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Amazon Location Service

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Re: Amazon Location Service

#21

Post by dheera »

ZeroCool2u wrote: post #9

Honestly, I'm surprised that Amazon hasn't done this sooner. Google and to a lesser extent Apple both have a huge lead in this space. Amazon is one of the few companies that can afford the massive capital cost to create this kind of service. I am curious about the quality though. It seems like they're just reselling from 3rd party data providers. Hopefully, we see this forcing price cuts to Google's Maps API at some…

Yeah me too. Google's cloud APIs especially the location related ones have always been a royal pain to use due to limits and really weird policies around how you are allowed to use them (for example, you have to provide attribution, you cannot use them in vehicles, you can't cache, you can't scrape, you can't create content from Maps content, you can't use it near a non-Google map, you can't use it in certain territories, etc.)

I'd much rather have a service that I just pay for and I can then use however I want.

Re: Amazon Location Service

#22

Post by pheelicks »

I've read through all the docs and it is unclear if aerial imagery is supported. I just launched a JavaScript 3D mapping library (https://github.com/felixpalmer/procedural-gl-js) and would be up for trying it out if it were supported.

Also interesting to see them use Mapbox as an example of an open source library that can be used with this. They obviously haven't been paying attention this past week.

Re: Amazon Location Service

#25

Post by jack_riminton »

cldellow wrote: post #17
jack_riminton wrote: post #15

Always great to have an alternative to Google but I'd encourage anyone to have a look at Leaflet.js which is a great free alternative and doesn't take much JS knowledge to get up and running Edited to say: and of course it runs on OpenStreetMaps

Leaflet.js is just the client piece. You still need a tile server, which is one of the commercial services being offered here. While you _can_ use the OSM's tile servers, they offer no guarantees: https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/ They also have ongoing operational problems/expenses from people using their tile servers, and it's possible that they will one day break you in order to keep their own s…

Ah understood

I've always used MapBox free tier for tiles (which I believe may be changing) so this could be a good alternative for that

Re: Amazon Location Service

#26

Post by swiftcoder »

ZeroCool2u wrote: post #9

Honestly, I'm surprised that Amazon hasn't done this sooner. Google and to a lesser extent Apple both have a huge lead in this space. Amazon is one of the few companies that can afford the massive capital cost to create this kind of service. I am curious about the quality though. It seems like they're just reselling from 3rd party data providers. Hopefully, we see this forcing price cuts to Google's Maps API at some…

Amazon acquired a mapping startup and built out a full 1st party maps product for the FirePhone launch. I'd assumed that was discarded along with the next-gen FirePhone - but it's possible bits and pieces of that effort ended up being integrated into this offering.

Re: Amazon Location Service

#29

Post by christocracy »

nickpatrick wrote: post #24

If you're looking for a simple, polished, developer-friendly alternative, check out Radar ( https://radar.io ). Think Twilio/Braze/Amplitude/Segment/Radar vs. SNS/Pinpoint/EventBridge/Location Service.

Tim Hortons in Canada is being probed for using Radar Labs in their mobile app.

"Tim Hortons' parent company, Toronto-based Restaurant Brands partners with Radar Labs, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based company , which provides location-based data analytics, and helps the Tims app to identify when users are near competing fast-food restaurants and coffee shops."

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-privacy-wat...

Re: Amazon Location Service

#30

Post by BoumTAC »

why nobody use openstreetmap ?

I was always wondering why google concurrent don't use OSM, the quality is better than here and they would benefit a lot from OSM to compete against google.

I don't understand why microsoft doesn't use OSM for bing map to replace their shitty map and why facebook doesn't use OSM to display map.

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