Free & open source · GPLv3

Google Maps,
degoogled.

Vela is a maps and navigation app for Android that pulls the data you actually rely on, live hours, traffic, transit and reviews, straight from your own device. No account. No API key. No Play Services.

Android 8+ · runs beautifully on GrapheneOS and every de-googled ROM · no ads, ever

Turn-by-turn navigation in Vela
The walkthrough

Everything the big app does.
None of the strings.

The same live data, drawn on open vector tiles, fetched anonymously by your phone the moment you ask for it.

1

Live traffic, real ETAs

Turn-by-turn that knows what the road is doing right now: traffic-aware arrival times, faster-route offers when things jam up, lane guidance, highway shields and speed limits. Spoken by a neural voice generated on the phone. Here is exactly how it sounds:

The actual nav voice, generated offline
2

Search that knows what’s open

The business data that makes the big app hard to quit: ratings, reviews, prices, photos and live opening hours, fetched fresh when you look. Filter by open now, rating or price, and see it all as pins and rated bubbles right on the map.

3

Bus stops that tell the truth

Tap any stop for a live departure board built from open GTFS feeds: every route, real-time countdowns, official line colors. No more guessing whether the bus already left.

4

Follow the whole line

Open any route from a stop and walk its full stop list, with scheduled and live times for every station down the line. Tap a stop to jump to its own board and keep exploring.

5

Light, dark, and fully offline

A hand-tuned palette in both themes. Download whole states and keep the map, routing, place search and a typed-address geocoder working with zero bars.

And then some

Small app. Long feature list.

Street View, in-app

A keyless panorama viewer with walk arrows and time travel through old captures. Drop the little guy anywhere.

Camera aware

Community-mapped license plate readers drawn on the map and counted per route, so you can pick the quiet way.

Self-healing

When upstream data shifts shape, a signed remote calibration fixes the fleet in minutes. No app update needed.

Voice search, offline

An optional on-device speech model turns "coffee near me" into results without any recognizer app or network.

15 languages

Interface, spoken guidance and place data localized end to end, with downloadable voices to match.

Runs on keypad phones

Every screen works with a five-key D-pad and no touchscreen, down to tiny flip-phone displays.

Privacy
Your map should not have a memory.
  • No account, no sign-in, no API key
  • No Play Services, no Firebase, no analytics SDK
  • Your GPS trace never leaves the phone
  • Place lookups go out anonymously, from your device
  • Every network call is documented, and the optional ones have switches
Read the full privacy doc
0
accounts, trackers and ad networks
100%
of navigation runs on your phone, voice included
GPLv3
every line of source in the open, forever
Screens

Looks like the app you already know.

That is the point. Familiar where it helps, honest everywhere else.

Get it

Free forever. Pick your channel.

Weekly stables, nightly builds if you like it fresh, and an in-app updater either way.

Simplest

Direct APK

Grab the latest release from GitHub and sideload it. The app keeps itself up to date from then on.

Latest release
Power users

Obtainium

Point Obtainium at the repo and choose the stable or nightly track. Clean, automatic, signature-checked updates.

Setup guide
F-Droid users

F-Droid repo

Add the signed Vela repo to any F-Droid client and updates arrive alongside the rest of your apps.

Add the repo
Get it on Obtainium Get it on F-Droid, through Vela's own repo

Prefer to build it yourself? It is a standard Gradle project with no secrets required: git clone, ./gradlew :app:assembleRelease, done. See the build docs.

Keep Vela going

Vela is free, ad-free and always will be. No accounts to sell, no data to mine. If it has become useful, a coffee helps cover the time. Entirely optional.

Buy me a coffee