Farewell, Google Maps • Hacker News Board

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#21

Post by RestlessMind » Thu, Jul 19, 2018, 9:34 PM UTC

> Importantly, prices are the same from US to the Africa, despite the fact that revenue generation is vastly different in most developed countries compared to the others.

This can be understood in two ways:

1. Cost of serving is the same from US to Africa (datacenters, network bandwidth, engineering etc), so prices are same

2. If #1 results in less adoption from developing countries, it is okay because they are not the focus anyway (i.e. SV companies are focussed on US/EU markets first). So getting rid of non-revenue making chunk of traffic doesn't hurt much.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#22

Post by zylepe » Thu, Jul 19, 2018, 9:35 PM UTC

This mentions Apple mapkit js. This is the first I’ve seen of that. Has anyone used it before?

I’m wary of building anything on a proprietary JavaScript api, but if they provide tiles that can be used in leaflet or mapbox gl it might be an attractive option.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#23

Post by pjungwir » Thu, Jul 19, 2018, 9:35 PM UTC

I have a native Android app I need to update before Thanksgiving. Right now the map uses Google Play Services. I've done fairly deep OpenStreetMap projects on several websites, but with Android I'm afraid what it will mean to find a Google alternative. What are other people doing there?

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#24

Post by finnwolff » Thu, Jul 19, 2018, 9:36 PM UTC

does anyone know if this development will affect users of MapKit that hosts Google Maps within an iOS app? I've been using Google Maps through this SDK for over a year and haven't heard anything about them charging for the service or being able to track usage as one scales.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#25

Post by spaceflunky » Thu, Jul 19, 2018, 9:36 PM UTC

abduhl wrote: post #10

Is this price increase imposed on X-sharing outfits like Uber/Lyft/Lime/Bird/etc.?

IIRC Google Maps via the iOS/Android SDKs remain free, so theoretically the price increase does not apply to mobile-first X-sharing outfits like Uber/Lyft/Lime/Bird/etc.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#26

Post by spaceflunky » Thu, Jul 19, 2018, 9:38 PM UTC

finnwolff wrote: post #24

does anyone know if this development will affect users of MapKit that hosts Google Maps within an iOS app? I've been using Google Maps through this SDK for over a year and haven't heard anything about them charging for the service or being able to track usage as one scales.

Nope. Pretty sure usage through the SDK remains free

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#27

Post by seshagiric » Thu, Jul 19, 2018, 9:38 PM UTC

It's strange they haven't tried Bing Maps (differnt than Azure maps), it has a much rich web control and support for Javascript which per the article was one of the selection criteria.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#28

Post by edgarvaldes » Thu, Jul 19, 2018, 9:38 PM UTC

b212 wrote: post #19

There's a small Polish startup that helps people find nearest pharmacies with given drugs. They did pretty nice analysis and found out their whole infrastructure costs $1300 a month and they would have to pay additional $5000 for Google Maps alone (right now GM costs them nothing). Looks like GM will be ~10x more expensive to them than Mapbox or MapTiler, here's the original article (in Polish) translated by Google (…

This thread is precisely about that company

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#29

Post by ethelward » Thu, Jul 19, 2018, 9:40 PM UTC

zakk wrote: post #18

Would it be possible to use a local copy of OpenStreetMap database, not paying for API calls?

Totally. You also have business offering an API to OSM data that they mirror and host themselves.

The limitation is for the openstreetmap.org website, that is not dimensioned to be heavily used.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#30

Post by Groxx » Thu, Jul 19, 2018, 9:41 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #11

izacus wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC that's for the openstreetmap.org site, which wasn't built to answer queries from hundreds of commercial apps (like Maps API is). You're supposed to copy and deploy the dataset on your own servers so you don't burn bandwidth of the OSM project.

There's some other options too for people who want to use OSM data, but avoid deploying it themselves. One of the ones I discovered is that MapQuest (which it doesn't look like they considered) offers OSM data and APIs as an option alongside the MapQuest proprietary data and APIs: https://developer.mapquest.com/documentation/open/ And there's several other places that offer this as well. So the advantage of building…

MapQuest seems like it might be 6x more expensive than the others listed in the post, if "transactions" are the same concept: https://developer.mapquest.com/plans ($100 for 30,000 transactions)

(transactions aren't defined anywhere I can easily find tho, so it's possible this isn't correct. but I don't really mind prematurely concluding that they're significantly more expensive if they don't clearly describe their pricing system.)