Have you ever tried to share a location with a OSM based application with another person? I have tried many times. My issue is that I’m almost the only person not using gmaps, and so far I haven’t been able to do that successfully. At the beginning I thought it was a Google thing, where they forced their product down everybody’s throats by ignoring geo: URIs, but last night I found the reason:

Messaging applications do not recognize these URIs.

To be honest, Google does somehow force themselves on everybody’s throats: It doesn’t send geo: URIs, just a link to goo.gl. Many other Android map apps do the same, not always to goo.gl but other times to their own sites. So far I have only found OsmAnd that sends geo: links. But all of them can handle such URIs, they’re not stupid :)

Between sender and receiver there’s the messaging app, which acts a the transport. So far I have found only Element Android (Matrix’s client) that recognizes geo: URIs as links and lets Android resolve that into a map app. Other IM apps treat them as just text. Most browsers will handle geo: URIs if they’re a link in an HTML page, even on the desktop version, but most will not handle it if you type it in the location/search bar.

I know this does not seem completely related to OSM, but I think that being able to share locations from any map app (most of them OSM based), using any messaging app and viewing the location with any map app (again, most OSM based) is a good thing to have.

I started a small wiki page tracking app status and sometimes links to the issues in their bug trackers we we could go and put some pressure for support. osm.wiki/Geo_URI_scheme Go and vote in your favorite apps, or open new ones!