CoMaps emerges as an Organic Maps fork

Summary

June 13, 2025 This article was contributed by Sebastian Crane The open-source mobile app Organic Maps is used by millions of people on both the Android and iOS platforms. In addition to featuring offline maps (generated from OpenStreetMap cartography) and turn-by-turn navigation, it also promises its users greater privacy than proprietary options. However, controversial decisions taken by the project's leaders, feelings of disenfranchisement among contributors, and even accusations of embezzlement have precipitated a divide in the community, leading to a new fork called CoMaps. The creation of Organic Maps Organic Maps traces its ancestry back to the navigation software MapsWithMe, created by Yuri Melnichek, Viktor Havaka, and Alexander Borsuk in 2010. Although the app itself was released under a proprietary license, MapsWithMe used open data from OpenStreetMap with its own rendering engine. MapsWithMe was renamed to MAPS.ME in June 2014, shortly before being sold to Russian internet company Mail.ru Group (now known as VK) in December of the same year for a sum equivalent to nearly $10 million. The original founders continued working on the software as employees of Mail.ru until 2016. During this period, MAPS.ME was released as open-source software for the first time, with its code being made available under the Apache-2.0 license on GitHub. Four years of steady development followed, but this status quo came to an abrupt end in November 2020 when Mail.ru sold MAPS.ME, considering the app a "non-core" part of its business. By the end of 2020, MAPS.ME's new owner had completely rewritten the software around a different rendering engine, returning again to a proprietary license in the process, albeit still using OpenStreetMap data. The new version of MAPS.ME was met with widespread disapproval from its users, and OMaps was released merely days later as a community fork of the last open-source version of MAPS.ME. The main driving force behind OMaps was Roman Tsisyk, des...