Some perspective from a user who’s been on Magic Earth for well over a year:
- It works very well. With a few quirks, it’s like 90-95% as useful as Google Maps for a majority of personas
- It’s a mature app, finds most addresses (with possible exception of recent changes like a business moving)
- Does surprisingly well with being current on traffic conditions
- While not FOSS, they seem to be open about what they sell of your information and it’s in aggregate, so I’m much less worried about location data being tied to other online dossiers I’ve left in my digital paper trail.
I found that Organic Maps and OsmAnd+ just couldn’t cut it at all for finding addresses, routing wasn’t super great (or intuitive), and otherwise rated very low on family acceptance as a replacement for Google Maps. I used Acastus Photon for addresses and frankly it’s not that much better and the workflow was janky and pretty useless when you want to plot route waypoints. Magic Earth was the bridge between fully de-googling and having a livable acceptance factor. So far I haven’t seen them doing anything they don’t claim (not getting in trouble privacy-wise), so I’m good.
I would say “privacy friendly” is accurate in the title - but this is not FOSS. Even so for those looking to de-google without losing utility, I recommend it and am glad it exists.
Edit: I wish some apps (looking at you Starbucks!) would use a default mapping engine like Magic Earth instead of expecing Google Maps on Android phones (Graphene, Lineage, Calyx)
somehow i got stuck on heads up display, and i cannot figure out how to disable it now!
I agree completely with your review of Magic Earth. I will say that I keep some maps on my phone in Organic Maps as well. They are easier for me to follow when hiking on forest trails. When we went trailblazing on snowshoes, it made finding our way back to the main route simple.
Some icons of the undergrounds have different license. Read your first link carefully. And you link the source of the ui, or you don’t consider png files as “source”?
If it wouldn’t be foss, it couldn’t be built by the f-droid build system, it can only build foss projects
Edit: i was wrong
It might be “privacy” focused, but it’s not open source
We have an indication they aren’t — they make claims that are demonstrably untrue.
[edit] actually, the website is pretty clear about what they do and don’t do. It’s only the poster on here who’s overplaying the availability, OSS and privacy angles.
I don’t see a single thing that’s claims they are Open Sourced. Not sure how you or OP are coming to that conclusion.
They use open street maps and crowd source the traffic pattern just like the rest of the map apps.
Putting those together doesn’t mean they claimed to be open sourced.
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.
Will Magic Earth be Open Source?
No; since it is also used commercially (we have a paid Magic Earth SDK for business partners), we cannot make the code public.
Oh ok so there is no way to independently verify its privacy or security. Doesn’t belong in this community then IMO.
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).
Proprietary.
FYI, from the FAQ:
Why is Magic Earth free? What is the business model?
Magic Earth is free for all our end-users but we also have a paid Magic Earth SDK for business partners. For instance Selectric.de (a supplier for navigation solutions for ambulances and fire trucks), Smarter AI (developing ADAS systems) or Absolute Cycling (using the platform on bicycles). For more info on the SDK, you can check magiclane.com.
