How do you syncronize it between multiple devices and operating systems?

Install Buster addon, you will never have to solve captchas in the future: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/buster-captcha-solver/

Do you want to import or record?

To import: star button -> import bookmarks and tracks. Then you can just pick it from your file browser. You can’t use it for navigation, it’s just displayed as an overlay.

To record: Hamburger menu -> Record track

CoMaps has far less features, but that’s the point. Some people love the simplicity, they don’t need all the confusing and overwhelming options of osmand.

Osmand has some performance issues on some devices, but Comaps was generally much more responsive on any device I tried it.

CoMaps has 3d buildings. Its map is very nice, but this is subjective.

CoMaps aims to be fully FOSS, this was not true for its predecessors, OM and Maps.me. Osmand is not fully foss.

If you are perfectly happy with osmand you don’t really need it, but for new users who are only familiar with the very basic interfaces of other commercial map apps, it can be much more welcoming.

The full story is in the Open Letter, but it’s long: https://openletter.earth/open-letter-to-organic-maps-shareholders-a0bf770c

AI summary from this comment from the osm forum:

Concrete Issues Leading to the Open Letter

• Misuse of Donations: Alexander Borsuk allegedly used project donations to cover personal holiday expenses, raising concerns about financial integrity.
• Lack of Financial Transparency: Contributors were consistently denied access to financial information, including total donations received and expenditures.
• Secret Hiring Practices: The hiring of the first full-time developer in January 2024 was kept secret from contributors, who only learned about it months later.
• Closed Decision-Making: Key project decisions, such as agreements with external partners (e.g., Kayak.com), were made without informing or consulting contributors.
• Shareholder Control: The governance structure allowed shareholders to make unilateral decisions, sidelining the input of long-term contributors.
• Conflict Among Shareholders: A significant conflict between shareholders Roman Tsisyk and Alexander Borsuk has led to a breakdown in collaboration, jeopardizing project stability.
• Lack of Accountability: The board, composed solely of shareholders, failed to rotate members or ensure accountability, leading to a stagnant governance model.
• Potential for Profit Motives: Contributors expressed concerns that the project could be sold or monetized for shareholder profit, undermining its community-driven mission.
• Inadequate Communication: Shareholders did not adequately communicate the role of Organic Maps OÜ as a for-profit entity, leaving contributors unaware of its implications.
• Violation of Open Source Values: While the maps generator code is technically available, the version in production contains private changes that are not disclosed, and the server used for downloading maps operates with proprietary elements, contradicting the project’s stated commitment to Free and Open Source Software principles.

We don’t map temporary features: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Good_practice#Don’t_map_temporary_events_and_temporary_features

If the road closure is less than a month long it shouldn’t be on OSM. A lot of people use the map offline, it’s better to have the default “open” state on the map for them.

Clients are free to mix the OSM basemap with their proprietary data. E.g. Magic Earth has some live traffic data from 3rd parties and from its users, and you can report temporary closures in the app as well and it displays them while driving. (Unfortunately it doesn’t consider them for routing)

OSM is not a map service like Gmaps, it’s a geospatial database and a community maintaining the database. OSM by itself is not really usable for end users, CoMaps and others should build their services on top of the data. This is the reason it’s not licensed by some kind of CreativeCommons, but it has its own special license ODbL. It allows easier commercial usage than CC-BY-SA, which was used by OSM before 2012. https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence_and_Legal_FAQ/Why_CC_BY-SA_is_Unsuitable

The routing was not working for the same reason. OSM does not route, as it’s just a database. It just displays a 3rd party routing engine which uses outdated data, from before your change.

That’s not an alternative frontend, but a different albeit very similar platform. With an alternative frontent you can see the same content, but with better and different features, usually without ads and with better privacy.

IIRC they used labs for “ads” in the past, so disabling labs was already recommended, now it’s just double recommended.

Nothing special, that’s how urls with unicode, non ascii chatacters look like. It’s called punycode, more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name

Emoji domains work the same, e.g. ❤️🍺.ws is the same as http://❤🍺.ws/

I found a better article about this story: https://thedesk.net/2025/06/kayla-mae-wikipedia-lawsuit-sinkule/

The woman, Kayla Mae — who also goes by the name Kayla Morgan — employed the same attorney and law firm in a discrimination case brought against a Texas-based company called Security Brands, where she alleged ongoing workplace abuse and harassment because of her sexual orientation.

In her first lawsuit, Mae said she worked as a senior software developer for Security Brands in 2020. From the moment she was hired, Mae says she was subjected to harassment because of her gender identity as a “lesbian female who presents as masculine.”

“She is sometimes perceived as transgender, although she is not,” the complaint read.

That is different from what Mae alleges in the case against Wikimedia Foundation, where her complaint identifies her as a “transgender female” who was subject to “gender stereotyping.”

It sounds like she is gaming the system deliberately. 2 times getting fired from 2 different companies for similar reason? Sounds fishy.

Mae says the Wikimedia Foundation ultimately sustained certain complaints made against Mbuguru. But, despite those policy violations, she was still required to work on his team, which led to additional harassment and discrimination that was the basis for further complaints.

Months into her employment, Mae was reportedly asked to speak with two Wikimedia Foundation human resource directors, Tatiana Tompkins and DeJa Hamilton, and a senior software engineering manager named Sai Suman Cherukwada. After speaking with Mae about her complaints, Cherukwada fired her over Zoom, the lawsuit alleges.

She was fired during she made the complaint? With the pot stirring comment and this background I’m mostly convinced she is a the problem here, she is looking for drama everywhere. These kind of individuals don’t help the trans right movement, and lgbtqnation.com should do a better background check on people they report about.

What I tried to say, it might be just some curiosity at the beginning, from someone who heard anti-gay propaganda his whole life, not necessarily malice. Wikipedia should have handled the situation better.

After repeatedly being denied transfer to another team, Mae was asked to meet with managers so that Wikimedia could “learn more about your recent experiences.”

E.g. it’s not clear why they didn’t let her transfer to another group. After this it should have become clear that they can’t work together, why it was better to fire her than to move her to a different group.

Mae was warned that one of her managers was “a ‘fixer’ who goes after employees that were seen as stirring the pot.”

So others noticed the she may be a problem as she seemed like stirring the pot.

The article is one sided, it would help if wikipedia would clarify what was going on, what they saw. Maybe we can learn more about this from the lawsuit, if it will be public.

Her direct supervisor was based in Kenya. […] Among other things, her supervisor asked her inappropriate questions about her sexual identity and inquired about her medical history. In emails to HR, Mae characterized other behavior by the supervisor as “transphobic microaggressions” and “ableism”.

This sounds like it’s a clash of cultures in part. I guess in Kenya you can rarely meet openly gay or trans folks as it’s punishable with prison there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_rights_in_Kenya