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Sandy, yes, Jose is basically the only developer. He gets help from others, for translations for sure, maybe for interface design too, but mostly he manages the app alone.

Of course not anybody is using OM from the beginning and cannot know the history of the app. In brief, it started when things were simple, and the author had a lot of freedom. On Google Play you did find a free and a "Donate" version that allowed people to show appreciation but the two version were identical. You could download from the oruxmaps website, Amazon and other sources I cannot remember. Back then Jose always said that he didn't care about reaching millions of users and/or making a business out of it, it was a side project and he was happy with a few thousand happy devoted users. I remember we asked for an option inside the Donate version to make further donations but he declined.

But time passes and things get more complicated, managing half a dozen versions scattered around various stores, each with its own rules becomes impossible. Just to make an example the free version was removed not by Jose but by Google itself because it was in violation of some unspecified payment rule (we suppose it was the link to Paypal donations, but it's only speculation because they never justify their decisions). Plus each new Android version creates additional restrictions and challenges.

Also, the more users you have the more support you are asked for. I've been the translator for the Italian version and I know the amount of help request you get just because your email is listed in the credits. And believe me some people can be very arrogant in their requests.

Meanwhile Jose got a family which is a wonderful thing in itself but as you can read in this post it came with some challenges that I think we all agree are more important than our beloved app being free or not.
https://oruxmaps.org/forum/index.php?topic=40163.msg52315#msg52315
To be clear, I'm not implying Jose's silence is related to this, and I hope not of course.
In the end Jose had to trim the free stuff but that doesn't mean the app is going fully commercial. It still is a side project and he does what he can which is a lot; if you compare what he accomplished working alone vs big software companies I think you'll agree. Betas always expire for obvious reasons, no need to state it, it's been the case for every software I tested in the last 30 years. It's not a free version, it's a test version and should be used as such, if anything because of the probable bugs.

All this to say you are not facing yet another greedy big company, but a single very nice person that stands behind his product as much as he can for very little compensation. The regular version 10 from the Play Store works well, is very similar to the Beta and is very affordable both in itself and compared to the competitors. You can be sure it will be maintained for as long as possible, but even if were to be abandoned all you have lost is 5€.

It's not the first time that betas expire, nor the first time that Jose disappears for a while but he always came back. He's got a life, and he always stated that this app is made in his free time which is less and less since he got a family that needs attention. Of course not seeing him around for months may rise some concern but let's be positive, hope everything is ok and wait. As for the app, the GP version works well, just use that; betas are only for testing new features.

The issue is not Scoped Storage, the issue is the workarounds. Let's face it, Google is right! As a nerd I'm the first one to miss the ability to share maps between apps and all the rest, but I'm old enough to remember when this forum was flooded by people complaining about all sort of problems and the most common cause was "optimisation" apps deleting random files on other app's folders; it just can't happen and it's perfectly reasonable on Google side to limit all files access. Could have they handled this in a more graceful way? Probably yes, still these are the rules and we'd better play with them rather than against them.

Android nowadays is built around the cloud, we need to use it that way. The only storage setting an app needs is "do you want to use internal memory or the SD card?". Importing, exporting and backing-up data can be done from/to the Download folder or a cloud storage of your choice, no need for direct access. If you think about it's also so much simpler for the user to handle. A few years ago, even if I use Oruxmaps to look at the maps I started using Locus for track recording just because it could automatically upload the gpx to Dropbox, and I still do (OM can now do it with Drive, but at the time it couldn't and I prefer Dropbox anyway); there's no way I'm going back to attach a cable and navigate through folders to extract a gpx.

Hi, I'd have a feature request for quick, single use, disposable "geo-alarms".

In the routes menu add a command called geo-alarm that opens a dialogue box offering three kinds of alarm:

• elevation: you set an altitude and the app warns you when you reach that
• distance from here: you set the distance and when you get there the app warns you
• POI: the app warns you when you reach the point (selected with center of the map), no navigation along the road, just a warning when you get there

Case uses.
The first one is useful when skitouring or hiking off path, because often you know you have to reach a certain altitude before a direction change, but you have no path or reference to use traditional navigation routes.
The second one is the same, but you have a loose direction to follow and distance before changing direction but again having no path the traditional waypoint based navigation doesn't work.
The third is for quick needs that come up along the road, for example you want to be warned when approaching a water source, but you are already using navigation and it's cumbersome to stop it, modify the route and restart.

Thanks

Is this a bug in the v.11.0.0beta10 version, or is there an option in the settings somewhere that can be changed, so that the zoom directly stops like before in the v.7.4.28 version?

If I understand correctly what you mean, look in Options -> Maps -> Zoom settings, you should find an option to finalize the pinch to zoom, disable it. (I'm translating on the fly from Italian, so do not look for the exact words...).

@Tronpo : First of all, how did you install OM GP on a phone "without connection or sim card"

I'm not Trompo, but it's quite easy, just use wifi to do the install and when you are done remove the network and/or the google account. I did this with an old phone I use as radio player, once installed the apps I removed the account so that a potential thief doesn't have access to it. On the "outdoor backup" phone I kept the account (since it has a fingerprint reader) but disconnected it from the net.

That said I agree that a clarification about how this works from Josè would be useful. I'd hate to find myself without the app in a situation where I have no connection which is pretty frequent in the Alps.

Hi,

I reinstalled OM from scratch on a clean phone, then tried to import a map.
First I tried tapping it in a file manager and chose OM to open the file. The progress bar stays there forever and the app hangs, I had to kill it.
Then I tried with the internal import function and got the same result.

The file was around 2GB. A 300MB one worked but took quite a bit of time, compared to the time it takes to copy the same file with SolidExplorer.

Works fine here: Samsung A52 with Android 14

[exactly]

I think it would be great for Oruxmaps to add the possibility to read those files, for better cumulative heights and other related features. Even though these type of files are a lot larger, today's smartphones have large storage capacities too.

Storage is maybe not that much of an issue, but processing power probably is, keep in mind that this kind of data quadruples in size each time you double the resolution. Moving from 30m to 5m means having ~10x the data to read and process. ASCII grid is also uncompressed text which means gigantic files. GeoTIFF can be compressed efficiently and it's trivial to convert to/from that format, but depending on the parameters used for the compression it can be very hard to decompress (if it's not tiled you have to decompress the whole file to read it).
On top of that, using very high resolution DEMs is unlikely to be of real usefulness, because the GPS reading isn't precise enough to take advantage of it. You can find DTMs with 0.5m resolution, but they are totally pointless if you don't know exactly where you are, and you don't. Actually you will be just adding noise to your height calculations. Could be useful for stuff like slope calculation, that's true, but those are better done on a proper GIS application.
Also, using .hgt has the advantage that you avoid conflicts between files. Say for example that the user has overlapping files on one are, which one should the app use? The naming scheme in the hgt prevents that.
Your best bet, if for some reason you don't like Sonny's datasets, is to perform your own conversion to .hgt. But I'd be surprised if you find any difference.

Ciao, le stringhe sono interne all'app, non puoi accedere direttamente.
La traduzione italiana l'ho curata io fino ad un paio di anni fa, poi non ho più avuto tempo e le novità sono state fatte con traduttori automatici. Nelle scorse settimane ho dato una ripassata correggendo parecchie cose. Non è ancora pubblicata, può darsi che nella prossima versione troverai già modificato. Però se mi dici quali stringhe non ti tornano ci posso dare un'occhiata subito.

Thanks, I looked everywhere except there 

Hi,

I was wondering if it is possible to have the distance line* text positioned at the bottom (just above the dashboard, or maybe *in* the dashboard) like it was before. It seemed a good idea at first, but honestly it become annoying fast. It's not that every time I pan the map I'm interested in knowing the distance, sometimes I'm just looking at the map searching for a road or something, and the damn text covers the map. A smartphone screen isn't that big anyway, even if the text is at the bottom is plenty reachable and readable.

I haven't found any option in the preferences, but maybe I missed it.

* I mean, the line drawn from map center to GPS position that shows distance, elevation difference and slope

From what I read in the two examples you give, both use GPS right?

In Locus they follow the GPS if it is active, if not they follow the map center.

Thanks, interesting. Maybe some update of Android caused that? Because it used to work without issues, and I checked energy optimization settings for OruxMaps, they are off.
I record a track with screen off with OruxMaps when this happens. I didn't try a different outdoor app and not with screen on (that issue can happen after some hours of recording, so screen on is not really an option if I don't want to drain the battery). But I used the phone with a car navigation app with screen on without the issue, but not as long as when recording a track with OruxMaps.

Same phone for me and A32 for a friend and same issue a couple of times with both Oruxmaps and Locus. We disabled "adaptive battery" (or something like that, it's a general setting, not app-related) and took care that the app is in the foreground before turning screen off and apparently it's ok. Maybe a coincidence, I mean it happened randomly a couple of times but in at least one occasion I did switch to Peakfinder and turned the screen off.

It's in the preferences. "user interface" --> "buttons" (or something like that, not sure about the exact wording, it depends on the localisation)