Pure Maps

From postmarketOS

Pure Maps displays vector and raster maps, places, routes, and provides navigation instructions.

Installation

Pure Maps is available from postmarketOS' repository, and can as such be installed via:

# apk add pure-maps

Data providers

The displayed map data is fetched from a provider, which is usually converting data from OSM into a format suitable for map clients such as Pure Maps. As of writing, there is no default data provider configured when installing Pure Maps in postmarketOS. You must configure a provider to make the app useful.

Offline

The most privacy friendly way of using this application will be with the offline provider OSM Scout Server. See pmaports#575 for an effort to package it in postmarketOS. In an early test it was noted, that running Pure Maps with OSM Scout Server requires a rather high amount of RAM with 2 GB, but maybe this can be optimized.

Online

When using an online provider, Pure Maps must send queries for tiles, search, and routing to the map provider. Make sure that this is what you want, and that you are fine with the privacy implications.

Find a suitable provider and register a free (developer) API key if necessary. Then configure Pure Maps in postmarketOS to use it.

To configure providers in the UI, first select the "Mixed" profile. Then in either of the "Search" or "Navigation" interfaces click the triple-dot button in the upper right to change providers.

To configure both profiles and providers with the config file, first close the app and then edit ~/.config/pure-maps/pure-maps.json . Note that the UI does not support adding or removing new profiles in this way. Changing the chosen profile and the providers used in each however works.

(If somebody went through the process for other API keys, please describe how to configure Pure Maps here.)

Mapbox API

Register an account on Mapbox. Log in, and copy the "Default public token" to the Mapbox API Key. Note that though they have a free tier, they may charge for over usage: https://www.mapbox.com/pricing/

HERE API

  1. Register an account on https://platform.here.com/ and log in
  2. Go to the application listing at https://platform.here.com/admin/apps/ and press "Register new app"
  3. Give it a name and press the "Register" button
  4. On the new app's page, in the Credentials tab, go to the "API Keys" section and press the "Create credentials" button

After adding the API key to Pure Maps, close and re-open it. You will be required to accept a license that mentions that it is against the HERE ToS to mix HERE data sources with others: https://knowledge.here.com/csm_kb?id=public_kb_csm_details&number=KB0017825

Pure Maps implements this restriction with a dedicated HERE profile, which like all profiles can be easily edited in ~/.config/pure-maps/pure-maps.json

See also

  • pmaports!593 initial merge request (with an interesting discussion with the lead developer about vendor lock-in)