CoMaps and its community at the end of 2025
CoMaps is now about 6 months old and between this and the end of the year, we want to reflect a bit about where we are standing and share some numbers. We also want to give a bit of an outlook what potential plans for the future are. And share how you can support us on this journey!
CoMaps started as an idea for a potential fork of Organic Maps earlier this year, with just a rough idea for focusing on a more open, community-based governance model. On May 31, we released the first preview release, back then only as an Android APK, directly on Codeberg. Since then, 11 more releases have followed and CoMaps is now available in the Google Play Store, F-Droid, and the Apple App Store as well.
From the very start, engaging the community in decision making has been a core principle, beginning with picking a name and color scheme. And the voting for our logo took a multi-stage voting approach, in which all designers got extensive intermediate feedback before the final vote. And since then our community has grown further, with ongoing active exchanges in Codeberg issues and discussions on Matrix/Telegram.
On the development side of things, the group of CoMaps contributors has grown and was very active: Nearly 1,200 pull requests were merged since the start of the project, improving the code, fixing bugs and building out new features for CoMaps. While we also benefited from all the contributions made by the contributors to Organic Maps, over 30 developers contributed to CoMaps directly as well and that number is still growing.
Contributing to developing the apps is not the only way of contributing though: Helping with translating CoMaps into different languages is another important effort to help our app serve a larger number of people around the globe. Thanks to the work of nearly 200 contributors who donate their language-skills to contribute translations, CoMaps is available in increasing numbers of languages. Currently, CoMaps is already available in 50 languages – and there are already efforts to bring this number up to 80!
Beyond code and translations, there are also volunteers making sure that the word about CoMaps gets out and that we are responsive to questions: For example, by writing blog posts such as this one or by posting regular updates on our social media channels and answering questions on the many different CoMaps communication channels. And, not to forget, by writing both internal and external-facing documentation about processes and how to use CoMaps.
On the less visible tech side, CoMaps is only possible thanks to a dedicated technical infrastructure that behind the scenes is responsible for generating the map files as well as distributing them to all of our users. Currently, this includes dedicated servers as well as CDNs around the world which host and distribute the maps, to deliver faster download times. And since a couple of weeks, we got a new dedicated server for the map generation that wrangles all the data from OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia and other data sources like TIGER, SRTM and postcode data. In the past, our map generation could take around 11 days to finish. With the new hardware, we could bring this down to around 2 days, removing a big bottleneck in delivering new maps more often.
All of these are great achievements, even more so given this important fact: CoMaps is fully made by volunteers! This starts at organizing community input, continues to the software development, creating the translations and maintaining our infrastructure maintenance, and our outreach/communication efforts.
This also means we need your help to keep CoMaps running. As shown, there are many ways in which one can contribute to CoMaps to help the project. For some of you, that might mean spending some time to donate your skills to CoMaps For example, by helping us test upcoming features in test builds, reporting bugs and giving us feedback. Or by spreading the word about CoMaps and answering the questions of users and community members in different places. Maybe you speak another language beyond English? Then we'd love your help with improving our translations. And if you are a software developer, there are always plenty of open issues for fixing bugs and implementing new features that could need a helping hand. Getting involved in any of these can be a daunting task, but the CoMaps community strives to be a friendly and welcoming place and loves to onboard new contributors!
And if you are lacking time but have some money, you might also want to consider supporting the project financially, to help us pay some CoMaps related bills. At this point, virtually 100% of donations that we receive go into providing the technical infrastructure we need to run CoMaps in different ways: That includes things like renting the servers that generate and distribute maps. For example, renting the new, much faster map generation server was only possible thanks to the generosity of the people who donate to us. You can contribute your donation via Open Collective or via LiberaPay. Our Open Collective profile also includes the full ledger of how we spend donations, including the LiberaPay donations.
No matter how you might contribute, in the past or in the future: Together, we can make sure that CoMaps will continue to improve even more in the upcoming year, as it takes a global village to make a map!