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Comment by yosito | Hacker News Reader

I really wish Apple Maps was available on web or Android so there would be a viable alternative to Google Maps. I love and use OSM apps, but they're lacking any up to date local business info, and often can't find my searches, forcing me to switch to Google Maps to find what I'm looking for.

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It is. See duckduckgo.com and check out their maps.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=san+francisco&t=h_&ia=web&iaxm=abo...

Well that’s a stretch. It’s there as a JS embed that requires a paid API (with unknown costs past the free tier).

There’s no first party website and the JS embed looks to be mainly just a way to show places on a map, not access most of the place data you’d find in the iOS/macOS apps.

What unknown costs?

It’s covered by your yearly developer costs.

> (with unknown costs past the free tier).

The website directs you to contact them for pricing past the free allotment. Hence "unknown costs" or I suppose more accurately non-public pricing.

Check out MapKit JS: https://developer.apple.com/maps/web/

Apple Maps uses data from OpenStreetMap, so shouldn't it be as good (or bad) as OSM is? On Android, try OrganicMaps. It's a fork of the Maps.me OSM client by the original devs. It's good, but then again I've made thousands of edits to OSM around my city so that's part of it!

I use OrganicMaps. It's fine for road maps and addresses when I have the number. But there's very little up to date local business information. I use maps apps like people used to use phone books. But OSM data just isn't suitable for that in most places.

You can add the missing data yourself (with OrganicMaps), then everyone can profit from it!

Hmm, I think they are licensing their data from TomTom. Not from OSM.

I'm not super familiar with Apple Maps, but it's common to use a mix of data. OSM may provide the base, but Apple almost certainly has done their own search indexing and may be curating business info from other sources and user reports.

Or they may be using OSM in some places and other sources in other places.

The new revamped maps being rolled out are made by Apple. I guess the older one was as good as OpenStreetMap and TomTom.

Uses, doesn’t mean use exclusively.

All map providers use osm as a data source.

Except Google.

When I worked at HERE, until late 2018, it was company policy not to use any OSM data at all.

HERE, along Apple, Google and TomTom, is one of the four companies in the world that create original digital map data, from scratch, on a planet spanning scale.

Note that OpenStreetMap project also collects data on a global scale (and actually better than HERE in most aspects).

And technically it is company (in UK law sense, not in "a commercial project" sense)

Looks like they're sort-of working on it. For example, this link to Buena Park works on the web:

https://maps.apple.com/place?address=Buena%20Park,%20CA,%20U...

Or Houston: https://maps.apple.com/place?address=Houston,%20TX,%20USA

Here maps is a great alternative to Google and Apple maps - even allows you to download the map data for offline use.

Here WeGo - https://wego.here.com/

HERE WeGo

https://wego.here.com/

But i agree, Google was smart to have all the POIs

Interestingly the Android app just got a complete redesign. I assume a redesign of the website will be coming too.

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