I first learned of Street-Complete here and I really like it.
It’s satisfying to walk around, complete little tasks, and get prizes, scratching a similar itch to Pokemon Go.
Stuck waiting for someone? Add opening hours for a few local businesses.
Have a long walk ahead of you? See if you can add/check house addresses as fast as you can walk.
Want to walk off a few beers before heading home? Complete some tasks in the bar street.
Its a very constructive way to “be right” on the internet.
When first reading (or not actually reading) this post, I thought “What’s the task? Go to the local bar and drink a beer, then enter the museum and scan a QR code to prove, you are there…”
But then, I realized what it’s actually about: Collecting information to show others in OpenStreetMap, like “does the bus stop have a trash bin? Or what kind of asphalt does the street have?”
I think, I’ll try this out tomorrow. Thanks!
Oh that sounds funny! Having a walk and doing something for the community.
Unfortunately it isn’t available for iOS. 🙁
There’s a web version, too. I haven’t played around with it much, but it looks like you can at least comment or mark resolved other people’s contributions
EDIT oh here’s a better comment re iOS: https://feddit.de/comment/11148500
I love this app so much, also if you really get into it go to the open street map website and draw buildings, roads, etc to add missing places or update changes.
I cleared my whole walkable area of questions then added all the houses and it populates new questions about house number, shop name, etc which I then went and filled out while walking round. In the zone around me the open source map is now by far the best free to access map, Google house numbers are completely random and no where has upto data shops.
There’s also a lot of cool projects devoted to mapping under-served areas, especially in regions where aid workers need information or natural disasters have changed landscapes. You draw in roads, towns, farms, etc based on areal imagery.
This is the most fun app in the world. I hope they keep building on top of this, it’s amazing! Plus, being able to see new “quests” popup as you edit on OSM/edit? Amazing!!
If there was some way for the app to create teams trying to fill out details like in Pokemon Go, that would be crazy exciting. Would be difficult to balance that so it didn’t incentivize adding junk… Maybe having a third party keeping players in check? Not sure, but the possibility is tantalizing!
@inbeesee @openstreetmap It does have a team mode, but I think that’s just a transient thing.
@InsertUser @inbeesee the team mode just makes sure 2 people don’t gets asked the same thing. Otherwise it’s wasted work
Would be cool to expand it! Is it open sourced work?
@inbeesee I’m pretty sure all of Street complete is open source. The team mode is a very clever hack, where each person gets a different number and it’s just showing people different quests
Why does F-Droid tell me that the app has features that I may not like?
It is because it has what F-Droid considers anti-features. In this case, even tho the code is open source, it seems to require a non-libre dependency to measure distances. See https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/issues/2627 and https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/pull/3709#issuecomment-1039710672.
F-Droid is very strict with what it considers an anti-feature, and Android is very restrictive to properly work without at least one closed source library (thanks, Google), so I say you can ignore this, but it depends on you.
Also, openstreetmap itself is a centralized eco system, even though you could theoreticallly host one yourself.
@Danitos @AngryCommieKender @openstreetmap
IIRC that was pulled out of the app into a separate companion app (StreetMeasure) ages ago.
F-Droid is complaining about “non-changeable or non-free network service”.
It doesn’t seem to say _which_ network service this is, which I think is quite scummy behaviour TBH.
to me it looks like it’s pointing out the network “services”:
and to me it also looks like they also say what the sercives are needed for. however its in german for this device.
update:
it sounds a bit weird that according to this info not the app is uploading new informations, but westnordost.de would, which suggests that they also upload/steal your openstreetmap password to their servers instead of using the app with locally stored access credentials to do that. but this could also be just a bad wording/misunderstanding/translation thing as obviously the party where you download the quests also need to know which quests are already solved which would be the data that is uploaded to them.
@smb @openstreetmap
In my browser that can’t be expanded and clicking on it just takes you to their definition of “Non-Free Network Services” https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Anti-Features/#NonFreeNetSo they’re complaining that an OpenStreetMap app is tied to OpenStreetMap related services and hiding this in a way that makes it look worse than it is.
This dramatically lowers my opinion of F-Droid.
maybe the browser version isn’t fully complete, or there might be a thing with css, bad browser specialities, just a bug in the webpage (did you check if it does show up in page source plaintext maybe?)
i would see the warning "bound to a specific non-changeable service as a good thing, as it would promote completely-free apps like (i think) fluffy chat, which does neither depend on a specific matrix service nor on a specific push service (i.e. it uses ntfy for push when installed, and if i choosed to use my own instance it would - i think - use that instead of the default ntfy.sh) in theory everyone could run something like osm and in practice this could come in very handy in the future one day, but currently IMHO only one osm exists, so maybe its not that bad for an app to be bound to it, but its always good to know if an app is bound or free to choice, same i would like to know if its maybe multi-account (which fluffy-chat is), but single-account-apps are so very common and thus this is not seen as an anti-feature which is completely ok for me.
but also in this case here the app is not only bound to osm, but to two other non-changeable services too, thus the warning is due even if label-app-bound-to-label-service would NOT be considered an anti-feature.
@smb @openstreetmap
If I view source I get “phrase not found” on a search for “Jawg” . It also doesn’t show up in Firefox’s Inspector, which I _think_ includes dynamically loaded stuff.Just checked Chrome and Microsoft Edge and they don’t show it either. What are you using to actually get the detail?
I wouldn’t mind F-Droid’s warning if they gave me the details, but for some reason they don’t seems to be accessible to me.
1/2
I don’t know how you’d get round the dev using his own site to pre-process (already published) data or host a list of “banned versions” with bugs that could corrupt data. You can’t really choose to have a different developer on the fly.
Maybe you could let people chose a different host for a published photo, but I think if there were privacy respecting ones that easily allowed that the dev probably would have use those instead?
https://streetcomplete.app/privacy
2/2
What are you using to actually get the detail?
i am using the F-Droid “app” (currently 1.20.0), not a browser now. But i asumed css or such could be a cause as sometimes nonvisible content is behind some bad (ad?) layer. i thought i had seen such infos also on their website, but that is then too long ago and i might just be wrong with that.
maybe you can only get that info from the app which would feel a bit like an anti feature *haha
RE the update. That seems odd that they’d do that. I thought the quests were now being generated on the fly after downloading the raw data direct from OSM (previously it was an overpass query per quest IIRC).
I don’t know why they’d be bouncing uploads through a remote server when OSM already has the capacity to reject a conflict.
I don’t currently have access to something that monitors raw traffic to check.
Non-Free Network Services
This Anti-Feature is applied to apps that promote or depend entirely on a Non-Free network service, or any service which is impossible, or not easy to replace. Replacement requires changes to the app or service. This antifeature would not apply, if there is a simple configuration option that allows pointing the app to a running instance of an alternative, publicly available, self-hostable, free software server solution.
Because you can’t change it from using OpenStreetMap.org to an alternative self hosted site.
Because it tracks real time location and uses the internet. Unless it’s an app like this where you explicitly want that functionality, that’s usually a sign of some sort of tracking mechanism for advertising or nefarious purposes.
That just is not what F-Droid is saying. Why would you even claim that?
If you expand the description it will be written out for you.
It is due to being bound to a specific mapping Ecosystem and using specific non Foss middleware
Thanks a lot for the suggestion, it’s quite fun and I’d love a future where OpenStreetMap data is exaustive
It already is better than Google in some areas. For instance, it has way more information on hiking trails.
Pretty sure they’re used for RideGPS, too.
I tried it when someone posted about it a couple of weeks ago. It is fun, my son and I go for walks and I include him in the tasks. Unfortunately, we get a lot of road surface questions which are a bit boring.
The road surfaces actually help a ton for apps that come up with bicycle routes as well as those on wheelchairs. However of you’d prefer less of them, you can make jt a lower priority in the settings.
@stiephelando @vatlark @openstreetmap
If a question type gets tedious you can disable that “quest” in the settings.
If I disable the 3 types of quest I get in my area (road surface, lanes, power pole type) then I get basically no quests, period
I’ve taken to adding buildings that I’m surprised they didn’t already have on OSM and then filling in the quests that auto-populate with that, but its meh
Have you looked at all the different layers? A while back they added more of those, with different types of quests that don’t appear normally.
If a question type gets tedious you can disable that “quest” in the settings.
That improved my experience. I disabled the things that my city generally doesn’t have, and it made my questing much more enjoyable.
Same here!
Iirc, you can deselect road surfaces in the settings somewhere so the app doesn’t ask about it?
Yea but somebody gotta add that info ;)
You can also add “little” objects like benches, recycling containers or trees in your near environment to the map that come with their own sets of questions
Yes, the gamification elements they’ve been adding lately are brilliant. I was really impressed when I first saw that. Really need to open the app more often…
iOS version is in the works but there’s something similiar online too.
I’ll recommend this to my wife who plays Pikmin Go religiously.
@MonkderDritte @vatlark @openstreetmap
@MapComplete is only similar in that it is aimed at giving simple tailored forms to new users. It does not make it easy to contribute “all the low hanging fruit closest to me”.
I love this app, found it a bit ago on F-Droid. I’m moving to a very rural town up north and there’s nearly nothing done there. Very excited to get up there and start working on it.
@[email protected] had a great idea in their comment above - fill in what you can, then use OSM to add missing buildings etc. They explain it better here though
!https://sh.itjust.works/comment/12811829
every time i find myself in a rural town, i go out for a walk with streetComplete. I’m often the first mapper of those areas and it’s a pleasure to complete the map and see your entries on the updates a couple of weeks later. next time you’re there, you have a detailed map of the area available and you know why :)
Explaining your OSM addiction to friends and family is a little harder. “I just need to spend the entire day mapping”
“don’t wait for me, keep walking. i have to answer these questions”
😅
I’ll always upvote StreetComplete.
I’ll always upvote upvotes of StreetComplete
I’ll always upvote upvotes of upvotes of StreetComplete
I’ll always upvote.
I do it but in Paris there are way too many things to add, so it feels too much most of the time
I hadn’t heard of that. Thanks. Just marked up my neighborhood. This a real clever and simple way to get casual users to contribute.
It is actually pretty fun. However it can’t do everything. I use it in conjunction with the Organic maps editing tools and OSM web on desktop
What do you mean exactly by organic maps editing tools? I was using organic maps before to add businesses, but now StreetComplete can also do that (and more!). I sometimes use Vespucci because it is very powerful, but it’s a bit of a pain to use.
It can create arbitrary points
Yeah I still can’t figure out how to add a postal box in StreetComplete so I use Vespucci. But yeah Vespucci is intimidating at first
+1 for vespucci being intimidating. Mainly cause I feel like I need to read a variety of wiki posts before modifying a new feature type. But once you start to get the hang of it, it really pays off.
@vatlark @Scafir @openstreetmap
The postbox thing is apparently an issue with the presets they use. The presets are from another project so it’s considered “blocked”.
https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/5584
