> 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)
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.
JBiserkov 7 hours ago [-]
From the README:
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.
amenghra 7 hours ago [-]
This is great! I wish more knowledge bases realized their barrier to entry. Eg even Wikipedia can be scary to edit the first time, if you want to present things like citations the right way.
kccqzy 6 hours ago [-]
Wikipedia is fine. Just make sure the content itself is good and appropriate for Wikipedia (such as no original research) and formatting citations is really least of your worries. When you do it wrong, some other editor will come and fix it.
nephihaha 3 hours ago [-]
What is, and isn't, original research is quite often subjective.
dndkdkdkdk 2 hours ago [-]
Just trust the approved publications chud
encom 3 hours ago [-]
The stupidest Wikipedia argument I ever had, was having to cite the fact that bread is sold sliced.
Ardon 3 hours ago [-]
You accidentally found a good example reason for the rule to exist. It's only relatively recently (2019-2021-ish) that Germany had more pre-slided bread move than unsliced loaves.
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.
victorbjorklund 2 hours ago [-]
Where I come from bread is normally not sold sliced. That is the exception.
alethic 9 minutes ago [-]
I am incredibly excited for this -- while I love doing StreetComplete quests myself, the lack of iOS support has prevented me from grabbing my friends / random strangers and turning mapping my city into a social outing. I'm going to wait until it's officially available, but this is so wonderful... gosh, I can't wait. First style of quest I'm going to get ppl coordinated with is accurate hours on local businesses :^)
atollk 2 hours ago [-]
I love the project idea, unfortunately I had bad experiences with the community. I had lots of fun walking my neighbourhood to perform quests in the app until like one or two other users started reverting my edits. I checked their comments and it was some weird pedantic arguments, like I shouldn't mark a street as not walkable because there is no official sign that prohibits walking; the fact that it's basically a highway with no sidewalk would not matter.
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.
apt-apt-apt-apt 1 hours ago [-]
Aren't there many places where a highway with no sidewalk is the only walkable option? So if someone saw your not-walkable, they might think not walkable at all.
Seems like you guys had two different perspectives, both arguably right. Maybe it needs to be split into technically-walkable and comfortably-walkable layers.
Tempest1981 1 hours ago [-]
Or add a "probability of injury or death" attribute for more granularity.
Ylpertnodi 13 minutes ago [-]
Walkability based on time of day?
westnordost 35 minutes ago [-]
This has been the most controversial quest in StreetComplete for a while. Following several discussions about it, I have now removed it for the upcoming version (i.e. v64.0).
bwnkl 36 minutes ago [-]
Just tag POI, they get stale so quickly. Everybody wants to tag the roads, but the real gap in many places is stale POI, or missing tags like opening hours. You'll get much less attention from these gatekeepers there too
technothrasher 48 minutes ago [-]
I actually feel better about making edits if I know people may revert them. I don't have the time or interest to dig in deeply to what exactly they want, so I normally wouldn't contribute. But if I know people double check and fix mistakes, I'm more likely to try and be helpful with the app.
zeeveener 35 minutes ago [-]
"I feel more comfortable contributing to huge open source projects through the use of AI because I know that the maintainers will review my code for me and catch the issues I didn't"
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.
Ajedi32 1 hours ago [-]
If you were using StreetComplete I don't think you would have run into that. StreetComplete is very beginner friendly, and I don't think you can use it to mark a road as prohibiting pedestrians (which, as you discovered, is easy to get wrong if you don't understand what you're doing). You can use StreetComplete to mark whether there's a sidewalk or not, but I don't think anyone would object to you marking roads without sidewalks as not having a sidewalk.
greggsy 7 hours ago [-]
Link to the actual TestFlight beta invite, since it wasn’t easily found on the linked page:
Thanks. If anyone from StreetComplete is watching - please put the TestFlight link prominently on your page!
aquova 4 hours ago [-]
I wonder if it's by design. TestFlight apps have a hard user install limit, I remember waiting around for someone to leave previous betas to try them out.
ChrisMarshallNY 3 hours ago [-]
10,000.
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.
PetitPrince 7 hours ago [-]
StreetComplete is regularly cited whenever OpenStreetMap is mentioned on HN, and with excellent reason (this is a really good introduction to mapping with OSM). Congratulations to the team for the beta!
dewey 6 hours ago [-]
Indeed, I've been following the issue since it was mentioned here last time and was positively surprised about how quickly they progressed and got the first version shipped.
tbo47 6 hours ago [-]
I tried both StreetComplete and EveryDoor on my Android for a while.
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.
rafram 5 hours ago [-]
Every Door has a very confusing UI (lots of unlabeled buttons with unclear icons), unfortunately. I would love to use it, but even the web-based iD editor is so much easier to figure out!
raybb 2 hours ago [-]
I agree and I've been thinking about making something similar to Every Door but that takes advantage of AI to let you snap a photo or just send a voice note and then have the appropriate tags generated for review based on some very strict schemas. Would something like that be of interest to you?
Also open to feedback from anyone.
rafram 2 hours ago [-]
Sounds like hosted AI inference would be involved! Who's paying?
raybb 12 minutes ago [-]
Me!
abdullahkhalids 4 hours ago [-]
You can choose the type of questions you want to get asked about in StreetComplete. If you want to only enter store names and timings, then go into Settings and pick those.
westnordost 5 hours ago [-]
Have you tried out the Things or Places overlay? Second button from the right at the top, looks like a cake.
SomeonesAccount 6 hours ago [-]
StreetComplete, as indicated by it's name, is about street data. Both are for contributing to OSM, but they are for different parts of OSM
remedan 5 hours ago [-]
StreetComplete asks about things other than street data as well. For example, I get queries about operating hours of businesses.
blargpls 5 hours ago [-]
The name probably just references the street in OpenStreetMap (OSM) as StreetComplete doesn't only collect street data as the sibling comment already noted.
Loic 6 hours ago [-]
I have been using StreetComplete on Android thanks to a comment here some weeks ago. This is a really great tool, the barrier to contribute is brought to nearly zero.
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.
westnordost 5 hours ago [-]
There is an undo button on the lower left corner of the screen. Try it!
(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.)
As someone who has enjoyed playing GeoGuessr-like games in the past, I find it a bit fun to enter/guess a completely random username and see what edits it has made. Interestingly, quite a few of them are concentrated in the Germany/Switzerland/Austria region (the US is popular too)
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.
you can revert immediately in bottom left corner of StreetComplete, click on little revert arrow
progbits 4 hours ago [-]
> I think 70% would be better
You can actually split the road into multiple segments and answer each separately if you don't mind the extra effort. I think there should be something like "differs along the way" button which then asks you to pick a point where to cut.
thrownawaysz 7 hours ago [-]
>Known caveats (we are working on it):
>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
dewey 6 hours ago [-]
It takes a bit of practice, but I got it to work after a few tries.
rgehan 5 hours ago [-]
I might be dense, but what's the back gesture exactly?
EDIT: Got it, swiping from left to right, starting from the very border of the screen. Not super intuitive but simple enough
Aachen 3 hours ago [-]
That's Apple's native way of going back across macOS and iOS no? I'm not an Apple user and even I've come across this when handling a family member's device for a few minutes
Maybe Android's visual ←back button is the way to go after all instead of hoping someone will accidentally discover implicit gestures
ocdtrekkie 4 hours ago [-]
I've been on iOS for like seven years and have never done this. But... hey, it works!
dewey 27 minutes ago [-]
Do you already know the one where you swipe alongside the bottom of the screen from left to right, or right to left? If not it's probably one of my most used gestures to swipe between apps.
elaus 7 hours ago [-]
It's a great app, been using it on Android for years. It has a really low barrier of entry (except maybe OSM account creation) and makes improving OpenStreetMap really easy even for people that have no experience with map editing. There's simple questions, e.g. about road surface or accessibility, with illustrated multiple-choice answers.
Maybe I don’t understand how it’s supposed to work, but the very first question I was given had three choices and none of them were correct. What are you supposed to do then?
nizmow 3 hours ago [-]
It’s very confusing to me too. I clicked an icon to see what it was, and it was opening times of a supermarket, which I had no idea about. But I couldn’t find a way to just get back to where I was before. My workflow now is to keep force killing the app frequently when I get stuck.
paweladamczuk 3 hours ago [-]
Same here, I can't believe there is no way to go back. I have to s of things around my house that I can just add because I live here, but I don't remember everything, and once I hit a question that I cannot answer from memory, I am stuck.
Mashimo 2 hours ago [-]
Click into open source on the map (on android). I think for Ios it might be back gesture.
Tomte 1 hours ago [-]
Same here, but the GitHub thread actually calls that out as a known bug. Swipe from the left. Intention is that clicking sonewhere on the map closes the dialog.
Mashimo 2 hours ago [-]
Click into open source on the map (on android). I think for Ios it might be back gesture.
boredinstapanda 5 hours ago [-]
Most of the time you can leave a note. Do you get an "Uh..." option?
dmd 5 hours ago [-]
No, there’s only the listed options (street has a sidewalk, or it doesn’t - no option for “sidewalk extends for half the street but not the other half”).
I don’t know if that counts as it does or it doesn’t.
mayneack 5 hours ago [-]
On android there's a "differs along the way" option which let's you split the way.
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.
westnordost 5 hours ago [-]
In this case, the intended flow is that you tap "Uh..." -> "Differs along the way..."
You will then be led to another UI in which you can split the road into several sections.
dmd 5 hours ago [-]
Aha. If you click 'Uh' exactly on its text, it works. If you click even one pixel away from the actual text, you get the chooser with not enough options.
mineo 3 hours ago [-]
First-time StreetComplete user here. I just answered a few of these "street has a sidewalk" questions myself. Upon first clicking on one of them, I was able to answer this question for each side of the street individually. The visual selection that you mentioned only applies to one side.
Dunedan 5 hours ago [-]
I can tell for sure the current version of StreetComplete for Android does allow specifying that only one side of the road has a side walk. I solved a few of these quests just last week. No idea what's the state on iOS though.
yaomtc 5 hours ago [-]
That's when you hit "uh..." and leave a note with details. In an effort to keep things simple on a small screen it doesn't include every possible option. You can read the wiki to find the best way to tag it. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/
pkthunder 4 hours ago [-]
I'm trying to get off of Apple Maps and into OSM (using Magic Earth as my navigation app) - seeing more OSM work is exciting.
Now I need to figure out if it's possible to merge my navigation maps with the deflock maps..
intrasight 7 hours ago [-]
I'd like to hear more about people's experiences with Kotlin Multiplatform
sargunv 47 minutes ago [-]
I've been building https://maplibre.org/maplibre-compose/ in my spare time for the past two years and helped with this port; happy to answer any questions you have about KMP or CMP
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.
westnordost 5 hours ago [-]
Overall, my experience has been pretty smooth. Just look at how little platform specific code is found in the streetcomplete repo and how straightforward these connect with the common code.
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?
meepmorp 3 hours ago [-]
Have you ever used flutter? If so, what's the relative pain level like?
westnordost 43 minutes ago [-]
I can't compare it to Flutter, I haven't used it.
WhitneyLand 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, to be more specific, every tool like this has benefits offered and then taxes to be considered. For example, what's the tax for:
- 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.
westnordost 46 minutes ago [-]
Alright, let's see:
> 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.
anotherpaul 7 hours ago [-]
StreetComplete is great. For me it made Openstreetmap much more approachable and now thanks to me there are a few more public toilets and one small road in osm. Especially with the road it was really interesting to see how quickly Google maps also took in this path. But they still also have the old road in the app. So it's linked but not 100%
I wonder what some experienced OSM editors think when they see StreetComplete edits.
mbirth 4 hours ago [-]
OSM editor Go Map!! also has a "Quests" overlay that is very similar to Street Complete (even uses the same icons). And you can also define custom quests for data you want to easily gather.
However, it's lacking the nice example pictures for each option - so, with Go Map!! you need to know what you're doing.
bjoli 5 hours ago [-]
I feel I must warn you. It is a gateway to more heavy map editing using the online editor or tools like Vespucci.
cbeach 5 hours ago [-]
Good app. Some feedback -
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.
ocdtrekkie 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, dismissing a question I don't see an answer for right now easily is the worst. I think swiping the app closed is the easiest way out.
sparrowidle 6 hours ago [-]
There is actually an edit history, the little arrow icon on the map pulls up your recent edits and lets you undo them.
7 hours ago [-]
smcleod 6 hours ago [-]
That's legitimately a good idea. I just contributed more to open street map in 5 minute than I have in 15 years.
conartist6 7 hours ago [-]
Can you use OpenStreetMap like Google Maps?
I tried to use it to list restaurants but the UI reacted like nobody had ever tried that before
flexagoon 7 hours ago [-]
OpenStreetMap is a database, not a map application. The map on the official openstreetmap website is more of a demo to show some of the data. There are many different map apps that use OpenStreetMap data though.
mbirth 4 hours ago [-]
https://cartes.app is trying to do this. OsmAnd is quite usable as well.
For navigation there's Magic Earth (can route around traffic jams), TomTom, and Scenic. OsmAnd can also do routing.
maelito 2 hours ago [-]
And we're adding new itinerary options soon.
For cars : avoid highways, tolls. For cycling : follow rivers, less noise, less traffic, etc; for walking : no steps.
Is TomTom's basemap entirely OpenStreetMap? Or do they add their own proprietary layer of map data on top?
unfocso 4 hours ago [-]
It's a... mix. I can see all the shapes of the roads and areas i mapped in my area, but they seem not to trust OSM naming so they either have no name or the name TomTom gave to the equivalent street.
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.
drcongo 6 hours ago [-]
I tried the TomTom app (on iOS) recently but found it incredibly buggy, especially when connected to CarPlay. The speed indicator would often just show 1mph, the dark mode would work about 20% of the time, and searches would show results from other countries ahead of a place 4 miles up the road.
nice to see StreetComplete coming to iOS. Its question-based approach makes contributing to OpenStreetMap feel approachable even if you’re not familiar with the underlying data model
oulipo 2 hours ago [-]
The UX has some glitches... like when you click on an item, you HAVE to set the answer, you cannot go back to seeing all the markers...
sargunv 44 minutes ago [-]
You can swipe back on the bottom sheet for now. It's a known issue and is being worked on!
asymmetric 6 hours ago [-]
I’ve been using EveryDoor so far, excited about trying this one out!
Poudlardo 7 hours ago [-]
OH long overdue, glad it finally came out
yieldcrv 3 hours ago [-]
> The code base of this app is written in 100% Kotlin
weird choice, from 2023, to code an iOS app. but it doesn't matter today in 2026. frontier models can manage weird software stacks
jasonmp85 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
PiGCodingAgent 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 18:35:16 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
> 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.
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.
https://testflight.apple.com/join/K1u3eUU5
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.
You can actually split the road into multiple segments and answer each separately if you don't mind the extra effort. I think there should be something like "differs along the way" button which then asks you to pick a point where to cut.
>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
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..
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.
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?
- 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.
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.
For cars : avoid highways, tolls. For cycling : follow rivers, less noise, less traffic, etc; for walking : no steps.
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.
weird choice, from 2023, to code an iOS app. but it doesn't matter today in 2026. frontier models can manage weird software stacks