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Comment by 29083011397778 | Hacker News Reader

> Then again, Apple Maps started getting sorted out around then too iirc.

And we assume completely coincidentally? Not that Apple Maps, like Google Maps, pulls in data volunteered by the OSM community (both corporate and personal members), packages and improves (sometimes "improves") it, then locks it away behind paid API calls?

In this case and many others, the free and community built project enabled, assisted, or powered the multi-billion dollar tech conglomorate.

I recognize I might sound bitter or dismissive of companies mapping the world and giving it away to consumers for free, but so much is built on openness that so many companies just eat without giving back.

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> Not that Apple Maps, like Google Maps, pulls in data volunteered by the OSM... then locks it away

You have that backwards, at least for some companies.

> How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft are contributing to OSM

At the State of the Map conference in Milan, the teams from Microsoft, Apple and Facebook presented their projects, describing how they are working with communities.

https://www.theodi.org/article/how-are-facebook-apple-and-mi...

I've never seen any cite for Google contributing their data to OSM.

> You have that backwards, at least for some companies

Absolutely I do - my overall (and apparently poorly communicated) point was more about Apple pulling in data from OSM to improve their product. They (and others) do contribute back, I only meant it's hardly coincidental that OSM and Apple Maps improved around the same time.

> I've never seen any cite for Google contributing their data to OSM.

This is what I'm so up-in-arms about: people spend so much time adding to Google Maps for free (not even necessarily via OSM), to be locked away behind paid (past a limit) API calls. Perhaps I should have been more explicit in that many companies contribute back, and Google being an outlier in that.

> it's hardly coincidental that OSM and Apple Maps improved around the same time

True, but in Apple's case, the massive improvements stemmed from no longer relying solely on data licensed from others, and starting a program back in 2018 to collect their own map data from scratch.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebuilding-maps-f...

Apple Maps doesn't use OSM for developed countries, but for places like SEA and Africa. It's places like Facebook and Mapbox who use OSM for everything IIRC (don't trust me here as I didn't check this.)

Actually, does Google Maps use OSM for anything?

Google dont directly use osm, as far as we know, but they or subcontractors check the changelogs and often add newly built things hours/ days after they get added to osm, presumably from their own sources as the data is not identical.

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