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Farewell, Google Maps

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Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#141

Post by abduhl »

izacus wrote: post #57
abduhl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually my real question: can these companies afford it? If a company has X months of runway and their Maps costs just went up by a factor of 11 then Google may have just gone from "less than payroll" to "more expensive than our devs". Is this Google trying to move into a new space?

Do you really think you can just jumpstart a project like Google Maps with a few devs?!

My question is pointed at companies that rely on Google Maps, not Maps itself. If a company is spending 80% of their cash on HR related items and 20% on miscellaneous infrastructure costs (hosting, Maps API access, etc) with 25% of that misc cost being maps then monthly expenditures just increased by ~23% (and runway decreased by ~19%)

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#142

Post by jseliger »

Zaskoda wrote: post #103
linsomniac wrote: post #65

I'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…

I only came to the comments to upvote whoever mentioned OpenStreetMaps. It needs our love.

I only came to the comments to upvote whoever mentioned OpenStreetMaps. It needs our love.

This is the platform Maps.me is based on, correct? I ask because I downloaded Maps.me the other day, after reading HN, and have found it to be missing most businesses that I've attempted to search for. In addition, there seems to be no obvious way to suggest missing destinations.

I too want Google/Apple maps alternatives to succeed, but my limited trial so far has not been promising.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#143

Post by MattBlissett »

voxadam wrote: post #126
MattBlissett wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You mention being "a few months behind", what is the reason for this lag?

My apologies, I'm out-of-date with the commercial offerings of OpenMapTiles — I work on an open data project, eligible for OpenMapTiles' free license which has old (currently one year old) tiles.

With a commercial license, the tiles are from 2 July.

I assume the commercial tiles are a few days behind as it's just not worth most people's effort to stay up-to-the-hour — different map services can offer that, this company is making easy self-hosted map tile packages.

The free license is presumably using older data to encourage an upgrade.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#144

Post by pjungwir »

izacus wrote: post #61
pjungwir wrote: post #23

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?

Displaying maps on Android remains free... so I guess people are doing nothing?

Okay. I've read that in a few places, but never anything that seemed quite clear and authoritative enough to really trust it. For instance Google's docs [1] say:

    In addition to the $200 monthly free credit, all users get:
      
      Free Maps usage for iOS, Android, and Embed
      (for displaying maps only)
But in a section about Dynamic Maps and Street View they also say:

    This change affects the following Google Maps Platform APIs:
    Maps JavaScript API, Maps Static API, Street View API, Maps
    SDK for Android, and Maps SDK for iOS.
So are maps on Android only free if the user can't interact with them?

[1] https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/user-guide/pricing-ch...

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#145

Post by lucb1e »

bambax wrote: post #33

It's not hard to produce your own tiles from OpenStreetMap data and serve them from your own server using something as Leaflet. If you only need to show maps, and if OSM data is good enough in your part of the world (a big if), this is the way to go. What is very hard is coming up for a replacement of either geocoding/reverse geocoding, or routing; many solutions exist but most don't really work or are quite difficul…

> and if OSM data is good enough in your part of the world (a big if)

Same for Google Maps: https://twitter.com/lucb1e/status/522491538912604160

Most of us here are from reasonably rich countries, and here Google is always fine, while OSM is usually fine (but not always). I am curious if you compare a few hundred random populated places on earth, how they compare. Where it is not economical to create a map, as in the tweet above, Google Maps is terrible. OSM is more often terrible in a country where they have just enough money to be worth it to Google, but where OSM just didn't happen to catch on among local mappers. You only need a few dozen for a country of a few million.

The Netherlands is truly the best country on OSM that I know of: 100% road and address coverage, and there are always people who love to jump on new things like a new bridge or tunnel. Somehow almost all the cyclepaths, trails, etc. are also on there.

Turns out, a grand total of 65 monthly active users maintain it.

I was very surprised. Apparently it doesn't take that much to maintain the map. If we get a few hundred people to work on OSM once a month in a given country of average size, it seems that you can maintain a map of a quality higher than Google Maps, at a tiny fraction of the cost (look at the expenses of the OSM Foundation), while being objective and free for everyone (scientists, businesses, consumers) to use.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#146

Post by Const-me »

megous wrote: post #75

> Google Maps is objectively the best product on its market, in many regards positioned light years ahead of its competitors. No. Google maps is an absolute, washed out turd style wise. We have much better local competitor. Compare this: https://www.google.com/maps/@50.081478,14.4272906,13z https://mapy.cz/zakladni?x=14.4068130&y=50.0892746&z=13 You can try various zoom levels, and mapy.cz is always better. Much more…

> You can try various zoom levels, and mapy.cz is always better.

mapy.cz indeed has more data but visually, Google IMO looks better on my Windows PC. Maybe it’s high DPI support, maybe it’s font rendering, but small labels are barely readable in mapy.cz, compare the screenshots yourself: http://const.me/tmp/maps/mapy.png http://const.me/tmp/maps/gm.png BTW, Microsoft did even better: http://const.me/tmp/maps/ms.png

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#147

Post by MattBlissett »

bflesch wrote: post #128
Symbiote wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you miss where they wrote "a developing country"? There are places where a software developer's good salary is $10,000 a year. Google doesn't need to provide a service in that country, but it's understandable that a 20× increase is going to hit harder than in a wealthy country.

No I did not miss it. Also I'm based in a neighboring country to Poland. The salary you mentioned won't get you a software developer anywhere in the EU. I am only pointing out that entrepreneurs need to rethink their business models if they are hit by this price increase, as this is a very strong indication they are not working on a healthy, high-margin business.

I very occasionally work with developers from places like Benin and Zimbabwe, so I'm giving the benefit of the doubt here.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#148

Post by rickycook »

asadlionpk wrote: post #66
6cd6beb wrote: post #55

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?

i think uber at least (not that i want to defend anything they do) is different, because they don’t have low rates to smother their competition; they have low introductory rates to attract riders and drivers to the service

unsure if that’s also predatory pricing? seems different to me

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#149

Post by rch »

I've had acceptable results with GeoServer, OpenLayers, OSM, and PostGIS. I've occasionally done proof of concept work with Leaflet, but that's always turned into Google Maps eventually.

MapBox isn't perfect yet but I'm eager to see them deliver on engineering... it's been about a year since I've looked.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#150

Post by lucb1e »

makomk wrote: post #121
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #110

> OpenStreetMap is not supposed to be directly used by commercial sites What does this mean? How did Apple Maps use it?

It means that you're not meant to use their servers to supply your map tiles (basically, image files that cover an area of map). You're supposed to either use one of the commercial tile providers or set up your own tile rendering servers. All the code and data required to produce tiles identical to the ones on openstreetmap.org is open source and freely available so in principle this isn't a big deal. This company ju…

> This company just wanted a direct drop-in replacement for Google Maps that didn't require running more of their own servers.

All the while complaining about how expensive Google has become.

Hosting OSM is definitely cheaper than Google Maps, but it's a little ironic that they didn't consider this alternative solution.

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