I first learned of Street-Complete here and I really like it.
It’s satisfying to walk around, complete little tasks, and get prizes, scratching a similar itch to Pokemon Go.
Stuck waiting for someone? Add opening hours for a few local businesses.
Have a long walk ahead of you? See if you can add/check house addresses as fast as you can walk.
Want to walk off a few beers before heading home? Complete some tasks in the bar street.
Its a very constructive way to “be right” on the internet.
I hadn’t heard of that. Thanks. Just marked up my neighborhood. This a real clever and simple way to get casual users to contribute.
This is the most fun app in the world. I hope they keep building on top of this, it’s amazing! Plus, being able to see new “quests” popup as you edit on OSM/edit? Amazing!!
If there was some way for the app to create teams trying to fill out details like in Pokemon Go, that would be crazy exciting. Would be difficult to balance that so it didn’t incentivize adding junk… Maybe having a third party keeping players in check? Not sure, but the possibility is tantalizing!
@inbeesee @openstreetmap It does have a team mode, but I think that’s just a transient thing.
@InsertUser @inbeesee the team mode just makes sure 2 people don’t gets asked the same thing. Otherwise it’s wasted work
Would be cool to expand it! Is it open sourced work?
@inbeesee I’m pretty sure all of Street complete is open source. The team mode is a very clever hack, where each person gets a different number and it’s just showing people different quests
Yes, the gamification elements they’ve been adding lately are brilliant. I was really impressed when I first saw that. Really need to open the app more often…
iOS version is in the works but there’s something similiar online too.
I’ll recommend this to my wife who plays Pikmin Go religiously.
@MonkderDritte @vatlark @openstreetmap
@MapComplete is only similar in that it is aimed at giving simple tailored forms to new users. It does not make it easy to contribute “all the low hanging fruit closest to me”.
It is actually pretty fun. However it can’t do everything. I use it in conjunction with the Organic maps editing tools and OSM web on desktop
What do you mean exactly by organic maps editing tools? I was using organic maps before to add businesses, but now StreetComplete can also do that (and more!). I sometimes use Vespucci because it is very powerful, but it’s a bit of a pain to use.
It can create arbitrary points
Yeah I still can’t figure out how to add a postal box in StreetComplete so I use Vespucci. But yeah Vespucci is intimidating at first
+1 for vespucci being intimidating. Mainly cause I feel like I need to read a variety of wiki posts before modifying a new feature type. But once you start to get the hang of it, it really pays off.
@vatlark @Scafir @openstreetmap
The postbox thing is apparently an issue with the presets they use. The presets are from another project so it’s considered “blocked”.
https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/5584
I do it but in Paris there are way too many things to add, so it feels too much most of the time
Friendly PSA that there is also StreetComplete ExpertEdition (on F-Droid only) which as more tasks and crucially allows you to directly edit tags. Very recommended if you know what you’re doing and have some more familiarity with OSM.
https://github.com/Helium314/SCEEOh, this is interesting. I’m not the most advanced OSM user, but I’ll definitely take a look at this and learn.
Nice! I like this idea a lot :) I’ll download and maybe use it as an excuse to walk :)
I will give it a shot today.
What’s the best android app to use OSM?
I’ve been using magic earth as a sort of waze alternative but it’s not great for looking up store hours or just general info
I use Magic Earth when I take my car, Organic Maps when I walk or use public transportation. I don’t think there is a single “best app”, it depends on your use case.
I use a mixture of Organic Maps and OsmAnd+. Organic Maps is more simple, while OsmAnd+ allows you to set up a lot of customization in different profiles to tailor the experience to different use cases (e.g. one for hiking, one for “I’M HUNGRY SHOW ME FOOD”, one for biking etc.).
Awesome thank you, I installed organic maps and I’m checking it out, I’ll check out OsmAnd+ as well
All of them use the same data (osm is actually a databasae) so if data like that is missing, you won’t see that in other osm based apps, you (or someone else) have to add it first…
Magic Earth uses some extra overlays for hotels, and OrganicMaps had some controversial deal about adding 3rd party hotel data (basically that’s an ad on the map, and a lot of people don’t like that). OrganicMaps map data updates monthly, it became regular in the previous months, Magic Earth similar but sometimes they skip some months. OsmAnd can be updated hourly if you pay for it or if you are a regular osm contributor, monthly in the free tier
@infeeeee @variants @openstreetmap
IIRC OrganicMaps adds an affiliate link to hotel listings that lets you search for them on Kayak. From what I remember it doesn’t add any additional hotels to the map and in a quick spot check doesn’t appear to hide any website links stored in OSM.
Why does F-Droid tell me that the app has features that I may not like?
If you expand the description it will be written out for you.
It is due to being bound to a specific mapping Ecosystem and using specific non Foss middleware
Non-Free Network Services
This Anti-Feature is applied to apps that promote or depend entirely on a Non-Free network service, or any service which is impossible, or not easy to replace. Replacement requires changes to the app or service. This antifeature would not apply, if there is a simple configuration option that allows pointing the app to a running instance of an alternative, publicly available, self-hostable, free software server solution.
Because you can’t change it from using OpenStreetMap.org to an alternative self hosted site.
It is because it has what F-Droid considers anti-features. In this case, even tho the code is open source, it seems to require a non-libre dependency to measure distances. See https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/issues/2627 and https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/pull/3709#issuecomment-1039710672.
F-Droid is very strict with what it considers an anti-feature, and Android is very restrictive to properly work without at least one closed source library (thanks, Google), so I say you can ignore this, but it depends on you.
Also, openstreetmap itself is a centralized eco system, even though you could theoreticallly host one yourself.
@Danitos @AngryCommieKender @openstreetmap
IIRC that was pulled out of the app into a separate companion app (StreetMeasure) ages ago.
F-Droid is complaining about “non-changeable or non-free network service”.
It doesn’t seem to say _which_ network service this is, which I think is quite scummy behaviour TBH.
to me it looks like it’s pointing out the network “services”:
and to me it also looks like they also say what the sercives are needed for. however its in german for this device.
update:
it sounds a bit weird that according to this info not the app is uploading new informations, but westnordost.de would, which suggests that they also upload/steal your openstreetmap password to their servers instead of using the app with locally stored access credentials to do that. but this could also be just a bad wording/misunderstanding/translation thing as obviously the party where you download the quests also need to know which quests are already solved which would be the data that is uploaded to them.
RE the update. That seems odd that they’d do that. I thought the quests were now being generated on the fly after downloading the raw data direct from OSM (previously it was an overpass query per quest IIRC).
I don’t know why they’d be bouncing uploads through a remote server when OSM already has the capacity to reject a conflict.
I don’t currently have access to something that monitors raw traffic to check.
@smb @openstreetmap
In my browser that can’t be expanded and clicking on it just takes you to their definition of “Non-Free Network Services” https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Anti-Features/#NonFreeNetSo they’re complaining that an OpenStreetMap app is tied to OpenStreetMap related services and hiding this in a way that makes it look worse than it is.
This dramatically lowers my opinion of F-Droid.
maybe the browser version isn’t fully complete, or there might be a thing with css, bad browser specialities, just a bug in the webpage (did you check if it does show up in page source plaintext maybe?)
i would see the warning "bound to a specific non-changeable service as a good thing, as it would promote completely-free apps like (i think) fluffy chat, which does neither depend on a specific matrix service nor on a specific push service (i.e. it uses ntfy for push when installed, and if i choosed to use my own instance it would - i think - use that instead of the default ntfy.sh) in theory everyone could run something like osm and in practice this could come in very handy in the future one day, but currently IMHO only one osm exists, so maybe its not that bad for an app to be bound to it, but its always good to know if an app is bound or free to choice, same i would like to know if its maybe multi-account (which fluffy-chat is), but single-account-apps are so very common and thus this is not seen as an anti-feature which is completely ok for me.
but also in this case here the app is not only bound to osm, but to two other non-changeable services too, thus the warning is due even if label-app-bound-to-label-service would NOT be considered an anti-feature.
@smb @openstreetmap
If I view source I get “phrase not found” on a search for “Jawg” . It also doesn’t show up in Firefox’s Inspector, which I _think_ includes dynamically loaded stuff.Just checked Chrome and Microsoft Edge and they don’t show it either. What are you using to actually get the detail?
I wouldn’t mind F-Droid’s warning if they gave me the details, but for some reason they don’t seems to be accessible to me.
1/2
What are you using to actually get the detail?
i am using the F-Droid “app” (currently 1.20.0), not a browser now. But i asumed css or such could be a cause as sometimes nonvisible content is behind some bad (ad?) layer. i thought i had seen such infos also on their website, but that is then too long ago and i might just be wrong with that.
maybe you can only get that info from the app which would feel a bit like an anti feature *haha
I don’t know how you’d get round the dev using his own site to pre-process (already published) data or host a list of “banned versions” with bugs that could corrupt data. You can’t really choose to have a different developer on the fly.
Maybe you could let people chose a different host for a published photo, but I think if there were privacy respecting ones that easily allowed that the dev probably would have use those instead?
https://streetcomplete.app/privacy
2/2
Because it tracks real time location and uses the internet. Unless it’s an app like this where you explicitly want that functionality, that’s usually a sign of some sort of tracking mechanism for advertising or nefarious purposes.
That just is not what F-Droid is saying. Why would you even claim that?
I don’t like the implication that Pokémon GO was bad when it got a ton of people to go outside and interact with each other. This is cool too though.
That’s a great point. I probably could have worded that differently.
@RealFknNito @vatlark @openstreetmap
It caused a lot of fake stuff to be added to OSM even though its update frequency was slow enough that very little of the fake stuff actually made it into Pokemon Go.
I think it did bring in a few good mappers too though so it wasn’t all bad.
It wasn’t bad. Now. It is.
This does not. Make. Any sense.
Time exists. Things change over time. Shocking revelation I know
It was unique time and experience at its peak. People moved on largely and if something as big and addicting as Pokémon couldn’t permanently make it popular then nothing will
It will come back however in different form as the miniaturisation of VR headsets progresses and whenever it will be cool and comfortable to walk in one
Walking with eyes glued to phone gets old real quick and can fucking kill you hence no matter how good game is this formula is dead. Many Darwin awards were handed out. My friend received one and another got just a nomination
I know the E word is getting old here but I’ll say that “product degradation” occured for the reasons of increased revenue
While StreetComplete is very careful with the quests, my experience with SCEE was much worse. As an example, with with current SCEE 58.2 the building color quest is still buggy. The brown, black and white choices are showing wrong colored illustrations.
Therefore SCEE is not a recommendation for me.
@redd @Andromxda Did you mention this on GitHub? That should be solvable.
Fdroid says that it is bound to jawg.io for tiles. What are the chances that we are giving our data to a company who will take it away from us, or is just using us for free labour?
It is free labor. However it benefits us all and there isn’t any alternatives. I don’t think OSM is going anywhere soon. It is has benefits for any people and industries.
Fun fact OSM has had lots of issues with hostile take overs. They now have a dedicated committee on the subject https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Special_Committee_on_Takeover_Protection
or is just using us for free labour?
It pushes updates to openstreetmap.
@jaxxed @vatlark @openstreetmap
Very slim. But their privacy policies are online if you’re concerned.You free labour all goes to the OpenStreetMap database licensed under the Open DataBase License.
Yes, you link your OSM account to StreetComplete and it adds your contributions via your OSM account. Same with Vespucci.
When you log into OSM you can see all the contributions pushed by StreetComplete.
