Features
Privacy
Organic Maps prioritizes user privacy by not collecting personal data or tracking user locations. [4] [7]
Offline maps
Organic Maps functions entirely offline by allowing users to download maps in advance. Once maps are downloaded, navigation, search, and route planning do not require an internet connection. The app offers offline maps of the world, including cycling routes, hiking trails, walking paths, contour lines, elevation profiles, peaks, and slopes. [8] [9]
Low battery consumption
The app is designed to optimize battery usage during navigation. [3]
Navigation
Organic Maps provides navigation for various activities, including hiking, biking, driving, and public transport. It supports turn-by-turn navigation with voice guidance and allows users to search for information on the map and add bookmarks. [3]
History
Organic Maps was founded as a fork of Maps.me app in December 2020.
The app Maps.me was initially launched in 2011 as MapsWithMe, later renamed Maps.me and open-sourced in 2015. On 20 December 2020, the then-owner of Maps.me app released a new version that was not based on the code published on GitHub, which resulted in backlash from the community. One of the users published a call to fork Maps.me and rebuild the community around it, [11] and on 27 December a hackathon was organised to bootstrap the new project based on a previous fork that was used to publish the app on F-Droid. [12] [13] Two of the Maps.me app authors, Alexander Borsuk and Viktar Havaka, started their own fork on 20 December 2020, [14] registered organicmaps.app domain on the next day [15] and joined efforts with the community fork in January 2021. The project adopted a set of guidelines and policies and focused on privacy, performance and community. The first public release of Organic Maps was made available in the app stores in June 2021. [16]
On March 13, 2025, Viktor Govako [17] and Alexander Borsuk [18] (founders, maintainers, and top two contributors of the project [19] ) were removed from GitHub's Organic Maps org repository owners, and a new owner Konstantin Pastbin @pastk [20] has been added. GitHub immediately banned the whole Organic Maps organization for several weeks due to Konstantin's sanctioned account [21] .
In April 2025, members of the Organic Maps community led by Konstantin @pastk, raised concerns regarding project governance and transparency. These issues were outlined in an open letter addressed to the project's founders/maintainers/shareholders. [22] The lack of a satisfactory resolution between the shareholders and the community contributors led a group of contributors to establish a separate, independent project known as CoMaps. [23] . Some private, unpublished commits from one of Organic Maps private repositories were illegally copied by Konstantin @pastk [24] and then illegally reused in the fork without the explicit commit authors' permission [25] .
In August and in October 2025 the developers explicitly clarified the license for map data binaries, allowing use in other applications only with prominent attribution to the OpenStreetMap and Organic Maps projects, folowing OpenStreetMap's ODbL license requirements [26] [27]
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