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Comment by Daniel_sk | Hacker News Reader

Mapy.cz is far better than Google in case of Slovakia or Czech Republic. They have full coverage of high resolution pictures taken from planes and not satellites. Also these contain all the hiking, cycling and other routes. The native Android and iOS apps work great and support offline maps - you can download the whole map for a country with one click. Google Maps is unusable for sport or hiking because you only see a large green blob instead of the terrain with contour lines with altitude markings, all trails and roads and POI. Yes, Mapy.cz can't compete with car navigation, but everything else is miles better (and navigation on foot is better too).

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Google Maps just isn't very good for hiking. But it's not just a map, it's got the yellow pages, Yelp, and, depending on where you are, various other things like hotel booking and public transport routing thrown in. My recent favorite feature is the live estimation of how crowded a store is, very useful during the pandemic.

Much of this is stuff the software based on OSM isn't even trying, or doing so only very half heartedly, as far as I am aware. On the flipside, OSM is, in many places, peerless in its core competency, a detailed map that everyone can use.

Mapy.cz covers most of other use cases as well, including business info, public transport and other details. I personally find mapy.cz more tailored to pedestrian/public transport navigation within european city. The only feature which I go to google maps is the mentioned estimation of how crowded a place is (as this comes from android data, and google has an clear edge there).

The software supports the use cases but the data isn't there. Certainly for where I'm living. Most of the information is missing -- eg apparently there are no pediatricians in my city, many opening times are missing, in my area there are no photos, no reviews; other stuff is wrong. It's more comprehensive in Prague, though from a brief look Google still has more of everything.

I'm not saying that OSM (and other projects, but particularly OSM) can't catch up, especially when it comes to factual information. It has already shown that crowdsourcing can do better than Google at pure mapping.

Does OSM support address-based resolution of places? AFAIK, Google is getting things like store hours when it crawls websites. Which, of course, it's doing anyway for indexing. As long as it can figure out the address and the store hours from the website, it can put them on the map.

In the meantime, OSM generally doesn't even have place addresses in my experience. If I could resolve addresses to places in OSM, then I could easily write some scrappers to help out with filling in other data.

> In the meantime, OSM generally doesn't even have place addresses in my experience.

As @matkoniecz pointed out, OSM is quite capable of having place addresses mapped to a specific spot. If your experience has been that they are missing, then that is most likely because no one has added them to OSM for the area's in which you have looked.

But the good part about OSM is that anyone, including you, can add those details, and they appear in the main map within seconds to minutes of someone adding them. So you could help rectify the missing situation by adding some of that missing data.

If you don't want to learn all the OSM details, and provided some background details are present (generally building outlines for address data questions) one easier way to help add the data is via StreetComplete (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/StreetComplete). It asks simple questions, you enter the answer, and the app handles the low-level OSM tagging changes based upon the answer given.

I do contribute in my local area. But I'm talking about entire suburban cities with no addresses on any of the houses. It would take me months to verify all the addresses and enter them manually. My county property appraiser does offer some data files, but I haven't yet written any tests to see whether it's enough to reliably populate addresses into OSM.

Addresses and exact shop locations can be added to OSM.

See https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/50.07298/19.93528 where it is mapped at least in a small part.

> then I could easily write some scrappers to help out with filling in other data.

Note that it may not possible due to copyright issues

I'm not talking about adding addresses to OSM. I'm talking about resolving features based on address. "Give me the building at address (____), because I know that's a business and I can fill in additional information."

I quickly found this: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim

E.g.: https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ui/search.html?q=pilking...

Just tested for Germany (where I am living currently) and it is not very good: at the map level it shows the correct street number but it seems unable to use it for actual route planning (i.e. if you are in a street with numbers from 1 to 200 it seems to always calculate your arrival point at #1 even if you specificy that you are looking for "72/b").

Also, is it available as an app on iPhone?

Yes, it's available on iPhone. The company is based in Czech republic and originally they were focused on Czech and Slovak market, but they cover the whole world. I haven't tried the navigation, I only use it mostly for navigation outside of cities for hiking - I can have the whole tourist map in my pocket and offline at any time.

> Google Maps just isn't very good for hiking

I find openstreetmap.org to be great for showing hiking trails. At least for my local area.

I've spent a ton of time mapping out trails in my region on openstreetmap. I've found the issue now is the interface. The map data is only good if it can be easily read.

I'm starting to look at workflows for taking osm trail data and trying to make nice maps, but wow it is not easy to do!

Thanks! I use mapy.cz for everything, but my main reason are the hiking routes. I've contibuted some routes also (and city data using streetComplete), but certainly not a ton.

Agreed. It has the potential to be best bar none for this. Where it isn't, it is probably only a matter of time.

To be fair the crowded functionality in a map is something only Google could pull of since they are tracking all phones and locations. And it still has a bunch of restaurants listed in my neighbourhood that is clearly only containing rental houses and very outdated roads compared to Openstreetmaps.

In the US, I use AllTrails for hiking, which I think is built on Mapbox. Hiking, hunting, fishing, running, biking—all interesting examples of niche uses for maps that naturally lend themselves to separate user experiences.

> My recent favorite feature is the live estimation of how crowded a store is, very useful during the pandemic.

Unfortunately it's been completely useless in my area. I wish stores just allowed access to the cctv cameras on their parking lots so I could estimate for myself.

That’s valuable data for sale by other vendors.

What vendors are in this business?

Foursquare, but not with parking lot data, to my knowledge:

https://www.cbinsights.com/research/alternative-data-future-...

Satellite image companies sell this type of alternative data to buyers:

https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/how-hedge-funds-use-satel...

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/stock-v...

Some of the vendors are RS Metrics, Descartes Labs and Orbital Insight.

Unfortunate that none of these, even when purchased, would be a substitute for actually looking at the parking lot in real time.

Another big issue I've had with using Google Maps for outdoor trips is their awful offline sattelite map saving. There is no way to specify which layers to save and the level Google chooses could be anywhere from decent to utterly unusable. I've had saved maps that turned into blurry blobs the minute I lost phone service countless times.

I eventually gave up on using it and switched to a proper topo map app that actually lets me set the offline resolution and it has been vastly better.

That is true, it's an order of magnitude of difference. For example, look at this location:

https://en.mapy.cz/turisticka?x=13.8929744&y=50.0331743&z=14...

And compare it to Google Maps:

https://www.google.com/maps/@50.0297578,13.8901237,13.85z

Google Maps is substantially better at search and places data but this advantage is slowly shrinking.

Also, Mapy.cz has a tracker feature with online sync and gpx export.

Wow, you weren't kidding. Poking around real quick, the aerial imagery is super high resolution, on par with what you'd get with a consumer-grade drone flyover.

>They have full coverage of high resolution pictures taken from planes and not satellites

...as opposed to google maps not using aerial photography? AFAIK most urban "satellite" picture on google maps is also taken with planes.

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