Why Use OpenStreetMap Instead of Google Maps?
openstreetmap.org
openstreetmap.org
But frankly, it seems it's still a lot of work to build OSM into your own website/app, setting up your own tile server.
I know there are instructions for this [1] [2] -- but to really get popular, it seems like there really ought to be up-to-date, auto-updating, officially recommended and totally secure server images on Digital Ocean, AWS, Google Cloud and Azure where anyone can spin it up for $5/mo without even ever having to SSH in once (except to update the root password), and then embed a live JavaScript map into their web page with two lines of code -- one to load the library, and one to insert a live map of a given size centered on a given location. Where the whole process shouldn't take more than 10 minutes, and most of that is waiting for the image to be copied to your server.
I've Googled but I can't find anything like that -- with the links below, I assume I'd be using at least a day to set things up, especially since setting up servers from online tutorials never goes smoothly, as you have to google error messages that arise since newer versions have changed slightly since the tutorial was written... And most times where I just want to "throw in a map", I don't want to spend a day+ doing it.
[1] https://switch2osm.org/manually-building-a-tile-server-18-04...
[2] https://ircama.github.io/osm-carto-tutorials/tile-server-ubu...
On a related note, Firefox on Linux came with duckduckgo as default and I am so impressed with it's search results. Unfortunately their API does not return the same quality of results
I'm sorry you've had problems adding your card. If there is a systematic problem with some bank, I can sometimes do something about it (but no guarantees). I've added my work email to my HN profile, incase you want to reach out to me.
I gave DDG a new chance a few months ago, first just on my phone as a pilot. It was good enough that I switched on all my devices. Huge difference from a few years ago!
Plus volunteers to answer any and all support requests? And the tile rendering needs to be fast? $5/month isn't enough hardware to a world-wide tile server and it sounds like users aren't willing to pay for setup costs.
> just want to "throw in a map", I don't want to spend a day+ doing it.
There's plenty of SaaS offering OSM tile hosting. If those are too expensive (quite more than $5/month, some have pay-as-you-go pricing) it's an indication running those servers is more complex than it seems.
> Where the whole process shouldn't take more than 10 minutes
That said, check out https://openmaptiles.org/docs/ installation. (They will charge up to 1000 USD for commercial use, free for personal project).
But on a serious note, yes, it would be nice if there was some pre-built container that just served the OSM tiles on an HTTP port. I imagine most people integrating OSM want to use their existing static-file-serving setup, which is why it doesn't already exist. (Or maybe it does, I haven't looked.)
In the end, Google Maps is free for 25,000 map loads per day and you don't have to run any servers. I'm guessing this is why it's more popular. The $5/month the OP ballparks as a price is how much Maps would cost for 760,000 map views per month. In the end, I doubt you'd do a lot better than that unless your bandwidth is free or you're serving a lot of maps. This, I guess, is why OSM isn't much more popular. The map data ends up not being the expensive part; bandwidth/hosting is.
I think the innovation in OSM is being able to use it for whatever you want. Garmin bike GPSes don't even use Garmin's own map data anymore; it's apparently cheaper for them to just use OSM data. That's because they don't have to pay the bandwidth hosting costs, they just dump the data out of the database and give people that care an update every 6 months. Each incremental map render costs them nothing, and nobody can stop them from using the data however they want. Pretty interesting that it ended up a better deal for them than using the maps they collected themselves (and probably supplemented with other vendors' data that won't let them use it on that "download once, use forever" model.)
This statement is true for a few more hours. As the headlined article informs us, Google changes its pricing plan tomorrow, 2018-07-16. Instead of 25000 free loads per day, as of tomorrow people get USD200 credit per month, on accounts that now must be backed by credit cards (or have billing enabled). Google tells us that a credit of USD200 per month is equivalent to 28000 free loads (of a dynamic map) per month (not per day).
* https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/pricing/sheet/
* https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/pricing/
Hence the timing of the OpenStreetMap article, of course.
I work in a small municipality so we don’t really have the resources to do the integration ourselves. What we did was find a company which specializes in making google maps like APIs/integration to osm as well as having a support line that can correct osm mistakes for us.
This is not free, like doing the integration ourselves would be. I can’t give you the exact price, but it is a lot cheaper than google maps and it’s worked great for us for several years now.
We did by a package with little osm support because we can update osm ourselves, but calculating routes is something we could never do within our budget.
If your country doesn’t have any companies offering these types of osm services, then I bet you could make a lot of money by building it though.
Perfect example of stifling regulations hurting the average person.
If it did not have that snark though, one could make the point that the data could still be 'deanonimitized'.
This is a guess, but I suspect the point had to do with data privacy. Maybe someone wrote legislation that prohibits public websites from hosting ads, or third party browser-tracking software. And google maps fits that.
In the parent comment, there's also this bit:
> but it is a lot cheaper than google maps
If true, this is an example of government regulations working as intended, and saving money.
But this amount of work is just too much.
Besides running your own tile server I'm also having problems using OSM to navigate. In the meantime I use G-Maps for stuff that is important and when I have to find my route quickly, it's just more reliable (it hurts to say that).
You assume wrong. :)
It takes an hour or so to get a tileserver up and running with the switch2osm instructions. I've done it countless times. (You do then need to wait for the Postgres database to populate, but that's just fire-and-forget.) They're written for Ubuntu LTS versions so the "newer versions" issue doesn't arise.
Or if Docker's your bag, you can get a ready-to-go image from openmaptiles: https://openmaptiles.com/server/
> where anyone can spin it up for $5/mo
Not gonna happen. Running a worldwide map server needs a lot of (SSD) storage and decent CPU. I have a £10/month Hetzner VM just to do geocoding (with Photon: https://github.com/komoot/photon) so you aren't going to get a tileserver for half that - and that's no surprise; OSM is ultimately competing with Google, and you can't really expect to host your own Google for $5. But there are plenty of hosted options with tiered pricing.
It is a one-liner:
L.tileLayer('https://{s}.tile.openstreetmap.org/{z}/{x}/{y}.png', {attribution: '© <a href="https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright">OpenStreetMap</a> contributors'}).addTo(map)They are easy to download for offline use. Following the suggestion of friends, I have repurposed an old phone as a "travel phone" with maps of the whole world (or at least the parts I can download!)
Not perfect, but when I catch a plane, I don't have to worry about local networks.
Fun story: recently in Europe, Google Maps stuttered. Now and then, there was a networking issue. It is almighty wiseness, Google Maps was then showing a white page instead of showing me the previously downloaded maps. This was irksome, especially in navigation mode. I was litteraly following my way on the screen, when it turned white in front of my eyes. Several times. I turned white too.
After that, I decided I would take a chance with the backup plan. I turned off the phone and used the travel phone instead. No network, so no lookup of business names, but Here maps offline with street addresses did better than Google Maps online.
I called that a learning experience. I later was told Google Maps lets you download some tiles, but it is not as convenient as having litteraly every continent saved. I do not want to plan what part I may need. Just "down it all"!
Google Maps experience with offline downloaded maps is 100% quality and absolutely not "sub-par" or "frustrating".
When you open apps like Hangouts, Google Maps, etc. on low-bandwidth connections, they immediately try to sync an onslaught of data before making the UI responsive based on the existing offline state. Data that could take hours to sync at 5kb/s.
There's no reason I haven't have a text-only messaging conversation perfectly well on a 2G network. Except when Google tries to sync 50MB of pictures from a conversation I haven't even selected yet, and all of my 500 contacts' profile photos, before I can do anything else.
Incidentally, this is why everyone outside of North America uses WhatsApp.
One strange thing I've noticed over the years is there's a difference on Android vs Apple -- can't count the times I've gone to the wrong place following the Android tablet in the car only to have to pull up the address on the iPhone to get there. When they first put the tablets in the cars I was using the navigation and it took me into the alley between the houses and "you have arrived"...in their backyard. Not very helpful.
Honestly, though, I rarely use navigation unless I'm feeling really lazy or going somewhere complicated enough that I can't figure out how to get there by just glancing at the map. 100% don't use navigation on the stupid tablet in the car.
Google Maps keeps notifying me of "you are at X, would you like to review it?" So it can't make useful notification anymore either.
Selecting areas to download is more of a hassle than with OSMAnd, and the map data requires more storage space. I've also frequently experienced severe degradation in the detail of the voice prompts for turn by turn navigation when the phone doesn't have a data connection, where the phone only saying "in a quarter mile, turn right" without giving me a street name or exit number, let alone lane information.
Having read the article I think it's using a great little leverage point: Do you have a website with a map? Does the map not work anymore? ("Yikes, will my map stop working," people think)
OSS doesn't have to win big popularity battles; the little cases here and there just add up over time. Soon it's in the background of everything, even proprietary software, because it's so useful that migration and contributions to the source code make sense.
Just in the past decade Kitsap County (just across the water from Seattle) has renumbered 300k addresses. Google Maps is buying their address database from a vendor that rarely pulls this publicly posted data, thus leaving Google a few years behind (except for spotty user corrections). OSM comparatively gets this data right from the county every week, which is great since they're renumbering 30k more addresses currently. Google will take a few more years to get any of this data if they stick to their current operational model.
When nobody uses Google Maps, Google Maps will never have good street/address data. In developing countries there's no official government office to get this data from, just user data.
OSM has a share-alike clause, which would require G to share all their own data with everyone.
Isn't that the entire point of open source technologies? If a platform is open source, then you can make whatever custom changes you personally need and make it work for your particularly scenario.
Downloadable maps, archivable maps, platform independent maps, faster loading maps, more accurate maps, more niche data centric maps, and fail-safe maps are all examples of maps that a particular person needs in a particular setting at a particular time.
It is not software for the masses, just software for the massive number of little things you could possibly need.
Anywhere you go far from a city will lack a network.
Probably the best UX of any map apps and some great sounding voices.
Someone said I found an obscure usecase. I disagree. Navigating without a reliable data connection is not obscure and uncommon!!
Even if it was, my obscure case is very embedded in my mind. I don't care about the 99% cases when google maps work. I care about the 1% when it doesn't work while I need it.
This is why after this, I've decided it was safer to migrate my mapping needs to a more robust solution.
I don't care about how wide user adoption is. I care that it solves my problem better than the alternatives!
This right here is a huge reason I distrust Google apps. When it's good, it's good, and when it isn't... it's terrible.
Except for the ads, which I consider to be pretty terrible UX compared to not having any ads.
I'd be willing to pay to avoid any ads in HERE Maps.
I've definitely seen ads in it before, can't recall on which of Windows/Android/iOS platforms though.
ADDED: I always download the OSM data into Maps.me on my iPhone before I travel internationally. If nothing else, it's a useful backup.
Also, including the App that was a lot of downloading just to look at a single map.
What? GMaps alone is already 30MB and has to download all of its maps on the fly. What do you think, that Google alone has a magic way of making up maps out of thin air?
And of course you can download whole countries at once, Germany for instance is ca. 1GB, which is totally doable on your home WiFi.
I have several countries and states on my phone, totaling about 600MB; I download a country on WiFi before leaving for the airport, and I'm guaranteed to have a working map with routing regardless of how well data works when I arrive.
maps.me is really excellent. The only thing is, it's owned by Yandex (the russian equivalent of Google), so your whereabouts are reported to the NKVD/KGB/FSB/whatever-it-is-called-these-days rather than to the NSA.
Yes it's a little less convenient than live data, but it works great for me. I have an Android phone with no mobile data plan. So whenever I'm in an area that I'm not familiar with, I just download to offline maps and I'm good to go.
For the first 25 years I drove a car, I had only paper maps and/or written directions whenever I needed to go anywhere. So Google Maps even in offline mode is still like magic to me.
I haven't used Here Maps so I'm not sure what it's like, but at least using OSMand I do have lookup of business names. Furthermore, I've been planning a trip recently and found out that Wikivoyage actually offers GPX files next to at least the articles on the places I'm going, containing the addresses and descriptions of places of interest. I loaded them into OSMand, and it's a pretty great experience.
[1] https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/reports/search/com.her...
There are some practical caveats in using it though: -If You are planning a ride by car, the estimated time for Your journey most likely be way (waaaaayyy) off. Especially in Asian countries that are less covered. It can show 3 hours in a journey that is 8 hours without traffic. -some areas are completely not covered (I mean at all)
But for bigger cities it's pretty good in coverage
I love using Google Maps for my applications, but I'll definitely look into OpenStreetMaps now.
I registered the domain thislocation.com a while back. Through some other work I'm doing, I'm hoping to release a platform and datasets that allow you to build/upload/download arbitrary metadata schemas that you can attach to a location (coordinate/POI etc).
The data will be freely available to other platforms, OSM compatible as much as possible. The goal is to pull up a location and there could be hundreds of interactive datasets about it specifically or nearby. Anything from a live audio recording of a space, to drone footage, lidar/radar captures.
The project started when capturing lidar & precision gps data recently, and not having an easy, agnostic platform to just upload and allow it to work easily. The goal is to understand common data patterns so the App will just consume where it can, or allow extension via custom schemas where needed. Everything now seems to be poorly design UI's, corporate desktop software, or if it is a modern online platform, it's too specific to a particular vertical.
I don't really feel like the layers/photos etc experience of google earth are really the best way to explore mapping data, as well as displaying thousands of markers. We are trying for different approaches based on the types of media.
A user can keep their data private, or share it publicly but it will be just like opening Google maps online, typing in an address etc, then toggling datasets in a modern, beautiful way that just works. hiding the map when needed, activating different pages when more appropriate. Everything defined in JSON Schema etc, no new standards or KML/XML, maybe compatible exports if needed.
Apologies for the long pitch, just wanted to share about this side project, and love for open mapping data.
IMO the biggest takeaway from this article. I've hacked up plenty of projects on using Google Maps, but would definitely think again with this much lower free limit. Though, on the bright side, it seems that Google has finally made Maps pricing transparent:
OSM maps are quite detailed, perfectly serviceable...but Nominatim is not very good (at least in my experience?) I used https://github.com/perliedman/leaflet-control-geocoder to interact with Nominatim but entering something that can sound relatively common (like a mall or an abbreviation of an institution) will come up with locations in entirely different countries than the user had in mind and at least in the case of that geocoder control (props to the dev for making it, BTW) there isn't a clear way to determine WHERE something is before selecting it.
I noticed this when I searched for "Mall San Pedro" and was returned the right location but it was displayed as something completely different, under the name of the street. It's a little disconnecting.
I appreciate that it might come down the libraries and tools that are querying Nominatim with certain design decisions, but the useful of a database is in the implementation of it into tools.
With this API a lot more is possible than with nominatim.
I will keep this handy for any future geomapping projects I work on (which sounds like a possibility given that this was interesting to work with)
- https://openmaptiles.org/languages/native/#0.88/0/0
- https://blog.wikimedia.org/2018/06/28/interactive-maps-now-i...
An example would be small towns in the US. They probably don't have a Welsh name, even if there happens to be a direct translation into Welsh.
We get silly things in Wales like Cymraeg mono-lingual government announcements/adverts on the radio (accessible to about 7% [1] of the population vs c.100% if they were in English), motorway signs that are only in Cwmraeg for half the people passing them (they change over, useless if you passed already), travel announcements in Cymraeg first. Heck, if you ring 999 in an emergency you have to wait for the Cymraeg speaker to finish their 20s message before you start your call.
Welsh people use British-English language predominantly; the Welsh name is the name in English, the Cymraeg name sometimes differs.
[1] roughly: ~15% of the adult population say they know any Cymraeg, half of those are fluent (self reported). FWIW half of those fluent say they prefer to use English. So one could argue you're catering to <4% of the population.
Not my experience (English - Somerset based - with quite a lot of work and friends the other side of the bridges). If you show some respect towards others, I generally find it returned. They are also not users but speakers. The only time I find dual language to be a bit of a pain is in lifts: being told the doors are closing in two languages is bloody stupid.
and want to deny that Welsh counties were annexed in to England and want to try and hold back the tide wrt English language use in preference to Cymraeg.
You might want to reread your history books and concentrate around 1066. The Norsemen didn't really give a shit whether you were "welsh" or "english" (neither of which, as we now know them, really existed as such at the time). You were probably a vassel, whatever language you spoke. I can't remember or even be bothered to look up when the concept of county was created. I think we still had hides and hundreds back then.
Re counties, there were established principalities in the West of the British mainland -- Gwynedd managed to subdue many of these other counties (ie independently governed areas), whilst paying fealty/homage to the English Crown, once Gwynedd had subdued Deheubarth and Powys and such, they (Llewellyn The Last) stopped paying the Crown. At which point Gwynedd was put down, handing their recent won territories over to be annexed to the "English" King's territories (Edward I).
I don't think the Welsh counties in general were divided in to hundreds until Henry Tudor (who also issued a writ demanding use of English across his whole territory). Hides and hundreds, like the words, are Anglo-Saxon I think?
AFAICT Gwynedd grew strong (post-Romans) by earlier conquest by Vikings and Irish-Scots.
You're right, the Norse, like the Romans before them didn't care what tribe you hung with, Wales is called that because it's the bit the Romans hadn't conquered yet (cf Walloons, Wallachia (? in Romania)); which is down to physical geography. Same with the Norse AFAICT. And the same in the other direction with why Gwynedd was able to conquer the principalities but not subdue the Marches or Pembrokeshire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/112_(emergency_telephone_numbe...
Surprisingly, even discounting this, the crowdsourced POIs are quite accurate.)
/rant
In other words, both are correct. Choosing the one that's appropriate in a specific context...is a tricky problem.
> because it looks very ugly when you only drive through it on the highway
A lot of places look ugly if you stay on the highway.
Your attitude pegs you as a fellow Dutchman holding the classic but outdated, tiresome, and condescending view of that city that you only pass it on your way to France for the holidays. But do stop there some time, the past decade has been kind to it (the modern train station is beautiful). Keep in mind that this is a large city in an area dominated by the coal industry for the better part of the twentieth century.
What I find interesting is that the road signs in the Netherlands say Liège whereas in the few km of Vlaanderen on the way there, they insist on Luik. But this is what makes Belgium, Belgium.
[1] - https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebuilding-maps-f...
[2] - https://electrek.co/2017/07/03/tesla-map-navigation-open-sou...
This is a literal description of the physical space we occupy. The knowledge of "what is there" should not be owned by any entity.
Now, I am aware that map data includes more than just "what is there" and one could argue that certain types of metadata can be more appropriately owned than others. But on the whole they should be the minority. In particular, the metadata required to "make sense of it all" should be free: Systems for searching between the wildly different naming conventions and other mapping oddities in various parts of the world.
I am also aware that certain parts of map data may be classified to certain governments. Exceptions could be made. I'm not sure what the best solution is but it's not that important as these spots are a minority of the world's mapped area.
Not sure what you are talking about, but I am not prompted to pay for updates. In fact, I'm installing some updates and new maps right now. Even the 'live' feature works. I am using the f-droid version of the app though, so maybe that's the difference?
This app is excellent. I'll probably donate. I would be totallly comfortable with doing this if they made their UI free, making osmand a completely free software.
I which I could use it on a regular computer, or if a web service provided something similar to what we get with osmand, the experience of its offline search included.
Next step would be mapillary providing a free app to contribute to their database or osmand providing a way to do it.
I haven't done it in quite some time, but if that is overly burdensome, it is also possible to avoid needing access to their servers by building a map file yourself.
Very slick, works well, offline. I guess aimed more at outdoor use than cities, or driving.
I love OSM but editing is horrible. Draw a small path that wasn’t there before, pick from 500 different labels and tags (landuse:path or landuse:track?), make one small mistake, get a passive aggressive reply from an experienced editor that is basically “get off my lawn” and have your edit reversed...
Popular times (Maps) in Google Maps is incredibly useful and a good example, requests to expose this data are ignored. Some may argue Google has a right to therefore it should. The data is gathered in numerous ways, perhaps unsuspecting mobile users is one which method is used to.
I want more competition, I don't think a flood of Maps providers is a good thing either. A single source of really good data is what is needed. Perhaps OSM can be that, or perhaps smaller Map providers can provide data to an open standard for which OSM can use through some type of exchange license.
The routing has many different cycling modes, and you can also click the little leaflet icon on the right and switch the view to "OpenCycleMap" to get a more cycling-oriented map view.
(Please remember: driving, like all practical and modern travel modes, is the art of getting from point A to point B as quickly as possible. I don't get paid to sit in a goddamn parking lot that calls itself a "highway", nor to sit in the other parking lot that calls itself a "two-lane rural road", nor to superspeed through an overly non-straight two-lane rural road while the other roads are actually performing as advertised.)
Gmaps has stopped being useful to me since searches in a given perimeter do not show all results spatially at any given zoomlevel, and whole roads and labels go missing if you zoom out a little bit to much or too far in. It used to be a fairly good product around 2012 but has since then declined in utility, especially in contrast to all the catching-up the competitors did in the meantime.
I suppose a huge part of Gmaps business nowdadays is the embedding of Gmaps in 3rd-party products.
https://osm.rrze.fau.de/testhd.html
OpenMapTiles.org provide vector tiles using OSM, but they don't include all the data for efficiency.
I think the problem for OSM is choosing which data to include in the vector tiles. The tile could get very large, but the outdoor view benefits from including electricity pylons.
Doesn't google already do this? Shops with paid advertisement come much higher than unpaid shops.
Only if you are a new user. Google published a transition document for existing users and it says they don't have to add a card, but then of course your maps stop working for the rest of the month if you go over the $200 free quota.
So current users have it easier, but new users have to add a card.
"If you choose not to add a billing account, there is a risk that if your usage exceeds $200 in a given month, your Maps API implementation will be degraded or other API requests will return an error."
https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/user-guide/pricing-ch...
So you can choose not to add a billing account if you are an existing user, but then maps won't work beyond the $200 credit/month.
Which agrees with "Is a credit card or billing account required? Yes." on the other page.
That second part is the difference between the docs for new users vs. existing users.
But we'll see who's right soon. Tomorrow.
This seems a bit tin foil hat to me. Has Google been caught doing something like this before with malicious intent?
Google Maps is not perfect but is there an OSS alternative to :
- a map
- a strong search engine
- POI synced on the cloud
- powerful transport/traffic route calculation
I can't use a map service without these features.
Facebook and others will always be in charge unless open source software gets good enough to form decentralized networks compete with it. It has to be user friendly and developer friendly enough to gain massive adoption.
Here is Qbix Platform. It took 6 years to develop, is open source and free.
Correcting the spelling and always guessing what your query means... Well not so much.