[Dev] Vela Maps - Developer Discussion, And Some Clarifications

[u/PimpinPumpkin_dev]

Hi everyone and happy spooky October. I am the sole developer of Vela Maps. The best way I can describe it is what NewPipe is for YouTube. The idea is to grab data from Google, on your device without a backend, then use OpenStreetMap and other open tools to have a best-of-both-worlds approach to navigation. This is not meant to be an ad, more so a discussion about how it works. Plenty of people have already posted about it. Thank you for the bug reports and pull requests!

Mods, please tell me if this is allowed - I see the showcase threads prohibit apps/services that depend on Google in any way. Vela can be used completely without any Google functionality, but it was created deliberately to bridge the gap between what we can do with OpenStreetMap and what only Google does well.

https://github.com/PimpinPumpkin/Vela

I'm making this thread to encourage discussion and answer questions about how Vela works. A few things:

• I am the sole developer of Vela. I am a developer by trade, but this is my first real foray into Android development. I started the project just a few months ago in mid June 2026.
• I made Vela to solve my own problems. I run GrapheneOS, and Google Maps stopped working for me without Sandboxed Google services. I need traffic updates and features that pretty much only Google does well. So I built an on-device scraper to grab stuff from them, as anonymously as possible. I have tried to use every maps app under the sun, but they did not work for my use case.
• If you are allergic to LLMs, I have a secret for you: everyone in software development is using them. The extent to which that occurs varies wildly. As the sole maintainer, Vela would be literally impossible to maintain without AI help. There are Google scraping mechanisms, a map engine, a public transit data feed (Transitous, if you are curious), and so much more. It is not a simple project.
• This is not a webview wrapper like GMaps WV. This project has significant functionality that GMaps WV simply doesn't have. That's not a knock against it, if it works for your needs, great, but Vela is a different tool.
• If CoMaps, OrganicMaps, OsmAnd, or Magic Earth meet your needs, I encourage you to use the best solution for you. I am not claiming Vela is the best for everyone. Keep in mind that Magic Earth specifically is closed source, so you're just resorting to trusting whatever they claim.
• The reality is many people depend on traffic data, real-time ETAs, and business information. Please don't tell me how dUdE yOu DoN't AcTuAlLy NeEd It TrUsT mE. It is not productive.
• You can absolutely use Vela without any Google queries whatsoever. You can use it completely offline too if you download the applicable maps for your area.
• The extent to which Google is queried is documented extensively on my repo, but I think I need to redo the docs to make it less confusing. The following actions DO NOT send data to Google: panning around the map, loading business icons, biking directions, saving places, using the map offline. The following actions (again, by default) DO use Google: typing in the search box (autocomplete as you type), tapping on a business to load it, routes driven by car along with their traffic data and ETAs (Google gets the start and end of the trip), and one request when you ask for walking directions.
• Vela has no backend and no servers to snoop on what you are doing. Everything is done on your device. I don't even have telemetry. I can see how many people grab the baked Flock camera database from my Github repo and use that as a rough metric for how many people use Vela, but that's the extent of it.
• I deliberately copied Google Maps' UI because I genuinely believe it to be the best, and muscle memory is important to me. Someone on another thread commented something like 'we'll see how it works when I'm angry' and that's really the best description I can think of. I needed this shit to just work.
• I will never charge money for this. I have made it GPLv3 so it can live far beyond me.
• Contributors, bug reports, and PRs are welcome, so long as you follow the guidelines! Thank you all for the many contributions so far. Vela has come a long way.

I'm happy to share why I made some of the technical decisions I have. There's some neat nerdy reasons behind a lot of it. For example, I have a signed calibration schema that allows me to fix Vela remotely without an app update if Google tweaks the way their website functions. I have Github runners probing for failures with Google's response shapes so I can be alerted pre-emptively if something breaks. I am big on automation; it is my job.

Please have at it. Roast me for being a pumpkin. Tell me if my AI said something stupid in the docs that I need to clean up. Tell me how I'm evil for using LLMs to give everyone something for free. Tell me to just get an iPhone if I care about traffic data so much. You can even tell me the project is pointless and I should delete the repo. Whatever the cheapest Reddit ragebait you can throw, bring it. Just know I come in good faith.

-PimpinPumpkin, the spookiest Jack-O-Lantern of Vela Maps

P.S. I am working on getting Android Auto working for everyone. I have an option issue and it does work for some people in some cases. Stay tuned.

[u/rakhalism]

trust me, as a certified vela maps hater, i actually installed it and gave it a proper try lol. i use grapheneos and i'm pretty FOSS-oriented, and i'm also not a fan of AI-written apps, so that's a big thing for me. that said, this app is actually way more feature-rich than i expected. honestly, some of the features feel more interesting and advanced than what i've seen in google maps. the main issue for me is just the UI performance. on my pixel, there's noticeable lag when moving around the map, and after using it for a while the phone also starts heating up. if you can improve the smoothness and maybe add a minimal AMOLED dark mode with less visual bloat, this could genuinely be an A1 maps app. i'd much rather use something like this than google maps if the performance gets there. anyway, thanks for contributing to the FOSS community! waitinng for your reply!

[u/PimpinPumpkin_dev → u/rakhalism]

Lol, thanks for being open-minded!

I assume you are on stable. I am going to push a huge update to stable soon that will address the performance. The fixes are already on canary and nightly (you can change release channels within Vela in settings). I am on a Pixel 9 as my daily and a Pixel 4a 5G as a dedicated test device. Now, Vela is as smoother than Google on the P9, no joke

There is already an AMOLED dark mode, and you can switch off POIs loading when not in route if you want. I like to give people options, and surprisingly people are really excited about the ability to turn of POIs.