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Comment by stoicjumbotron | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. My dad always asks me what would happen if Maps was shut down? Do we have any alternative service? And I'm not able to give a concrete answer to his question.

Sure there is OSM, but apart from pure locations (which are community led afaik) I don't know of any good reliable service for navigation not reliant on Google.

Edit: Apart from Apple Maps as well. Just in case someone points out the major competitor.

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Apple maps isn't the real competitor to Google Maps in India. It is HERE - https://www.here.com/applications/wego ... Google was forced to offer offline maps in India and EU because the Here apps offered it for a long time. (Apple maps still doesn't but it has a slight advantage over Here in that it licensed data from JustDial, an online yellow pages services, and so it can show the location of many retail and other commercial outlets better). Here had Nokia as a stakeholder, but is now owned by consortium of EU automobile manufacturers.

Apple Maps is honestly no where close to Google Maps. Especially in dense Indian cities with multiple roads to reach a place, some roads are not even there on Apple Maps. It also (like OSM) lacks in contact details of businesses, open/close time, etc. which are a real value add for Google Maps.

Hopefully some real competitor emerges.

All the map data of google is public, it's probably been copied/vectorized/etc, add some errors to it, remove some streets, shift the street a meter or two, you got a comparable service. Probably google has a lot of checksums in there to see if it's their data you're drawing, but since maps is almost an essential service I don't think they can abruptly remove it without consequences, one of which would be to allow a new service even on stolen data.

Scraping Google's maps tile by tile would take forever, and you'd never be able to keep up with the daily changes submitted by users, much less the network effects (traffic, live busyness, reviews, speed traps, etc.)

I have started contributing to OSM by manually adding my locality data keeping Google Maps as a reference. Feels good tbh.

Apple Maps wasn't super helpful for me when I was there. Even within cities. They don't have a big enough team on the ground (yet?) to detail the maps out

OpenStreetMap data is better for routing than it is for location lookups.

In the US, there will be the occasional problem where some local street detail is wrong, but things like inter-city routing work great. You can do it on device with several different apps, and there are several different providers selling route calculation as a service that use OpenStreetMap data.

This is the first time I'm hearing that OSM is better for routing. Will have to check on the available apps on Play Store and from the list given by @matkoniecz there is only mapy.cz which had the navigation and the app experience was subpar for me.

Organic Maps and OSMAnd both have on device route calculation and navigation.

There's an Android app called StreetComplete that asks users to fill in information about stuff that's around them, and uploads it to OSM. For example, verifying street numbers on buildings, down to verifying the material the sidewalks are made of.

For OSM powered apps:

- Organic Maps

- OsmAnd

- mapy.cz

Note: Google has clearly better car routing and shop listings.

But for cycling or hiking OSM is typically superior.

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