51–60 of 290 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Time to move away from awful raster maps and to vector maps?
That would definitely help a lot (and osmdroid at least does support vector map sources); I imagine the traffic would still be significant though.
Even Apple the most valuable company in the world with hundreds of billions of dollars of cash on hand is way behind Google in terms of mapping. https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat/ If Apple has trouble keeping feature parity with Google Maps, there is no way that an endeavor like Open Street Maps has any real chance of making something with the breadth, features, and usability of Google Maps.
A big issue is consistency though: OpenStreetMap varies way more in quality between regions, to the point that detailed conversations almost make no sense without disclaimers about where you are talking. OpenStreetMap is a really good map where a strong community exists (either locally or dedicated remote interest) and a pretty bad map if no large effort has touched the area.
• Tags and relations are a total mess. There are many different and overlapping schemes. There is obviously outdated/sub-standard data, but automated fixes are forbidden. There are some neat tools to make sense of the tag data, but ultimately I had to deal with all that mess and complexity on my end.
• The lack of moderation or a way to officially act as an intermediary for edits (other than clunky oAuth flow) meant I couldn't expose an Add/Edit/Fix functionality for my users. Similarly, if I wanted to let my users upload a photo of a venue, there was no service to store it, no identifier or tag to associate it.
• The API returns only nodes entirely within an area, rather than everything intersecting a given area. If you fetch small lat/long area, you won't get a node for the country/city/district it's in, unless you stumble upon a point in its border or label. That meant I couldn't fetch things from OSM API as needed, and had to have my own copy of the data and the DB and custom search.
• The map looks ugly without buildings. There was free building data available for areas I was interested in, but I was told to copy them by hand.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is OSM not doing this? I swear I've seen them importing and updating street level address data in my city - it directly referenced some city GIS server. Maybe not officially, but someone must be running scripts that do this?
Somebody might be doing that for their area but for example I haven't seen that happen in Estonia where the government provides absolutely excellent data but there's no easy and meaningful way getting that data into OSM
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The world's biggest company (Apple) uses OSM directly sigh apple zealots... its big, i give you that, but sure as hell ain't the biggest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...
Largest by market cap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...
b) having the biggest market cap is something thats good for their shareholder, and terrible for anyone else. But yeah, do continue to praise your beloved highness.
He's not wrong. OSM is too complex for the majority of businesses. I know two that chose to pay Google for their mapping needs rather than jump through OSM's hoops. Imagine if the only way to get Linux on your computer was to download and compile the whole thing from source yourself, instead of buying or downloading a distro. If OSM had a mapping solution like Google's, it would thrive. And just for fun, it should un…
Ubuntu, Redhat, and many others produce their own polished, supported products, sell it, and then give back to the central parts of the community in the process.
Mapbox and others certainly seem like they essentially play the part of "OSM Distro" in that regard. And maybe its okay for multiple entities to be able to contribute in different ways.
I've found that in terms of supporting any kind of additional analysis, OSM data to be unreliable to the point of uselessness, which isn't to say there is a better alternative. I think this quote from your article: "One of the most significant technical problems with OSM is the lack of a review model, that is for a change to the map to be staged and then reviewed before being applied. Not having this functionality ca…
I remember just a few years ago, I got a new phone and was interested in replacing as many Google apps with OSS maps that I could. (K9 instead of Google's mail app, etc.) Naturally I turned to OSM instead of Google Maps. But I was really surprised by how strange and difficult it was to install and use. As the author mentioned, OSM itself doesn't have any apps, which is very confusing. After some research I figured ou…
Even Apple the most valuable company in the world with hundreds of billions of dollars of cash on hand is way behind Google in terms of mapping. https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat/ If Apple has trouble keeping feature parity with Google Maps, there is no way that an endeavor like Open Street Maps has any real chance of making something with the breadth, features, and usability of Google Maps.
Get Microsoft, Tom Tom, Samsung - everyone else - to work on OSM.
Right now, Apple is basically building the "Windows Phone" of map solutions, because it "wants to be different", and making the same mistake Nokia did in smartphones.
They should get over their own egos and actually choose the option with the highest chance of success against Google Maps.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Generally when I drive with Google Maps, I already know the route but want Google to step in when there's traffic. You should try Waze. I too mostly use Google to route me around traffic, but Waze is an order of magnitude better at it. It has more frequently updated traffic data and is willing to take you on side streets. For example the other day I was driving down a major road, and Google said to just stay on it,…
Waze is pretty great but it has a habit of running you through hospital parking lots to save 2 minutes or turning multiple times to avoid a intersection that isn't really that busy. What I wish Waze would do is have a mode that allowed me to learn a route. Maps, and Waze both 'optimize' so much that its sometimes hard to learn a route from point a -> b because every time you go it sends you on different paths. Many o…