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Comment by pojntfx | Hacker News Reader

May OpenStreetMap prevail!

OSM has impressive geographical data now, but in the meantime Google Maps has gone well beyond "we can help you find that street address."

Their places data, reviews, photos, navigation, and street view are all adding a massive amount of value. They have shifted the goal posts.

I find most of the things you list add no value to me. Photos and reviews are of no interest to me in a navigation aid. In my home town at least (London), I frequently find their places data wrong with marked locations being several streets away from where they actually are. Finally, Street view, which previously I've found super useful, is being ruined in London, as the contractors who are providing the latest updates are phoning it in by submitting reams of data with the pictures taken at night, so you can't see anything in them (flash cameras being a super bad idea for mounting to a car).

Edit: I submitted two reports of bad StreetMap pictures a couple of months ago on the issue of the pictures being taken at night. In both cases the bot which handles those reports rejected my categorising them as "of poor quality", and I heard no more about it. But prompted by writing this post, I've just been back to the two locations I reported (on opposite sides of central London, one in Hackney, one in Mayfair), and now find that the StreetMap data is once more pictures taken in daylight. So thanks Google - thanks for telling me I was full of shit, but actually fixing the problem.

I think there is a good argument to be made for crowdsourcing some of those as well.

Absolutely. There could be some amazing projects and businesses built on top of this data if it were in OSM.

That's how Google did it!

>Their places data, reviews, photos, navigation, and street view are all adding a massive amount of value.

This is where OSM should move.

There's https://openstreetcam.org/ and https://www.mapillary.com/ for anybody who want to contribute. It's a huge operational cost to run such a service for free. OSM doesn't run donation campaigns like wikipedia/wikimedia does.

No, OSM should focus on what it is and what it does well. Reviews and photos are bound to attract a lot of garbage and problems. Navigation sure, there is lots of that available on OSM data already. Street view is also already covered by mapilliary and openstreetcam.

OSM's success has largely come from being efficient and focused. Adding photos and Street View would move into areas where the project has no expertise.

For navigation, on the other hand, it's already streets ahead (pun unintentional) of Google et al... for those of us who travel on foot or bike, that is!

> in the meantime Google Maps has gone well beyond "we can help you find that street address."

None of which has any real value to me.

How can I replicate the common UX of trip planning on my laptop and then send to phone with the directions with OSM? Ideally with offline maps.

I really want to love OpenStreetMap but the usability gap is huge.

I am happy to pay for something too.

OsmAnd. Not sure you need to use a laptop at all with that, but you can also route over any gpx track so you can generate that on your laptop. The ux is of course not as good, but my girlfriend and I got used to it pretty quickly and use it for all our routing.

I wish there was an app using OSM that had at least some usability and design. I tried some but had to quit out frustration.

maps.me is pretty good IMO

Didn't know it used OSM. Good suggestion.

Sometimes you have to sacrifice usability for something more important. AMP is a good example. Users love it. It's more usable, but HN thinks it's evil.

HN can't be wrong, right?

Do users love it, or even notice it? I haven’t seen any data either way.

I’m not implying such data don’t exist; as I’m not deep in SEO or anything like that I would t be exposed to it. Any pointers?

Embedding content inside walled garden and taking away control from content creators is a little bit more than "sacrifice usability"

> Users love it. It's more usable

Not all users. I hate it, and I don't really find it more usable. I find it more limiting.

The complaints about AMP are not unique to HN, either. I see them in all sorts of other places.

Not OSM, but I have been using HERE[0] with success for a while (if only to diversify off of Google products). Curious to know if anyone has done more research/has an opinion on their platform.

[0] https://wego.here.com/

I used it for a while as it was the maps provider on my Windows Phone, and it was fine. Not always as up-to-date as Google, but it was competitive.

How long ago was that? OSMAnd+ has come along in leaps and bounds in the past couple of years.

Also, all of them (on iOS at least) "force" you to download maps for offline maps.

I don't want some city I visit once in my lifetime permanently taking up storage...

Just delete it afterwards, the map download is usually only 30-100MB, and downloading it in advance means it will always be there on your trip, without needing data access.

Guru Maps is pretty nice, available on iOS and Android.

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