Hacker News Reader

Comment by petre | Hacker News Reader

Apple, Amazon, Facebook and MS have been lately contributing a lot to OSM, so what you see on Apple Maps might very well be OSM data.

https://joemorrison.medium.com/openstreetmap-is-having-a-mom...

View on HN

Apple Maps has been OpenStreetMap for years.

Apple's old map was OpenStreetMap plus other sources but its new ones are proprietary. But its new ones are only available in the US, UK, Canada and Ireland.

I believe the old map was mostly TomTom (TeleAtlas) with a little bit of other sources sprinkled in.

Yes, more TomTom that openstreetmap, that was clearly show by the dataquality. Much less walk and vike information. If you don't drive a car all my sampling say OSM is way better.

No, Apple is USING OpenStreetMap which is a different thing - they pulled the data but haven't contributed much back as they're building their own proprietary backend.

Apple does contribute to OSM quite a bit, see around 4:00 in https://2020.stateofthemap.org/sessions/SPRQVZ/ for details of corporate contributions: "Apple is currently doing the most work on the map".

Here is the base repository of their contributions on GitHub: https://github.com/osmlab/appledata

And if I see this correctly, the #adt hashtag (for Apple Data Team) contains already +100000 changesets for this year alone: https://osmcha.org/?filters=%7B%22comment%22%3A%5B%7B%22labe...

They also pay Kaart to do it, so most if not all of the Kaart contributions are paid for by Apple.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Apple#Contributions_thro...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com