So first step is we want to release the live or where it's available live where it's not available at least static some schedule information and attach it to public transport stops on the map.

So you can, for example, select a stop on the map and see the schedule when the next tram or bus or train comes.

And if there are any delays and if there is this data, live data available, then it will also show you is it delayed or not.

Is it on time or not as a first step.

And as a second step, we plan, of course, to do a full expected from many users routing based on public transport data, on live public transport data, which will not just build a route right now.

You can also build a public transport route in organic maps, but it's limited to offline and it's limited to subways and light rails only in some large cities.

So it works already there, but it's offline.

You cannot see the time.

You cannot see the schedule.

It's also quite important in some countries to see the schedule, for example, for ferries.

Right now, organic maps can build the route through ferry, but there is no schedule there.

So in some countries it's frequent, in some it's not.

This is our vision and idea that only if we provide actual, up-to-date, live data compared, ideally better, with what Google Maps or other maps are providing, then users may think about switching to organic maps.

So we want to do it right.

We want to do it properly, of course, from a privacy perspective also.

We want to do it right.

And we want to also contribute to OpenStreetMap in this regard.

And we already started a project which helps to attach scheduled information feeds to OpenStreetMap stops.

That also helps a lot to improve the OpenStreetMap data quality in many countries where stops were not added on the map yet, for example.

So we have a tool, online tool, GTFS OpenStreetMapMatcher,

which helps contributors and editors to update OpenStreetMap data

with relevant public transport information.

And we plan to develop it also as a part of our support

for online public transport schedules.

We want to contribute back also.

And there are already good improvements there.

So if you want more details, just contact us or check our GitHub.

There is some information here, or maybe we'll publish more details in the news post when we release the feature.

Finally, I hope it will happen soon in the upcoming months.

So we'll see.

It's exciting because I was actually going to directly ask you, maybe in like one or two questions, I have just a final little list here I've been creating as we're going along.

And it was, you know, how do you deal with the restriction of no real time data?

I feel like that is the one very nice, legitimate use case for having an internet connected

experience.

And so that does, I think if there is going to be anything that needs to be online in

a maps program, I think that's the one feature I'd really enjoy.

How do you balance that?

Do you think it's going to be opt in, opt out?

How do you kind of envision the flow looking like for users so that they know when it's

online and offline?

Because now we have this whole identity of everything being offline.

So when you add one thing that's online, even if it's done in a privacy-respecting way, I could imagine some community pushback.

So I don't know how you're kind of juggling that.

We, of course, plan to do it very explicitly.

For now, the idea is that when you select public transport stop, before doing any request to internet,

to our CDN where we will store prepared, processed information for schedules,

Before doing any internet requests, you will get asked, do you want it or not?

Because there's already a setting in Organic Maps left from Maps.me times where you can set the app, for example, disable any access to internet, ask when necessary for every request, or you can allow it for any request, for example, and we want to respect this setting.

So you can explicitly control, but of course, we want to stay privacy focused, privacy friendly.

So no requests and if requests will go, they will go to our servers where we don't collect

any logs, don't store any user information.

So it's just pre-processed, prepared chunks of data which will be cached and downloaded

by clients and they will be also used offline.

If you pre-downloaded, got some information about your area, some schedules, then you

don't have connection anymore for example, the old cached information will still be useful

in many cases because usually static schedules don't change frequently. In Switzerland for example

they change their schedule once per year so that should be good enough in many cases even without

online internet connection. We also investigate get direction and investigate the case maybe of

distributing some static information schedules information with map data directly or downloading

separately, or we have some ideas here. We need to understand how users will approach this new

feature and get some feedback first to choose the best way. There, so you heard it here. If you're

an organic maps user and you want to help guide the direction of this, that's the call to do so

before it rolls out. You know, on that note, one of our SecLorians in the Signal group also asked,

what happens if there's no funding or a key maintainer leaves? Is there a succession plan?

How do you think about your longevity? So just in general, I'd love to hear a little bit more about

kind of you guys as an organization and kind of what this looks like behind the scenes.

Everything is open source. So even if something happens with us maintainers, the code stays there.

So organic maps is available. You can download, you can fork it, you can continue doing whatever

you want with it. So our role here is to, with our experience, to push the project into the right

direction, keeping important goals in mind and keeping important values. Otherwise, we would

implement second Osman many years ago. So in terms of hit by bus principle, you cannot stop open

source, right? So it's open. That's the key. Yeah. Over the years, I've been kind of burned on some

open source projects, right? Like I find something I really love. It becomes a new part of my

workflow. I use it for six months and it really becomes a part of my life. And then the maintainer

drops it. So I think that's kind of where people might be asking that question from. And so even

if there was a fork, like what if there's a gap there? Is there maybe some more protections than

a normal open source project for someone who has that concern? We like what we do. I don't know

what will happen in the future, but at this moment, I say that this is the best place for me to learn,

to get new experience in different areas. So this is where I learn about many, many things.

So I was in different roles on the project from engineer to support to marketing person to CEO.

I mean, during all those years in Maps with me, Maps Me, now in Organic Maps. And you never get

such an interesting experience and losing that no yeah yeah and then um i saw on your website that

your your organization is based out of toland in estonia and then you mentioned that you're you're

out of switzerland so you guys are a global team what does that kind of look like yeah we all are

different countries right now and working from different countries remotely.

We opened the registered company in Estonia because it was easy for remote registration and

because we wanted to have some legal protection of course because it's way different if you publish

some apps in stores as a physical person or as an organization. So we needed some easy simple

solution without a lot of overhead throwing in a lot of money or time to support it so that was

the easiest option and we are open to to changes if they will improve something so

we're considering different other options also where discussions about even some maybe non-profit

stuff something else and we had already compared different options they all have their pros and

cons and still at the moment our main focus is on development and scaling the development on getting

it right in terms of organizing the process everything so to get frequent releases frequent

features bug fixes and the different business entity right now is not a blocker but we are open

to discuss any other options if they improve the user experience then we are open of course we are

users first. So users drive our decisions.

Very nice. And then, you know, just in the next, let's just say five years, what do you

all kind of envision as kind of the future of organic maps? Like, how would you like

to see things?

Oh, that's a very good question. So I think in five years, we definitely get at the level

comparable with Google Maps, Apple Maps and some other maps and we will be better in some

regards because we see how the nations grow when our user base grows and if this process

continues there is a high chance that we get enough resources to scale the development,

scale the product and invest time, invest money into also server infrastructure for example

to do properly efficient public transport at scale, to do live traffic data, privacy focused,

of course, opt-in also at scale, very requested feature, as I mentioned, satellite imagery.

And of course, we did some questionnaire and our users responded, why are they still using Google

Maps on some other maps? Because they have actual up-to-date business information with photos and

reviews. So this is also a very important part of the product which needs efficient approaches,

not just to implement it technically, but the main problem of such features is

vandalism and the quality of the data. How to keep it free of advertisement, free of scam,

free of bad things. And big companies like Google or Apple can afford some people,

pay some people who will maintain it, keep it of good quality, review, whatever.

In our case, we cannot afford some moderation.

So we need to think about how to scale it properly,

like OpenStreetMap or Wikipedia were scaled maybe or something similar.

So if someone has any ideas how to do it right at scale for billion of users,

our target is at least billion of users, and we feel it's feasible,

then yeah, any ideas are welcome. On the note of traffic data, this comes back. I just have a few

more questions to kind of round this out, but a couple more coming up here. So I remember there

was a story, I forgot who it was from, but they had a wheelbarrow and they put a ton of Android

phones in it with Google Maps and they started walking down a street and it pretty much like

they got Google Maps to show that street is completely congested because that's how they

they, you know, source that traffic data.

How do you source traffic data if, you know, theoretically you're not going,

unless you're just going to rely on your own users to send pings of their route.

But what does that look like?

Do you have any ideas of how you would source traffic data privately?

So the data can be anonymized, of course.

And the main source of data would be, of course, our own users after explicit opt-in, of course.

There are ways maybe to think about some external providers, but it depends, of course, on conditions.

We need to think to make it affordable and privacy friendly to use some initial data to fit it in.

But we would prefer to start with public data and user generated data.

And here the question is only in the volume of the data, because if you get enough users everywhere, then you get enough data to show the proper traffic information.

But actually, if you think about it, this is the use case for congested cities, mostly.

And sometimes it's the case for people traveling for long distance between countries or between regions, between cities.

So it's not useful in 100% of use cases when you drive the car, but of course, it's very helpful to plan and to see this information.

So we are looking for people who will help us to lead this direction, for example, traffic information.

So we have now a very active contributor who leads the public transport direction feature.

And if someone wants or feels capable enough to drive this feature, we would offer any help, any expertise, any ideas we already have to make it real and implement traffic information, which will be free for everyone, actual, privacy-friendly, at scale.

That would be nice, right?

Do you envision this being an organic maps exclusive thing, like you can only find it there? Or would this be somehow something like OSM, where any other open source apps program or even Apple and Google theoretically could utilize that data too, just out of curiosity?

That's a quite feasible option because then if many projects, many products can contribute to the same data source, then the data quality may improve.

So this is one of possible options and we consider it too.

But again, it depends on someone actively driving it.

So if we find a way to scale, if we find a person who will be ready to lead that, to help with that, yeah, why not?

Everything is possible.

And the last major question I had here was something I wrote down myself and a Techlorian

asked about it because I don't know if you saw this, but Pokemon Go, I never played it,

but so many of my friends would play it.

And I was coaching high schoolers who would go on runs and they brought their phones with

them and they play Pokemon Go on their runs as well, which for me drives me crazy because

I'm like, you're supposed to disconnect when you go for a run.

But there was a company called Niantic, Niantic.

And essentially, it came out recently that they were using those real world movement data

to build AI and build proprietary map data.

And so I just kind of wanted your thoughts on that.

I feel like this is exactly the situation where organic maps is like, yeah, see, told

you so, like, we don't do this kind of thing.

Of course, Pokemon Go is not a maps program.

It's not Apple Maps, but it actually kind of is in a way like the whole point of Pokemon

Go is to go to a specific location.

It tells you how to get there.

and there's something you do when you get there

and then you go to your next stop.

So I'm just curious for your thoughts, I guess.

Well, that was a nice use case,

how to collect the data for free, almost for free.

So just a business, you know, how it's done,

just a business for someone.

And yeah, I know many products and companies

collecting the data in different ways for their own needs.

And of course, it's usually legally covered.

when you press accept without reading agreement you may be skipping something important already mentioned there.

So we don't plan, we don't want anything like that.

Although we have ideas about improving OpenStreetMap data by running, for example, just an idea to record the video in real time

when you drive on the road or you go walk on the street, record it locally, analyze it locally,

extract useful house numbers, street names, signs or whatever.

And then of course opt in explicitly

contributed back to OpenStreetMap.

- Wow.

- That would be nice.

- That's so incredible.

I mean, it just automates the current,

what you described is no different

than how it currently works,

which is someone has to go and take photos,

opt in to contributing,

but that's just automating it via videos instead of photos.

- Yeah, and with OpenStreetMap,

everything should be very explicit.

The community doesn't like automated imports

and there are reasons for that.

So if it's user control, but hinted by the app,

for example, just confirm you saw it,

is it the right sign?

Is it the right speed limit for the road?

Then yeah, why not?

Yeah, very nice.

Well, is there anything that we missed

or that you feel like our audience should hear

before we start rounding this out?

So that's the end of my questions.

Recently, I got a question from one user on GitHub, why the project, the codename of the project mentioned in many places was called O-M-I-M.

And it started in Minsk and Belarus, where I'm from, originally from, in 2010.

And it was one month we spent in Minsk.

One month in Minsk.

So that's the reason of this acronym.

And that was the day when we decided to take some vacation to try if we will be able to

build, to prototype some technology which can be useful on phones in offline.

We didn't know when we started it in 2010, will it work or not?

We didn't know how interesting and fruitful and experience the road will be in the future.

We just took our time, gathered together with my friends, colleagues, and tried to build something new, something unique.

And now in six years, looking back, I see it as one of the best tries which I did in my life.

So I already spent more than a decade on improving working maps.

And this was one of the best journeys.

And I hope it will be even more exciting journey.

So thanks for inviting me here.

Thanks for your questions.

And I hope our time, our work makes this world a little bit better and makes your life a little bit easier in some cases when you use maps.

And if you have any ideas, improvements, always welcome.

Yeah, thank you so much.

And I know, you know, these things are very much just out of the goodwill of the people who put them together.

So is there any place where the people listening can connect with you all outside of just downloading organic maps, I assume?

Yeah, we have all our contacts channels on organicmaps.app website.

You will easily find us directly by my GitHub username and social networks username is Biodranic.

Alexander Barsik can Google also my personal website.

So we're open to any contacts, any communication ideas.

Please let us know what you think.

Any good words of support also helpful when we share it in our internal contributors'

chats everyone enjoys hearing how helpful the product is so we we like what we do this is the

most important thing like what you do and make this world better yeah it's something i hear from every

project like the the amount of it's not always bad criticism but the amount of criticism to

praise ratio is pretty skewed and so those nice things that all of you listening say to any of

your favorite projects. It like really does mean a lot to the people behind them. So I'm glad that

you guys still get a lot of nice words. And I'll definitely encourage everybody listening who uses

Organic Maps to send along some kind words to you all. Yeah. And of course, I would like to say a lot

of thanks to every contributor, every user, everyone who donated money, everyone who told his friends

or her friends or parents about Organic Maps. Thank you for your support. Organic Maps wouldn't be

possible without you, without your support. So thank you very much. We are really grateful for

all the support, for every dollar you donate, for every comment, every feedback. We read everything.

We try to respond to everything. So don't hesitate. Stay in touch.

Great. Thank you so much, Alexander.

Thank you. Thank you, Henry.

And I hope you liked that one as much as I did. It was very much a nice sit down,

relaxed conversation with Alexander. If you enjoyed this interview and you want to

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