Over the past two years, the biggest buzz among the geo chatterati has been Justin O’Beirne’s meticulously argued (albeit bizarrely formatted) feature-by-feature comparisons of Google and Apple Maps: their design choices, their data, their production processes.
What fascinates me is how the comparison is implicitly phrased. Apple Maps is fighting on Google Maps’ turf, and Justin O’Beirne never questions that. He asks “How far ahead of Apple Maps is Google Maps?”. It implies the same direction of travel. They’re going the same place, but Google is getting there quicker.
Meanwhile, OpenStreetMap goes its own way.
I’ve never actively used OpenStreetMap, but I feel like I should give it a far shot at some point. Are there people in the OSAlert audience who use it? What are your experiences?
For that link, you’ve missed the ‘https://‘, so it’s ending up as a relative link.
https://blog.systemed.net/post/15
Your link is http://www.osnews.com/blog.systemed.net/post/15
It must be http://blog.systemed.net/post/
Anyway, rarely I am using OpenStreetMap, google maps is the default choice.
I am not even going to entertain the thought of using Apple map if ever it existed at all.
First choice Google Map, second choice OpenStreetMap.
(Note that my experience is limited to Tasmania (Australia), it’s probably far better in the US / EU)
I’ve found OSM to be quite accurate for mapping, I’ve not had any problems with the content at all.
I do find that it’s no good for addresses though; lookups don’t do very well on business searches or house numbers.
I’ve learnt to get around that by searching for addresses for businesses, and then scoping numbers as I go along streets, but it is a bit of a pain.
My work does the mapping/directions service for the local bus company and we’ve recently had to leave google maps/directions/places due to their massive price hike.
We have switched to hosting our own cluster of FOSS projects that use open data:
– Open Street Maps (+ leaflet)
– Open Trip Planner
– Pelias
– Elasticsearch
– Open Addresses
– Who’s On First
– GTFS feeds from transit providers
The system we’ve put together has been pretty decent as an alternative, and it does mean the transit company has the ability to fix crappy recommendations, whereas before we basically had to shrug and accept whatever google came up with.
It looks like I’m using it, or at least some of it.
If you enter an address into DuckDuckGo, and click on the “Open Map” button, the resulting map says “(c) Mapbox (c) OpenStreetMap” at the bottom. I’ve been trying use DDG instead of Google, and these maps can often get the job done for me.
It depends. OSM is much more detailed than GM: contours of buildings, addresses on them, even power lines. On the other hand, GM seems to be less about maps as such, more about locating businesses, road/street navigation, Google ad business. Needless to say – licensing is different.
I don’t use OSM directly, since from a map I need navigation, and it does not do that (also, around here, Google Maps provides a lot more info). But I use it indirectly: I play Pokemon Go andat some point Pokemon Go switched from using Google Maps to OSM. It was a smooth transition from a player point of view.
I have a photo project about taking pictures around Madrid, the city I live in. First, I used GM, but now I prefere the OSM API:
http://pedroreina.net/pm/mapa.php
MUIMapparium is a fantastic OpenStreetMap viewer for AmigaOS!
https://blog.alb42.de/programs/muimapparium/
I use it all the time as it is a very fast way of checking world map when going somewhere or just checking places.
MUIMapparium is free and is out for several AmigaOS systems:
Amiga 68k, 68020+, (68881+ FPU recommended) AmigaOS 3.0+
Amiga OS4, OS 4.0+
AROS i386, ABIv0
AROS ARM, ABIv0 ARMV6+ VFPV2+ HardFloat (e.g. RasPi 1-3)
AROS x86_64, ABIv1 (non SMP-Version)
MorphOS 3.8+
Vote up from me. I am Google free since 2 years (well, only cheat is LineageOS but of course without GApps).
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Recently I was on holiday in Spain and OSM was pretty good as satnav in the car on my phone. GM seems to know more about restaurants and commercial stuff but the experience was pretty good.
The search function could be improved: often too many results or not found at all but I certainly don’t long back to GM.
OSM is the default choice. It has far better information density than any other map I know. (Streets, hiking trails, bike trails, all in one)
If OSM fails me, I go to mapy.cz (czech)
Google maps are pretty much as a last resort, not only is the information there lacking, but very often also inaccurate.
I use it daily on sailfish os, works great in Norway, even for navigation. I also use it quite a lot when travelling, as I can pre download whole countries. Still keep google maps as a backup for when I need to find specific stores or restaurants though.
I don’t even know what it’s called anymore, Here WeGo? They were the old Ovi Maps, then Nokia spun them off into the Here! application, and then it became Here WeGo, owned by HERE Apps LLC. Nokia had bought someone’s mapping data (it’s eluding me who it was).
This app has 100% offline maps, something which google maps doesn’t or didn’t have for years afterward, and I really like the interface to it.
I also at one point bought the Navigon app, which is pretty good.
So it’s not just Apple and Google in this space, in fact I think at least Google Maps is kind of crap (I haven’t used Apple Maps).
I work on HERE maps. It’s good to know that someone likes it!
They are more detailed and good looking than GM (Here WeGo is also nice and has some beautiful 3D buildings) but it lacks street numbers for many places so it’s not so good for searching and navigation in those cases.
Also the experience depends a lot on the program used. I tried a lot (MapFactor, Navmii …) Each has its own problems. My personal favorite is OsmAnd. My biggest gripe with it is that it lacks 3D navigation but apart from that is very featureful, is open source with a plugin architecture and some interesting extensions.
How good OpenStreetMap is depends a lot on your location. Sometimes it’s better than Google Maps, sometimes it’s worthless. When it’s good, a lot of different maps are created based on it and people use it without realising it comes from OpenStreetMap.
When I first moved to my current location, all the major mapping software would drop you off at the _end_ of my street (nearly a half-mile away) and had the location of the independent addresses incorrect on the street.
In open street map, the problem was very apparent.
I’ve contributed fixes to that, along with building footprint outlines, correct driveway and address locations, and lo and behold, within two years all of the major mapping services have magically updated and now reflect the updates to openstreetmap.
Hmmm…
Either way, I’m just glad I don’t have to waive down couriers and service trucks at the corner and lead them down the street.
The company I worked for before used an OpenStreetMap based stack. In the beginning a Leaflet and Mapbox, later we hosted more and more of the components our self. The Google stack is sort of a black box when you are nothing more than a consumer but if you build your own you see that it isn^aEURTMt all that hard. Most of the building blocks already exist and Mapbox is sort of helping to drive some of the standards in in the open source community (like with tile formats).
When it comes to routing there is still a bit of a mess. The APIs aren^aEURTMt really standardized. They have some trade offs and even the return values aren^aEURTMt the same so a lot of companies fork the open source projects without contributing back. Besides my ex employer I now of another company that did exactly the same thing in city I live in (about 150,00 people).
Even the raw data is available and when we compared it to Google (about 3 years ago) the data for us in Bavaria was comparable. We had rural areas where Google was better and we had rural areas where OSM was better. In our city we found a lot of data in OSM that was way better than Google but wasn^aEURTMt necessarily exposed in the routing engines out there.
So my opinion is OSM can compete. What we need is better standards for the routing APIs that expose more of the details that are available in OSM data. There is directional data in streets, walkways, footpath and even river ways in OSM data to a level that is not necessarily exposed in maps or routing machines right now. That^aEURTMs a killer feature.
The biggest difference we notices was that payed for data had the delimitation of property boundaries in it and sometimes even indoor information like room size and location. In Germany at least this information needs to be paid for but it can be added to the OSM data if you want or need this in your tiles.
I’m hosting an instance for hosting tiles for few regions and for geocoding.
It’s great that you have ability to self host it, hammer your instance as much as you want (official OSM service throttled our devs at some point to 2 api requests per day, due to volume of traffic) and it works pretty well.
Now i am only reliant on officail project for updates.
I use it a lot, preferably to Google and other maps.
Works well for me in Europe.
Website on computers and OSMand app on Android.