OpenStreetMap
Updated contributor stats - the end of maps.me
Posted by SimonPoole on 6 January 2022 in English. Last updated on 13 January 2022.As every quarter I’ve updated the contributor statistics in the OSM wiki. The most notable effect is the drop off in new contributors in the 2nd half of 2021, which can at least partly be attributed to the demise of maps.me as a source of new mappers.
This is more obvious when you consider just the new users from this source
Note that the numbers include new users using organic maps, but even that doesn’t change the trend.
See my diary posts from 2020, 2018 and 2017 for more on the topic.
Discussion
Comment from Harry Wood on 6 January 2022 at 15:40
That’s a shame …or not depending on how you feel about the many minor contributors that MAPS.ME was bringing. Personally I think it’s a shame.
But it’s also shame if general usage of the MAPS.ME app itself is in decline. Fewer people viewing OpenStreetMap. I guess that’s likely as the initial buzz wears off. As far as I’m aware it’s still the best app for viewing a map from OpenStreetMap though.
Comment from SimonPoole on 6 January 2022 at 15:51
The question always was if the minor contributors even had a remote idea on what they were adding, there is definitely no indication that it was ever a source of regular contributors in any form.
As a vehicle routing application (I don’t think it ever though of itself as a map viewer) it remains around and organic maps continues to have the editing feature, but with a vastly smaller user base.
Comment from andrewsh on 6 January 2022 at 19:18
Harry, but they killed it themselves, when mail.ru sold it to some crypto scammers.
I’d say today Organic Maps are better than maps.me, since it is actually developed, and by the original team.
Comment from Zverik on 6 January 2022 at 19:31
Buuuuut the best thing maps.me had was not the speed or the design or the greatest mobile editor in history of OSM. It’s their amazing marketing team that pushed the app to millions and millions of users. With all the flaws, what the app did is bring OSM to people, and the chart above displays how general population is out of OSM now. Yes, there are mappers (mostly Missing Maps participants and paid mappers) who use iD and JOSM and make up for the loss, but I’d prefer more eyes on the ground.
Comment from mmd on 6 January 2022 at 20:53
I’m not exactly sure if maps.me ever supported Basic Auth. In any case their “automated sign up process” was likely impacted by a security fix in https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/issues/3241 some time around July 2021.
By the way, Organic maps fixed the issue pretty much on the same day.
Comment from Strubbl on 7 January 2022 at 13:30
Thanks for updating the statistics. It’s also interesting to read the comments here.
Comment from Harry Wood on 7 January 2022 at 14:49
Yeah I’m learning a few things because I haven’t been following the MAPS.ME goings on properly. I saw the complaints a while back about new owners changing the look of the map completely, but things seemed back to normal when I had to reinstall it recently. I also noticed bitcoin ads appearing somewhere on it, but easily ignored. However ongoing development is always nice! Installing Organic Maps now. Hmm. This looks familiar :-)
Comment from G1asshouse on 9 January 2022 at 13:04
According to your chart, MAPS.ME was dying since late 2016 to today. The OSM new user chart indicates a drop of about 6,000, in the latter have of 2021 (tic marks are difficult to match to date). MAPS.ME shows a drop of a few hundred new users in that time. I’m not sold on MAPS.ME being a significant contributor to that decline. I’m more troubled by OSM’s plateauing of monthly new users (slight decline) and stagnant monthly active users (fairly flat) in that same time range. The full history of the project still shows growth (outside of monthly contributors), which is good. Edit per mouth still grows. I am concerned that this trend shows either, each mapper is shouldering more and more of the mapping effort (worrying) or automation/corporations are doing the extra work (troublesome). Thank you for packaging the data.
Comment from SimonPoole on 9 January 2022 at 19:42
@G1asshouse in the 1st half of 2021 influx of new users from maps me / organic maps was still relatively “high” that is 7’881 vs 1’682 in the 2nd half, that is nearly exactly the difference you saw.
Taking a step back, the only metric that really matters for the project as a whole is that of reoccurring long term contributors. To anecdotally put that in perspective, the first 80’000 or so editors that used maps.me contributed less than I have in my OSM career, and I’m by far not a particularly large OSM contributor. The statement should seen less as a dismissal of the long tail of contributors, but more a statement of that the continued viability of the project lies elsewhere.
Comment from pfg21 on 10 January 2022 at 12:36
maps.me :) Nothing personal, it’s just business
Comment from Zverik on 10 January 2022 at 13:34
Regarding the number of contributions, I’d reply that these 80k editors contributed on-the-ground POI information that not any single mapper could compile. Getting any single of these contributions is far more important than tracing another thousand kilometers of roads and rivers.
I’ve just updated the editor usage stats, and the first thing I noticed was that less people in 2021 edited the map (303k → 292k). I’d look into that — and the general stagnation of numbers in the past five years, instead of singling out any editor. I doubt that is an issue that can be solved technically, like by developing a new editor or redesigning the website.
Comment from SimonPoole on 10 January 2022 at 13:59
The thing is that roughly 2/3s of the annual contributors are new, see annual active contributors. And nearly all of them are short term to single edit contributors (and yes there is some correlation with tools and recruitment method, for example HOT) and while a larger pool of new mappers might lead to slightly more longer term contributors, conversion rates are so low that in practical terms even quite large changes in new contributor influx don’t make a big difference.
Comment from Zverik on 10 January 2022 at 14:23
What difference does it make if a contributor is one-off or long term? OpenStreetMap as a project, as an organization, or as a group of people does not care whether you’ve been here for ten years or one day. It’s what you put on the map that counts. Both old and new contributors’ edits matter the same. When you get a person into OSM and they leave the next day, it does not mean you did worse job than if they stayed.
it’s like saying, children are dying young, so we should focus on grown-up people. Usually that means we should focus on better child support.
Comment from RicoElectrico on 10 January 2022 at 16:38
@Zverik: It is simply a cold calculation. In case of new users no matter how friendly you are (sending a welcome message, commenting the changeset with explanation how to map properly, etc.) most of the time you get zero response and the user churns anyway never to be seen again. Monitoring edits and fixing them is a Sisyphean task, feeling very ungrateful, and OSM community at large is not prepared enough for the system to balance out. For example, I am the only person out of 200 mappers in Poland who sends welcome messages through https://welcome.osm.be/ .
I think is better to let people self-select with low human intervention. In the startup world they defined “activation” - a threshold/event at which the user is likely to retain. In case of early Facebook, it was “7 friends in 10 days”. If I could define a similar event for OSM, that would be fantastic; we can surmise it’s only a few of 50 new mappers per week in Poland - which is way more manageable and allows for a more personal approach.
Comment from Zverik on 11 January 2022 at 07:01
Continuing this weird analogy with newborns, if your only help is saying hello and scolding them for breaking things, that wouldn’t affect their lifespan and wellbeing much.
Comment from SimonPoole on 11 January 2022 at 10:41
@Zverik in a world in which OSM had unlimited resources perhaps it would be possible to close our eyes to which contributor groups the project critically depends on and which not, but that isn’t reality.
In reality the project could easily survive and still be relevant with the 10% (or less) that contribute and maintain 90% of the data, the other way around clearly not. That doesn’t mean that the map isn’t better when we get input from those additional contributors, but it is also important to understand that many of them are not, as in really not, interested in any kind of long term relationship with OSM. RicoEletric has already covered most aspects of that.
And yes I believe we need to create low-impact, low-maintenance ways for such contributions to happen, that do not create extra load on the 10% of contributors that we really depend on, for example OSMyBiz. It can be argued that MAPS.ME was never that.
Comment from Zverik on 11 January 2022 at 13:44
To me, this focus on long-term relationship feels unnecessary. Like, you can get a life partner only long-term, no one-night stands or one-month flings allowed.
The idea for OSM was, among others, that we get a good map with diversity, not proficiency. More eyes on the ground, not more skill for a few mappers. One POI in Mongolia is more important than a hundred in Switzerland, because we have lots of mappers and lots of business directories in Western Europe, and these hundred would be mapped one way or another.
You want contributors that don’t need hand-holding, that know our tagging model and use proper editors, that adhere to whatever regional standards you have, and that also do not require your time and guidance. I believe we’ve dried out the pool of such technically proficient mappers around 2015. After that, novice mappers are and will be not good enough for you.
I do not understand this need for control. OSM never intended to be perfect. It cannot be perfect by definition. Mistakes are allowed. Broken data is okay. You don’t have to monitor and fix every change. You cannot control hundreds of mappers around you. The only thing you can achieve with such control is driving them away.
Finally, I still don’t understand your problem with maps.me. As I spoke since 2015, POI editing is as low-impact and as low-maintenance as you can get in OSM. There’s been a couple of dedicated websites (like this one) for edits monitoring, where you could focus on your area. Changesets were small, comments good enough, data mostly correct.
What was uncommon and hard to monitor is the enormous quantity of contributors. Nobody and nothing in OSM were prepared to handle tens of thousands edits. And as it often happens, instead of looking at that as a challenge, we decided to fight that. Prevent maps.me from getting anywhere, block mappers, publicly denounce the editor.
But this still stands: maps.me was the best that have happened to OSM from the point of its original vision, and with its demise, we have lost a hope of getting a good POI coverage outside USA and Western Europe. But at least we have experienced mappers armed with Josm to draw all the roads from constantly outdated imagery.
Comment from G1asshouse on 11 January 2022 at 17:28
@SimonPoole, we were comparing different numbers. It would be easier to correct this misunderstanding if we were in person. So, I’ll leave it there.
@Zverik, No one has a problem with MAPS.ME. It just didn’t produce many edits (36% of users and <0.1% of edits). This also isn’t a competition between MAPS.ME and JOSM. JOSM has 7-8% of all OSM users and produces 60% of all edits. One of these groups is objectively more valuable that the other. Being angry about this fact makes as much sense as being angry that the sun is bright or that mountains are tall. I’ll leave with, your description of OSM’s needs, verses , is not the impression I have ever seen expressed in the community and is the opposite of what I believe. I guess we agree about not being controlling. Anyway, thank you for all the work you’ve put in and the passion you bring to this project.
Comment from SimonPoole on 12 January 2022 at 09:26
@G1asshouse wrt the numbers, it is simply maps.me demise obscuring the underlying continued growth of “organic” new mapper influx rate, see the two old blog posts. It wasn’t different last year either.
That growth is very slow, but that has always been the case, just as the number of active users has always grown very slowly. Seasonal effects and even individual news articles tend to lead to lots of variation, but there is clearly a bit of growth there, if anything it picked up a bit 2019-2020.
Comment from Zverik on 12 January 2022 at 16:21
Maps.Me wasn’t an OSM editor. It was a navigation app that had an “edit” button. Editor engagement, while being considered at some point, have never been done, so people just tested the feature and were satisfied with the result, never coming back. Because they were using the app not for editing, but for navigating.
By the way, it also brought users that have contributed tens of thousands POIs, so dismissing the app because of the long tail is missing the point. I’m pretty sure iD has a similar user distribution.
Comment from Rovastar on 12 January 2022 at 23:05
“I don’t think it’s 4 month map update cycle, or whatever it was, helped much either. My guess is that most people thought they didn’t actually contribute anything because it took so long for their edits to be displayed on the map.”
That is not the case as when you add something it appears on maps.me for your device. And it the refresh is not every 4 months more like a month or maybe two.
I expect a gradual decline is the number of people actually using maps.me (it is clearly not as popular as it once was) and they only once (that i saw) had the splashscreen when you started it saying we use osm and you can edit it. That was when it launched with editing and obviously the massive uptick in users but they neer mentioned it again so newer users would barely know you could update OSM from it.
maps.me opened a lot of doors for osm with the initial push in editing on there and I’m sure many edited osm via other editors from that exposure to it. you can only add POI so naming a road , or adding a building you would have to do elsewhere.
It is used as a map not an editor first and foremost. The editing is basic - but tbh all i need to add things quickly on the fly. I’m using the map anyway and add missing POIs on the way if I notice. I don’t go out to map with it.
I still haven’t found a mobile editor I like as trying top do everything I don’t get I would rather map from my PC.
Comment from Rovastar on 12 January 2022 at 23:33
And I am no fan of some of the old timers here who do come across as “I know best you must do it my way” for many things.
And although some (still very small numbers) longer term contributors have been put off by this and stopped mapping (I’ve been tempted before….) I think you misunderstand how very few people actually have anything to do with the community. Hardly anyone even looks at a dairy entry, mailing list, forum, etc. So I am not sure that interaction is putting newer people off.
I have a theory I share in the meetups I go to. That just even contacting someone just to say Hi , nice mapping, etc most of them then actually stop mapping. I have done this many times waiting for a dozens of edits and as soon as contact is made I guess they think “someone is looking at my edits. I don’t like that stalking. I going going to leave.” That is all a bit tongue in cheek but the majority over teh years that I have conatcted just stop and I suspect that is the case for most others if they are being honest.
People just aren’t all that interested in mapping in any great detail.
The vast majority never even make an edit at all of the 8.3 million registered members. Only 1.75 million have made an edit. And only a small percentage have made more than 1 or 2 edits.
I think read a few years ago now when we had about 1 million users with edit there were only 30,000 that had made 100 changesets.
Someone that does hundreds or thousands of changesets (I presume map changes as a metric but whatever) is rare indeed.
Comment from SimonPoole on 13 January 2022 at 09:34
@Rovastar the fact is that most people immediately stop after a couple of edits, so you would expect most people that you contact with a welcome message to have already stopped or that they will do so around the time. Now and then I delay sending welcome messages by a bit 10’000 welcome messages it doesn’t make a difference in the net result.
@all It is hilarious is to spin conspiracy theories around the lack of retention around contributors coming from maps.me, particularly attributing it to “nasty” people. One of the constant problems we have had with maps.me editors was that in practical terms they can’t be contacted at all. There is no reason to believe that retention is particularly low from this source other than that it is a demographic for which this is intrinsically going to be the case.
It should be further pointed out that the overall low conversion rate from “trying OSM out” to a regular contributor has been a constant over the history of the project (and yes that was the case before you make changeset comments too). It is not something that we should fret over (this is a constant theme over all pastimes), we should simply make sure that the contributors are informed enough about the project that if they carry on they are already on the right track. That is something that we don’t seem to be very good at overall and the reason we send welcome messages locally here.
General note: the reason I even started with separating out maps.me numbers was because a large initial one time effect was to be expected and that was going to obscure underlying trends, which continue to indicate growth of reoccurring mappers. Again conspiracy theories are misplaced.
Comment from Rovastar on 13 January 2022 at 09:46
simon,
I don’t do that. I wait for them to do a dozen or so edits over a few days and be active before contact. Not a 1 hit wonder editor. And they still stop. :)
Comment from jonsger on 13 January 2022 at 12:52
I’m using Organic Maps for a while now on my phone and I pretty like it as map. Its less “bloated” compared to OSMAnd.
Yesterday I tested the integrated editor in Organic Maps and I have to say, that I like the opening hours part. So lets hope that the dev community around stays alive :)
Comment from SimonPoole on 15 January 2022 at 11:39
@Zverik you write
Back in 2017 I actually did some statistics on mapper retention, I’m fairly sure that I mention them back then, but in any case I just reran them for 2021 and nothing has changed. The gist is that mapper retention for new accounts was and is substantially lower for maps.me than iD, by an order of magnitude, with streetcomplete being in between. The actual surprise in the numbers is that even with maps.me demise, streetcomplete is a smaller source of new mappers.
Comment from joost schouppe on 16 January 2022 at 17:07
Maps.me is (was) different indeed. From an analysis of Notes I made a few years back :
Source: https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/joost%20schouppe/diary/43057
Comment from Komяpa on 16 January 2022 at 18:56
Well, the reason response rate is 0 is simple: there is no good API to get your messages inside maps.me or organic maps or any other app. You can’t GET api/0.6/inbox that will return everything you need to show to user as popup, so there’s nothing shown as the popup and messages die somewhere in the mail spam filters.
Comment from woodpeck on 17 January 2022 at 08:52
I have hidden a few comments towards the tail end of this discussion as they veered decidedly off-topic and into personal attacks. I’ve tried to also hide comments referring to hidden comments so as not to break context too much.
Comment from tg4567 on 15 February 2023 at 13:52
How does this look if you add Organic Maps users to maps.me? I think a lot of maps.me users are migrating to Organic Maps.
Comment from jonsger on 15 February 2023 at 14:03
@tg4567: I don’t think the chart would look that much difference. Organic Maps had 3k unique users in 2021 and 6,5k in 2022, see this table. Surely only a part of them are new OSM users…
Comment from SimonPoole on 15 February 2023 at 14:27
@tg4567 and @jonsger this is already covered in the blog post.
Comment from PierZen on 4 January 2024 at 00:26
In my Pulse of OSM Contributors diary, I did follow each year cohorts of new contributors. As we see on the graph below, year after year, the great majority dont come back a second month.
Statistics about proportion of contributors by days of contribution also show a large percentage with 2 days or less. It would be interesting to see if contributors starting with mobile tools or via remote mapping in mapathons have a different Survival curve.
Looking at trends globally does not reflect the reality in various countries. I agree that POI contribution by phones or other mobile tools are valuable. This I suspect is the main contribution of local mappers in Africa. How can we help them to build a good map from there plus take account of massive remote contributions from remote mappers plus quality problems ?