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Comment by tony_cannistra | Hacker News Reader

> charge for access to the maps we've already paid for with our taxes

No one is gate-keeping these taxpayer-funded resources, which is sortof what you're implying here. It costs money to process, host, and deliver these taxpayer -funded maps to people, especially offline.

If you're a legacy user of Gaia, I'd encourage you to give the app another shot. Originally Gaia was the best way to view USGS quads on your phone. Since then, we've invested a ton of resources and engineering into building a vector topographic map based in OpenStreetMap, which I think is a huge value add for backcountry users.

We give that away for free.

But if all you're looking for is USGS topos, I'd use Avenza.

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ESRI and the USGS provide WMS tilesets of USGS topographic quads. So a generic WMS viewer capability with the ability to save cached tiles offline in Gaia could provide that functionality without incurring additional bandwidth costs. Except of course, users might prefer these maps to the in-house ones that you charge a subscription for.

The subscription model has distorted the smartphone map app ecosystem, just like it has the rest of the software industry.

For the record, OSM maps lack the detail and reliability of the legacy USGS 7.5 minute topographic quads. For that matter, the most recent USGS topographic maps are themselves almost as bad as OSM! For best coverage I would recommend the 1990s series or earlier. ( https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-do-us-topo-maps-differ-histori... )

For Android, OSMAnd is good enough for navigation and Qfield can load any GIS vector or raster layer from a desktop QGIS project.

Esri does not provide free access to their tile sets for offline caching.

I encourage you to check out some more modern OSM maps, like ours :)

I hadn't tried Gaia before today. Gave it a whirl and looks like a great tool for my backpacking trips. I am a paper map and compass kinda guy but this seems like a convenient addition, especially for trip planning. Mapped out the next boy scout troop hike in just a few minutes, the way routes snap to hiking trails is really nice. Thanks!

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