Is it fair to say that MapBox is moving into auto services?
Or to put it another way, is it not a good idea for me to move to a different provider for basic mapping services?
Or to put it another way, is it not a good idea for me to move to a different provider for basic mapping services?
The big money is helping big corporations (including automotive) with advanced use cases around logistics, very detailed 3d maps, gis, etc. So, that's increasingly what they are doing at the cost of the business that made them big (shipping good quality openstreetmap based maps and OSS software). They are now very similar to Here, Tomtom, and a few others. The latter two used to be mostly about consumer navigation products for in cars but that is now a commodity business that got disrupted by Apple and Google just bundling it with their phones (actually Nokia started this by giving away Here maps 14 years ago). Mostly if I'm in a rental car with tom tom / here maps built in, I end up using my phone with Google Maps instead. Just easier for me. Both will get me from A to B. I don't pay for it directly. That's no longer a viable business model.
We are currently using maplibre with Maptiler.com as our maps provider. We may have to switch maps provider for some of our customers (our German customers are picky about where their data is hosted). Maplibre has been pretty solid for us. Last year when I had to pick a library, I briefly considered Mapbox and then noticed all the activity around the newly created maplibre fork (and the reasons it was created) and went there instead. All the commit activity happening there is no longer happening around mapbox. That's the value Mapbox lost by going closed source. So unnecessary and short sighted.
It seems so
https://www.mapbox.com/navigation/
Perhaps that's just their 'thing' for now and their core mapping/viz work will continue - I hope so as it's great tech and still relatively open compared to other cos.