Earlier quoted context omitted.
MapKit JS allows 250,000 instantiations and 25,000 service calls per day on the free tier. Currently you must have a paid developer account to use MapKit JS. Beyond that use this form to request an increase in your limit: https://developer.apple.com/contact/request/mapkitjs/ As for pricing, nothing has been announced at this time.
How much does the developer account cost?
Farewell, Google Maps
341–350 of 545 posts
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#342> OpenStreetMap is not supposed to be directly used by commercial sites What does this mean? How did Apple Maps use it?
> What does this mean? How did Apple Maps use it?
It's not true. Ish. On openstreetmap.org there's servers that render the map data into the images you see. That's run by volunteers, on mostly donated hardware and hosting. There is no SLAs. If you run your big commericial app against that, and cause the load to go through the roof, the volunteer sysadmins will be sad, and will block your app. It's not commerical vs non-commerical. Big non-commerical apps do get blocked for misusing it too.
You can download the raw data from ( https://planet.openstreetmap.org/ ) and run your own tileserver and use that commerically.
You can use OSM for commerical sites. You cannot use the volunteer hardware on openstreetmap.org for big usage.
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#343Seriously, build your own solution based on OpenStreetMap. It's a core project we should all support as we can all benefit from it. Google's model is to build a huge collection of data that is otherwise freely available, and then sell access to it. You can just take OSM data, put them on your own server and embed freely on your website, provided that you credit the project: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Legal_FAQ#3a._I_would_li...
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#344Would it be possible to use a local copy of OpenStreetMap database, not paying for API calls?
> Would it be possible to use a local copy of OpenStreetMap database, not paying for API calls?
Yes, plenty of people do that. Be careful "OpenStreetMap API" is only for editing. There is other software in the OSM ecosystem which has it's own API (e.g. graphhopper has an API for routing). But sometimes people get confused and try to use the "OSM [editing] API" for all sorts of things.
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#345I would never trust Google as a business partner based on only my personal experiences. Here is a list of problems I had with Google and its services;
- Firebase suddenly changed its pricing, claiming that they were calculating prices incorrectly. A tiny multiplayer game that I made for kids were not fitting the free tier anymore, and my account was locked until I make payment. A sudden e-mail at 6am in the morning was enough to take an app down. Customer service? It doesn’t exist. I lost the data and moved away. The stress didn’t worth it.
- Kozmos (getkozmos.com) extension was taken down although it was a simple, open source bookmarking extension (github.com/kozmos) with good description, many HQ screenshots and also a video. I noticed it when users began reporting they couldn’t find the extension. They didn’t even dare to reach me out after taking it down. I sent so many e-mails, users mentioned Google Chrome on Twitter, no response was given. Not even a single response. Again, I had no contact to reach out and ask what is wrong and how we can fix. I was so frustrated that I even wanted to build a new browser and ship my extension with it.
- Someone began impersonating me using my full name on blogger. I reported it countless times providing fresh copy of my passport every single time, not even a single response was given. No confirmation, nothing. The blogger is still there impersonating me. My friends also reported it, nothing happened.
Here is three experiences. Based on this, I learnt to never trust and rely on any Google service. The last thing is e-mail and search, and I’ll celebrate the day I’m completely free from any Google services.
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
I totally recommend hosting your own tile-server using open street map if you have the resources . Creating your own tile-server is not as difficult as it may sound however it is really resource intensive, especially if you want to cover large areas. For a single EU country it shouldn't be that resource intensive. I have set it up on a Centos 7 server using more or less the instructions from here https://switch2osm.o…
The fastest way, if you don't have resources and don't mind being up to a few months behind, is to use OpenMapTiles vector tiles [1]. The download is an SQLite database with a standard-ish structure (MBTiles), you can either write a small server or use theirs. I needed vector tiles in other projections — WGS84 equirectangualar, an Arctic one, and an Antarctic one. Generating those took many hours on a cluster. [1] ht…
Vector tiles is interesting and they are actually supported by GeoServer http://docs.geoserver.org/stable/en/user/extensions/vectorti.... However I wasn't able yet to integrate them to my GeoServer installation.
Has anybody else been able to try this?
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
Counterpoint: if these startups need a giant subsidized mapping product for free or else they aren't profitable, they weren't ever profitable . I mean, there's a real cry-me-a-river aspect here. No one has a Google-granted fundamental right to mapping. It's a free product Google released to drive traffic to their own offerings, and which they happen to make available for free for a lot of purposes. As it turns out, y…
Here we go again with the "No subscription fees means you have the right to like what we give you" argument. Haven't we beaten the "nothing is actually free" horse into the ground by now? There is the matter of the vast amounts of data Google collects from people, and the other intangible costs you incur from the lack of alternative products due to the high barrier to entry (hard to compete with 'free'), and of cours…
I completely disagree. You can find Google's pricing tactic aggressive, but it made me think about the entitlement there.
They complain that Maps at new prices would be more than the cost of their infrastructure, when actually their entire startup revolves around this data, and 5k to be able to use an amazing piece of high tech software that is ahead of the competition is..peanuts.
No matter what other business interests and strategies Google follows, there is no right to using such valuable tech for less than the monthly salary of an engineer. I find this incredible entitled.
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A big price bump with a few months notice is painful (and I'm glad it's bringing competition), but it tells me they're thinking seriously about how to sustain/develop the product and lets both them and me explore the real value of the service. This is a bit of “thank you sir may I have another”. 10x price increases? It’s not sustainable? This is just a money grab - they’re not going to give a roadmap for how in the…
Did you to read the article which mentions all the competitors that are available?
The simple existence of competitors in a market segment is not proof that there is no monopoly. We wouldn't say for example that there are realistic copetitors in the web search space or in the desktop OS space - maps is similar to both of these sitations.
(Now I realise that some people like to argue the toss about whether search and desktop OS are monopolies and to that I have no comment)
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#349I'm just finishing spinning up OpenStreetMap servers in EC2 as one of the last stages of our testing, and they look great. We almost went with Mapbox, which is probably a pretty good alternative. But as part of that move I decided to try OSM tiles and I had them up and running in an afternoon via a docker image, created an Ansible role for deploying virtual machines that evening, and had tiles for our region built th…
You can also prerender the tiles on a powerful machine and host them on a cheap instance (assuming you don't need very large regions). A while ago I created an OSM server (https://github.com/seemk/TileSweep) to do this for me, you can select regions you want to render via a polygon and you get a SQLite database of the tiles. It can also run as an alternative for mod_tile + renderd.
I rendered all of Estonia from zoom levels 0 to 18 (~16.5M tiles) which is around 20GB and host the tiles on a cheap DigitalOcean instance.
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem isn’t that Google wants to charge for a service. The issue is that they offered it for years for free or below cost effectively price gouging any competition. Now, with no alternatives they jack up the price. Classic monopolistic and anticompetitive behaviour.
Uh... the linked article compared 8 different competitors on various metrics. There are reasonable ways to disagree with Google's policy here, but "no alternatives" and "monopolistic" are just laughably silly.
Thats a ridiculous argument. There were competitors to standard oil too.