Last time I tried with Google I could only download a relatively small area, and it would only be available temporarily.
With CoMaps, I can download entire countries and keep them forever. That's pretty different.
Maps.me used to be an open source project, when they took it closed source and tried to commercialize it, the last open source version was forked and is now known as Organic Maps.
Then the Organic Maps maintainer started acting sketchy, introduced a paid partnership with Kayak and generally not behaving in a very community minded way. Organic Maps was forked and the new version is now known as CoMaps.
We'll see how long this one lasts.
The area you can download is still pretty large - whole cities, big chunks of countryside. I'd put money on the fact its good enough for most people's uses.
I don't know anyone (and I mean exactly zero) who ever used the offline feature of Google Maps. Online is good enough for people who almost always have an Internet connection. What happens when they don't is that they don't have access to the map.
People who care about having offline access (because they live in a place where they don't always have Internet or just because they care) don't bother using the Google offline feature. They use proper offline maps instead. Maybe in parallel to Google Maps: it's possible to have Google Maps and CoMaps.
Have lived in Alaska. Used offline Google maps. Worked perfectly for years and years.
Worse, without a net connection you can’t even get the phone to start a route.
The internet is great for many things, but also has huge downsides.
It's probably what I hate most about Android- apps shouldn't need an update as often as they do.
"Resolve login issues by improving forgotten password messaging"
Hold up a whole queue in a pharmacy to change some fucking text lol.
i am looking very hard for any hint of humanity behind any of it, but all i see is a vibe-coded website, marketing a huge collection of vibe-coded apps by generating articles like this one. even their social media presence (linked on their blog[1]) feels like agents that have been told to role-play on X.com as caricatures of their position/role in the (made up?) company
and i mean.... come on, a $5 web browser??? that's just a wrapper around the system's webview??? why would anyone think this is something worth spending their time building, economically speaking??? even FREE browsers are struggling in this hyper-competitive market. if you make a paid browser it better be the best browser of all time, not some vibe-coded average of every other browser
i agree with the premise, im all for local-first software. but this really feels like the AI-era equivalent of the countless scams we've seen during the crypto-era...
[1]: https://getapps.cafe/blog/a-new-name-behind-the-counter-welc...
No proof yet that they will be maintained but they seem to be pretty simple. Single use software, sold as a bundle.
Yes it is, I totally agree.
> The cloud has definitely advantages, like having the same data on all devices
That's not an advantage for the user at all, is it?
> and it provides some kind of backup.
You can backup user data in an offline-first app. Better even: you can let the user backup their data themselves!
> The mentioned downsides could be adressed by better software archticture or e2e encryption.
The article is superficial, but they mention at least one thing that cannot be addressed this way: what happens when you are offline or have a very slow connection?
It really boils down to one simple fact, IMHO: offline-first is harder to do. It is better for the users, but it is harder to do for the company doing it, which means it is more expensive. Companies are there for the profit, not to please the users.
Of course it is an advantage. I tend to access most of my apps and services from both the PC and the smartphone, having data shared across the two is a deal breaker for the very vast majority of them.
Sure, sync between devices is a nice feature. But it can totally be implemented with offline-first apps.
Whilst that's better for a small audience of techy types (most here, I'd guess), you know that's not true for most users, right?
Like people used to lose work on hard drives and laptops that they hadn't backed up all the time and its much, much rarer now (OK, I don't have data beyond anecdata but still).
I do yes. It's good to have a choice. Many times the reason there is not a proper local export is that it would take more work to implement properly, and it doesn't bring money to the company.
Again: companies exist to maximise profit. When making the product worse (or not making it better) improves their margin, they go for that. They don't care about the users, that's a big lie. A company fundamentally cares about profit. If competition or regulations mean that their profit is correlated to the users satisfaction, then they will have to work for that. But they don't do it "because they care about the users", ever.
Now with LLM to do the boiler plate of event logs, healing, retries and testing all that, it's finally reasonable for a side projet.
And the result is great, the UI is reactive, it works in malls with bad signal, you get a no account experience almost for free...
I do all my apps like that now.
IMHO, it would be best if developers all over the world boycotted proprietary platforms entirely. (Of course, this is never going to happen, I'm just saying.)
Note that Linux and Android, from your list, are open source.
> For true cross-platform, you need to develop for 5 platforms
I would argue that anyway, you should develop for multiple "kinds of devices". Writing the same code for a desktop computer and a smartphone is fundamentally a mistake: I don't want to slide big buttons with my mouse.
So first, you need to design the UI multiple times: for desktop, for smartphones, and for tablets. If you want a smart watch, you need another design for it. Web apps don't solve that better.
Second, if you can write a webapp that works everywhere, then you can write a native app that works everywhere. I don't see how that would be different. The problem is generally that if you run the exact same code everywhere, then it's not a good experience.
GrapheneOS is based on Android precisely because Android is open source. They couldn't do that with iOS, or Windows, or any proprietary OS. Same for LineageOS.
Honestly it seems like you don't really know what you are talking about here?
It's nice to build decentralized personal software and think you're fighting the good fight, but all the government has to do is pass a law and suddenly that option is, practically and effectively, closed to you. We're headed down that path, and that's before you get to the fact computers powerful enough to support today's more interesting applications are just being priced out of the consumer market altogether.
Go home with your nihilism.
That's an advantage for the company, not for the user.
The best user experience is when the client app is open source, so that I can adapt it to my needs.