OpenStreetMap

StreetComplete finds gaps in OpenStreetMap near you and turns each into a one-tap quest: is this street paved? what are this shop's opening hours? You answer on-site, and it writes straight to OSM in your name, with no editor and no tags to read first.

Its real trick, one contributor argued: hide OSM's intimidating tagging model until you actually need it, since most tools expose the schema too early. The flip side is that the complexity is hidden, not gone. Another mapper admitted he's never sure he tagged a crosswalk the 'right,' undocumented way.

The pitch: offline search and routing that need only a GPS fix, zero mobile data, and an app that says it collects no information about you at all.

The catch users keep hitting is search, with no way to blend city with name, road with category, or filter by opening hours.

The pitch is clean: 100% of features work offline, no ads, no registration, verified tracker-free, 6 million installs by December. Then a CoMaps contributor shows up in the thread recruiting iOS developers, and others start listing why the community walked out a year ago — quietly added ads, a slice of code turned proprietary, donations that allegedly went missing.

The awkward footnote from a long-time user: even fans admit the search is so bad they keep crawling back to Google Maps.