OSM Apps Catalog – What is it and what could it be? I would like to hear your opinion

General talk
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What it is

The OSM Apps Catalog presents existing apps based on OSM data. The aim is to make these apps (and OSM) more visible, discoverable and accessible to a wider audience. It brings together and shows all the great work (mapping and programming) we have done so far.
The catalog is aimed in particular at people who are not tech-savvy and do not want to or cannot search through the tables and pages of the wiki for an app that is useful to them.
The OSM Apps Catalog is based on the work of TTTBot (by Tobias Knerr) and the Osm Software Catalog (by Dmytro Ovdiienko). The data comes from the OpenStreetMap wiki, Wikidata, GitHub and the Taginfo project list.
Checkout the wiki page about the OSM Apps Catalog to find out how to add or remove apps from the catalog.

More about the catalog can be found on my blog, on the about page or in the code repo.

Until now, all work on the OSM Apps Catalog has been done voluntarily in my free time.

What it could be

I have plans to redesign the landing page to make it look more like an app store, including: What’s new, daily featured apps, full multilingual support, an explore view with categories and improved search, and a support/donation feature (for accessed apps).
For that I received a microgrant and started a project to redesign the OSM Apps Catalog in order to reach a wider audience. The project will run in January and February 2026.

For the redesign, I have started a survey to understand what is needed. Please fill it out and share your perspective with me. Click here for the survey (or the survey in German).

Or leave a “Reply” with your idea or opinion below.

What would make the OSM Apps Catalog more helpful to you? What would you like to know about map apps?

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Great initiative! :heart:

My 2c: if the goal is to “look more like an app store” and “appeal to people not particularly interested in technology” I’d suggest:

  • Hiding editors from the main list. I get that they’re technically consumers of OSM data, but it feels a bit circular to include them (as they’re how data gets added in the first place). Perhaps they could go in a separate “here’s how you can contribute to OSM!” section?

  • Adding commercial apps that prominently use OSM data (Strava, AllTrails, DoorDash, etc). This will help the average person realise “oh I already use OSM!” and that it’s not a niche/obscure project. This would make the FOSS apps less prominent though…maybe there could be a filter or separate section to help promote their benefits?

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Would you then also have to mention Amazon, Uber & Lyft, that use OSM for deliveries?

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Good question…perhaps including the likes of Uber/Amazon/Lyft/Doordash is going too far. With apps like AllTrails & Strava you spend a lot of time literally looking at OSM data, which isn’t true of the other examples.

It’s a somewhat fuzzy criteria I admit.

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Is there a place for OSM-based software that comes with professional support for tailoring/deploying, like the whitelabel version of Cyclestreets - White label sites now with 3D itinerary and other features – CycleStreets

(Perhaps that is too far off scope)

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Is that actually defined? My main problem is that this is a marketing activity, but nobody from “OSM marketing” aka the CWG is involved … and even if we excuse the EWGs medling in other peoples business, the issue remains that it is just a random website nobody is going to find (no offence intended) without integration in osm.org and that opens a further can of worms.

This is always a bit of an iffy proposition, many of them don’t actually advertise this and for many it is just the cheap option that they might or might not drop in the next second. Not to mention apps that are building proprietary data and are at best using OSM as a stop gap measure or to attract naive potential contributors.

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The data/apps are taken from wiki.osm.org, Wikidata, and other sources. Strava, AllTrails, and DoorDash do not appear in the catalog because no one has documented them yet. They are not excluded from the catalog on principle. How prominently an app appears in the catalog is determined by the Community Contribution Score: the more free, accessible, and well-documented an app is, the more prominently it is displayed.

In the future, I would like to design the page so that apps are displayed in categories (Issue #205), with vertical scrolling through the categories and horizontal scrolling through the apps in the categories. As in popular stores.

Category 1
[App 1] [App 2] [App 3] [...]

Category 2
[App x] [App y] [App z] [...]

Category 3
[...]

...

Your Reply inspires me to create a category called “Commercial apps you should know” and to show free open source alternatives at the bottom of the detailed view of these apps. (Issue #206)

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Not really. The focus is on apps for end users and APIs, as well as packages for developers.

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I would have thought the first thing to think about is what’s the purpose of the catalogue and what’s its intended audience is.

If it’s just a way of cataloguing uses of OSM data in apps as something that would be of academic interest to those already in the OSM-ecosystem, then that’s one thing. If you want it to be something that those outside the OSM-ecosystem might use to find apps to use, then that’s something quite different.

For the latter, you’d need to focus much more on categorising apps according to function and presenting the catalogue to user that way. (User: I’d like an app to do X. Site: Look at these apps that let you do it (which happen to use OSM data).)

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