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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?
Apple
250K map views / *day*
Mapbox
50K map views / month
Google ($200 credit buys you)
28k dynamic map views / month
TIL there is a paid API for google maps, I just assumed it was free to use. Seems pretty nickel-and-dimey.
We already have our own aerial tiles, built off the free NAIP imagery, and I just went through rebuilding the 2017 NAIP tiles last week to make them higher quality and fix some seam issues.
This combination is pretty good and lets us take control of our map tile destiny.
References I used in setting things up:
https://github.com/zavpyj/osm-tiles-docker https://switch2osm.org/ https://ircama.github.io/osm-carto-tutorials/tile-server-ubu...
"Sudden change of policy by Google, which is directed specifically at startups (as smaller web sites should largely remain below even the new lower thresholds), is surely an unpleasant surprise for us and does not create much trust in Google as a vendor. In the future we would therefore keep our distance from Google Cloud and avoid deep integration with any Google services on which it can pull a similar trick. For ex…
>In the case of maps, there weren't many great alternatives for a long time, due to Google sucking all the oxygen/profit potential out of the field with their excellent free offerings. ianal and all that, but isn't somewhere antitrust- or monopoly- adjacent? I know if walmart moved into a new city and started giving away hardware for free, then waited until all the local hardware stores had been shut down for 10 mont…
It's as much as a 28x increase in price. For Street View imagery, the cost has gone from $0.5 per 1000 views to $14 / 1000. Unlike with maps, Street View lacks a real alternative. I'm seeing my own costs, for a site which I run on my own, rise from $1,500 / month to around $30,000 / month. Their rationale is essentially that they did not want commercial users abusing their free tier. Before this change, they had been…
Though, Mapillary is quite interesting but their pricing model is not really comparable to Google's one: https://www.mapillary.com/pricing
"Sudden change of policy by Google, which is directed specifically at startups (as smaller web sites should largely remain below even the new lower thresholds), is surely an unpleasant surprise for us and does not create much trust in Google as a vendor. In the future we would therefore keep our distance from Google Cloud and avoid deep integration with any Google services on which it can pull a similar trick. For ex…
>In the case of maps, there weren't many great alternatives for a long time, due to Google sucking all the oxygen/profit potential out of the field with their excellent free offerings. ianal and all that, but isn't somewhere antitrust- or monopoly- adjacent? I know if walmart moved into a new city and started giving away hardware for free, then waited until all the local hardware stores had been shut down for 10 mont…
I don't know if this qualifies, and I don't know how much appetite there is for prosecuting Google for offering useful things for free. I don't think they've had much of a history of jacking up prices after killing off a market, until relatively recently. Interesting question, though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>In the case of maps, there weren't many great alternatives for a long time, due to Google sucking all the oxygen/profit potential out of the field with their excellent free offerings. ianal and all that, but isn't somewhere antitrust- or monopoly- adjacent? I know if walmart moved into a new city and started giving away hardware for free, then waited until all the local hardware stores had been shut down for 10 mont…
Don't Uber and Amazon do that already?