If you're not the leader in the field, and won't be able to catch up just by investing, you try to make the leadership in the field (Google's) irrelevant.
If the 2nd-best-by-small-margin base map info is open, having the best one isn't a competitive advantage anymore.
I've been trying to get Google to fix an incorrect path drawn at a state park that I frequent. I've submitted an alternative route twice now, but it's been denied twice with little explanation. The path is a loop, but Google has it missing half of the loop, off by an eighth of a mile or so, and has it drawn where it cuts through private property. In contrast, OSM's data is completely spot on with what my GPS shows.
The park is in a tourist area, and I go to this park often enough that I've actually ran into multiple people visiting who have been standing on the trail with Google Maps open on their phone, thinking they've made a wrong turn.
I've experienced the same thing at GNP in Montana, BWCA in Minnesota/Canada, and all along the Richardson Highway in Alaska. If you're in a rural area or on public land, OSM data is the best available --- even better than what a ranger station would sell you.
I'm sure that, for whatever product in the world, you can find a subset of people in the world who will swear that such product is, in they experience, the best in the world.
Google is basically the de facto map, even as far as many governments are concerned, and so showing localized maps of disputed areas may actually be saving lives.
The tiles served from osm.org don't.
For example, the Indian OSM community have an OSM map, which shows the borders of India as per Indian law (w.r.t. Kashmir)
https://openstreetmap.in/#5/22.150/79.081 vs https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=5/22.167/79.102
I'm sure that's true. Google Maps seems to be better or at least more consistent (and better at routing with real-time information obviously) for the things that Google cares about. Which doesn't include rural areas, hiking trails, etc.
Which is a subjective factor. "X is objectively better for the categories that I subjectively selected".
Mapping is a subjective topic, simply because there are endless ways to evaluate and compare maps, so attributing any type of weight to any factor is a subjective exercise based on your own personal preferences.
But if you have two maps and they both have a shared subset of layers, you can (for that subset) objectively evaluate which map more accurately represents the real world, eg: has more objects than the other map, and/or has objects marked more accurately.
And what I'm saying is that for the layers that they have in common, I think OSM wins hands down.
Where I went to college, near Rochester NY, housing data is nearly non-existent in OSM, while Google Maps happily provides it and 3D models of them too. Where I am in Seattle, OSM has parking information while Google Maps does not.
Plus finding good OSM apps is hard.
Contains ads, in app purchases
Hmm...
I think OSM is a great data source and I always try to contribute at least the business opening hours but it deserves a better application layer on top of it.
It's always interesting to see where my OSM data pops up, as I mapped a number of obscure cliff lines in in accessible bush, which are quite a distinctive feature. For example, participating in rogaining or orienteering events and realising that I drew the base map 4 years before!
For example:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/4532022
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/390264609
I tried to click/double-click the text "Kölner Dom" (which is how it works on GMaps) on https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/50.94132/6.95838 but it doesn't show anything.
By using the 'query features' tool on the right (the pointer with the question mark), and then picking the object you want from the list of objects in that area.
Other viewers of OSM data (like smartphone apps) can have different (sometimes easier) means of accessing that data. OSM is a database intended for use with many clients; https://www.openstreetmap.org is just one.
But people mostly don't want three or four different mapping apps to cover their use cases. Having it in one app is a better user experience.
(It's okay though, I'm happy to work toward changing that.)
If I enter my street address into Google Maps, it shows my house. If I enter it into OSM it says "No results found" and can't even figure out what country or city I am in.
In a similar situation with Google Maps, you wouldn't even have been given the opportunity.
This kind of patronizing attitude is unnecessary and silly. The vast majority of users of any software product are only interested in being just that: users. And that's totally okay. No need for passive-aggressive shaming.
Again, sorry.
Which country are you in?
Addresses here are written like "220/9 xo viet nghe tinh", which means "go to 220 on Xo Viet Nghe Tinh and turn into the alley there, go to #9 in the alley".
Typing "220/9 xo viet nghe tinh" into OSM results in "No results found". Instead I have to write "hem 220/9 xo viet nghe tinh" for it to find the road; no one writes it that way.
A house address would be "220/9/14 xo viet nghe tinh" meaning "go to 220 on Xo Viet Nghe Tinh and turn into the alley there; go to #9 and turn into the next alley you find there; then go to house #14".
The only way OSM can figure things out is if I write it like "14 hem 220/9 xo viet nghe tinh"
How does https://photon.komoot.de/ do?
openstreetmap.org uses Nominatim:
https://github.com/openstreetmap/Nominatim
The photon link uses Photon:
https://github.com/komoot/photon
Nominatim processes OSM data, associating items of interest with features like town boundaries that enclose the item, or place markers that are nearby, and then is also a fairly pedantic search interface for that data.
Photon takes the data that Nominatim generates and sticks a more flexible search on top of it.
Checking for/creating an issue for Nominatim describing the address format that doesn't work well would be a useful thing to do, as global support is a goal there.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.westnordost...
While contributing you almost feel like playing a game :)
CityMapper uses OpenStreetMap data for the cycle and walking route planning (even though the GUI is Google Maps). Best cycling directions you can get, full stop. The algorithm is by CycleStreets, a UK academic start-up out of a university.
Maps.me is more user friendly than OsmAnd and feels more like Google Maps, but needs internet and just feels a bit strange to me. Ad supported but you can turn the ads off in the settings.
They said that they checked and it is ok. I asked them how they did this because, well, I actually see the place twice a day. They said that they have ways to check (or smthg like that).
I then sent M their own stree view link and screenshot. Not good enough. So I have up, I do not need the gps to bike there twice a day.
Two years later, suddenly it was approved.
All my corrections are now approved automatically (within an hour or so) so they may have improved.
I also told them to check on OSM where I also updated some information about the surroundings :)
This is far more cost-intensive, both in upfront as in maintenance, than the translation problem.
Software is easy. The real world is hard.
The real-world constraint of translation software is building a sizeable quality corpus of real-world text with real-world living human translators. We're lucky that the EU employs literally thousands of translators to publish identical texts across languages (for free!!), which has helped make European languages pretty much a solved problem in machine translation. But anything non-european is still hopelessly incomprehensible, simply because we don't have enough real-world data.
For example compare the two following areas :
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/41.88846/12.49110
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.8884227,12.4916715,17.54z
Google Maps is lacking some details inside the park, you don't have any path, fence, grass, water tap, bench or bin.
The issue for OSM is that some less popular areas are totally barren.