Magic Earth - Free Navigation & Maps App for Android and iPhone
www.magicearth.comMagic Earth is a free maps and navigation app based on OpenStreetMap data. Enjoy 3D maps, Satellite maps, Turn-by-turn navigation, HD Traffic, Offline maps
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
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- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
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Not open source no thanks. I’ll stick to Organic Maps.
Seriously, y’all should try organic maps, particularly if you like to hike in places without reception.
Shoutout: we have a community here to on lemmy: !openstreetmap@lemmy.ml
Joined, thanks!
(Anyone else getting a 404 error at that link?)
Wow. Major fail-and-uninstall for me: There’s a repertory movie theatre across town I visit once a month and always use Google maps for traffic and routing advice. Magic Earth couldn’t find it.
Follow-up after using Magic Earth to navigate to an intersection up in the local hills: It worked, but I didn’t like that it wasn’t indicating street names in the read-aloud directions–just “turn left, turn right”. That might be a must-have feature for me.
You can add it personally at openstreetmap.org
I’ve discovered that it IS on OSM–but I had to search for the exact string (“aero american cinematheque”).
Hadn’t considered that–you’re right! 👍
Currently using Magic Earth as its the default map application for /e/OS (mobile OS). Been liking it for the most part, but sometimes searches for a place comes up with results that are way far away.
I replaced my Garmin sat nav with an old android phone using Magic Earth and it’s great for the most part. However, even after updating the maps last week, on our recent holiday around Scotland it wanted to send us up through a ‘new’ housing estate to get to the other side. Unfortunately, the main road was now closed off and then it was trying to get me to drive through someones living room to get back to the main road. The map kind of showed new housing estate roads but not to the scale of this development.
Also, the export favourites function is pretty useless. It exports a sqlite db but there’s no visible way to import this into another copy of Magic Earth.
GMaps VW (android only) + Organic Maps is the best open source mapping solution imo.
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Proprietary.
Not even joking, the fact that Magic Earth is still proprietary and comes bundled with /e/ is the main reason why I’m still not confident enough to use it as my ROM
So, I have an issue with OrganicMaps and Magic Earth: maps are too old.
Is that true or am I crazy? I make a modification in OpenStreetMap and it shows up in Osmand in a few hours, but it takes months to show up elsewhere.
Am I doing something wrong or is this expected?
OrganicMaps only updates the maps monthly, so you will see your changes only on the next month. Also map updates are tied to app updates, so you have to update the app in your store first, then a button in the app will let you download the new map files. Related issues, more info about this:
In OsmAnd you can set up the map update frequency and you can even enable online maps, so you can set it the way you want.
I never used Magic Earth, so I don’t know how it works.
dot
As soon as Organic Maps can route better, I’ll switch back to it for driving. Magic Earth is my current tool. For routing and traffic shaping, it’s as good as Waze. The driving / routing map (for me) is better than Waze or Google maps. I desperately want Organic Maps or OSM to work better.
Organic Maps is nice, but working with GPX files is still very terrible. It has no direct way to import GPX files created on desktop, you can only open them from the disk, and they will look very strange, not like routes but like a bookmark. But as I see, Magic Earth has even worse capabilities for GPX.
What problems have you faced with organic maps? I have used it have a dozen times and had no problems. Does it not find the best path?
Organic maps is OK and will get you to where you need to be, but routing is odd. It’ll sit you in the worst traffic and doesn’t know about road closures etc.
Usually an
Anyapp that knows traffic situation, knows it from your (and other users) location, so it obviously doesn’t know about traffic.Edit: Magic Earth gets this data from a third party: https://lemm.ee/comment/1993667
In openstreetmap it’s not recommended to map temporary things, and the map only updates once a month in OrganicMaps, so that’s also expected.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Good_practice#Don’t_map_temporary_events_and_temporary_features
If I remember correctly Magic Earth claims to get its traffic information from public sources, without using user’s locations like google. So no, location data is not strictly necessary for that.
It seems you are right: https://www.magicearth.com/faq/#traffic-and-events-help
It’s limited to mostly first world countries: https://www.magicearth.com/feature-availablity/#hd_traffic
But somehow, someone tracking it’s users, I can’t imagine other way to get data like this. Maybe some carsharing service, company fleet management or something like that.
It (ios app store) says not available in my region. does anyone know where I could find what region to spoof to get it? (also I know I should get android im working on it)
Did you contact the developer? It’s open-source, why would they restrict it?
I just realized it isn’t open source, not sure where op got that from, so I’m just not gonna get it.
It’s not OpenSource unfortunately
Is there a way to download the official APK without relying on Google Play Store or Aurora Store?
There are websites which scrape the play store, and let you download apks without login. The problem is you cannot be sure that you get the same apk as you would get from play store. (But actually you cannot be sure about anything on play store as well: the developers build the apks and upload it, e.g. an attacker impersonating the developer can publish a fake apk to play store.)
With these things in mind, you can download apks from apkpure without login to anything: https://apkpure.com/magic-earth-navigation-maps/com.generalmagic.magicearth Afaik they never had an incident where their apk was different from the one on play, but you cannot be sure when they change their mind.
Can anyone point to the source code please? They claim it is “privacy friendly”, so it cannot be proprietary, right? right? right?
Your comment got me curious so I had a look.
From their FAQ:
Oh ok so there is no way to independently verify its privacy or security. Doesn’t belong in this community then IMO.
Atleast its based in the EU, but yeah hard to tell what the black box does
I think you have a wrong understanding of software auditing. Software can be closed source and 3rd party auditors can assess if it has good privacy and security implementations.
Being closed source doesn’t necesarily mean it’s bad (for privacy/security).
But then you have to trust, 1, the auditors (I assume by your comment you mean the people given closed door access to the code, reviews it, then publishes a statement saying their claims are valid, that kind of third party auditing?); 2, the code they disclosed to the auditors is the actual complete codebase; 3, that between the current version and the next they did not add anything fishy; and last but not least, 4, the binaries they give you is actually built from that codebase and nothing else, since you can’t build it yourself if you’re really that worried.
I don’t fully disagree that you can have a private and secure proprietary app, sure you can, but I argue that there are some really big hurdles and you can never have 100% trust in it. Whether these things is a dealbreaker depends on your own values, opinions, and threat model, of course. If you’re choosing between this and Google Maps, then this is almost certainly better in terms of privacy and security.
I suppose you can also decompile it and analyze it that way, but that’s very difficult and compared to reviewing an open source app, pretty much no one is going to do it. You also don’t have the same level of community attention and contribution on the code itself as an open source project would where people are forking it, implementing features they want and sending pull requests, and going through the codebase to learn how it’s implemented in order to develop their own projects. All of which gives many opportunities for other developers, usually ones very concerned about privacy and security themselves, to notice and sound the alarm on unethical or insecure code in the app, basically getting tons of community driven audits all the time.
How many people are actually auditing an open source app themselves though? And if they don’t, they again need to trust others’ opinion.
It seems Like it doesnt work without gapps. I am in LineageOS without gapps, so Organic Maps wins.
EDIT: It works without Gapps. Tested it again today and it worked.
It works perfectly fine without any GApps, not sure where you’re getting this info. I’ve used it for months with no issues.
Im using Fairphone 4 5G. Do you really use it without any gapps? Not even Micro/Nano G? I installed pure Lineage20. In Google Maps and most of the other Navigation apps GPS Locationing doesnt work. Organic Maps just works. At least for me. Most of the time something doesnt work, it is because of gapps, and it is on the play store, so i would think it is because of that.
But i will try it again and reply if it is now better or not.
Yes, I used it as my primary mapping tool on GrapheneOS, the GPS locating worked fine, and I didn’t have any Google software installed.
You Were right. Used it for my way back home Form office and it worked this time. Strange. I swear, that when i tested it yesterday, it didnt got my Location! Today it took less than 10sec.
Works without Gapps.
When you use Google’s precise location tracking, your location is found almost instantly, even if you’re indoors.
If you’re not using it, you need to be outdoors for it to triangulate your position. It takes about 3 or 4 seconds to calculate, but once it’s found it works perfectly fine.
Maybe that was your issue?