Offline, privacy-respecting public-transport journey routing

mobile app venture scale ••• trending

Privacy-minded and offline-first travelers want real public-transport journey planning (bus, train, metro routing with schedules) without handing their movements to Google or Apple Maps. The most-reacted Organic Maps issue is a multi-year plea for transit routing that is still active this week, and OsmAnd's offline transit is schedule-blind and often fails. The opportunity is GTFS-backed, on-device transit routing for the de-Googled and offline crowd, possibly delivered as the data pipeline both apps lack.

builder note

Because an active PR already targets Organic Maps, pure 'add it to one app' is half-claimed. The open lane is packaging GTFS feeds into offline-routable bundles, the data pipeline neither app has solved, which a separate product could license to both.

landscape (3 existing solutions)

Good transit routing today means real-time online services that track you. The privacy and offline maps this crowd actually uses either lack transit routing entirely or do it without schedules, leaving accurate offline journey planning unsolved.

Organic Maps Privacy-first offline maps with zero public-transport routing today. A community PR (#12890) is in progress as of 2026-06-08 but unshipped, so the feature is wanted but not yet available.

OsmAnd Offers offline transit routing from OpenStreetMap data, but it uses default per-vehicle speeds from a routing config rather than real timetables, so journeys are schedule-blind and routes frequently fail to generate.

Citymapper / Transit / Google Maps Accurate timetable-based journey planning, but online-only and tied to account and location tracking, which is exactly what this audience is trying to avoid.

sources (1)

other https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/5331 "Implement public transport routing" 2023-06-13

mapstransitofflineprivacygtfs