MapUnpack
🌍 Independent Geospatial Project

About MapUnpack

MapUnpack was created with a single, urgent mission: To liberate irreplaceable travel pins, trekking waypoints, and personal maps trapped inside proprietary, orphaned container formats.

The Real-World Crisis We Solve

For nearly a decade, Maps.Me was the undisputed lifeline for backpackers, solo travelers, bikepackers, and camper-van explorers navigating the world without cellular roaming. Over 140 million users saved hotel locations, hidden trails, mountain summits, and favorite local restaurants on their offline maps.

However, when corporate acquisitions shifted the application toward financial services and closed architectures, millions of travelers realized their data was locked inside a closed binary format: .kmb.

When users tried to move their saved places to Google My Maps, Garmin, or OsmAnd, they hit a wall. No mainstream online file converter supported .kmb. The only working options were complex C++ command-line utilities compiled from developer repositories or emailing zip archives to volunteer maintainers.

Our Engineering Philosophy: 100% In-Browser Privacy

Location data is deeply personal. Your map pins reveal where your family lives, where your children camp, and your personal travel itineraries.

We fundamentally rejected the traditional SaaS architecture of uploading user files to remote cloud servers. Instead, we reverse-engineered the binary serialization specifications and compiled the coordinate transformation engine directly into WebAssembly and client-side JavaScript.

Zero Server Processing Every byte of your .kmb file is decoded in your device's local memory. No files are uploaded.
Google Maps Limit Bypass Automatic layer chunking ensures large collections (> 2,000 points) import into Google My Maps without errors.

Commitment to Open Geospatial Standards

We believe that user data belongs to the user, not to application developers. MapUnpack translates closed binary blobs into universally accepted open formats:

  • OGC KML 2.2 (Keyhole Markup Language for Google Earth & My Maps)
  • GPX 1.1 (GPS Exchange Format for Garmin, OsmAnd, Gaia GPS, Komoot)
  • GeoJSON (RFC 7946 standard for GIS analysts and developers)
  • Tabular CSV (Comma-Separated Values for Excel and Google Sheets)

Get in Touch

MapUnpack is actively maintained by an independent group of open-source cartography enthusiasts. If you encounter an unusual .kmb file format variant or have suggestions for new map formats, please reach out via our Contact Page.