The maps you make are yours
A track is a day you spent outside. A route can be several evenings of planning, and the waypoints for water and camp are often things you learned the hard way. You made all of it. You should be able to keep a complete copy, whenever you want, without asking anyone.
Most mapping apps don't let you. They'll export one track at a time, if you're lucky. Few export a whole account at once, and fewer still include the folders, notes and photos. The only complete copy of your trips stays on a server you don't control, owned by a company that might just sell out to a PE firm.
Owning your map data means:
- You can download all of it in one go, whenever you like.
- Nothing is left behind. Tracks, routes, waypoints, areas and photos, along with how you organized them: which folder a route is in, which waypoint a photo belongs to.
- It's in formats you already use: GPX, GeoJSON and JSON in an ordinary ZIP. Unzip it and drag a track into any other map app. Interoperability is crucial for open data.
MapLiberator does this today for the apps that don't. It runs in your browser, with your own account, and writes everything directly to your computer. Your data never touches any other servers. There's no account to create and no analytics. The code is MIT licensed and on GitHub, so you can check all of this yourself.
MapLiberator shouldn't need to exist. Getting everything out of a mapping app should take one step, and so should bringing it into another. Until that's normal, the extension does the first half, and the specification is there for anyone who wants to build the second.