Wikipedia’s Mobile Apps Drop Google Maps for OpenStreetMap | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia’s Mobile Apps Drop Google Maps for OpenStreetMap

techcrunch.com

63 pointssbashyal16 comments

Am one of the devs working on the App. The App is Open Source and available for forking at https://github.com/wikimedia/WikipediaMobile. We're also switching to a 2 week release cycle so updates should be faster.

Please poke us/me with any questions you might have :)

It's nice that Google provided access for free for so long, allowing the development of so many location-aware products and services. But it's also nice that a healthy competitive environment is developing around the maps themselves.

But isn't Google's motto open and free?

Since when?

Besides, it is still open and free.. to end users. You're only affected by the pricing changes if you utilize their API's as a developer.

Google Maps is in a rough spot right now. They're not better than their competitors, so most of their users are just there out of momentum. If Google does anything to annoy their users, masses of them will leave for Bing Maps or OSM. If they want to make some money, they will have to improve their product first.

"They're not better than their competitors"

I guess my mileage varies widely here, they're far and away the best.

But OSM is "good enough" for most purposes.

It's a real shame that Google have decided they no longer want to be the universal, free solution for maps. They were the standard for so long. I don't understand what they're doing, especially with the ridiculous pricing.

Well, they were sued for providing maps for free:

http://www.afterdawn.com/news/article.cfm/2012/02/02/french_...

I don't quite understand why they are charging as much as they are (pretty much unaffordable for a low margin, high traffic business), but it does seem like the free ride had to end.

They could easily monetize it and still keep these customers. The scheme they have chosen seems all about making money in the short term. One thing they could do is open up local ads to 3rd party maps use in return for keeping them free. Also just charging a rate that sites can afford would be good, google has more than enough data to decide what the average site with high traffic can afford.

Is their pricing really that bad? I'd assume it's just what's required to break even.

My startup utilizes maps and we were thinking of using Google until they quoted us $18,000 USD/year

In my area, Bing has much better imagery than Google. They have for years. Google Maps has better text layout than Bing, but Bing Maps has several features that Google Maps doesn't. The orthogonal "Bird's Eye" view lets you see the map from an angle, and you can rotate to see all 4 sides with the arrows in the top-right. http://binged.it/Iaa4xm

Wow, thanks for sharing that. I just saw New York from a whole new angle... literally...!

The 45° “bird’s eye” imagery was a feature that Bing had first, but Google has been adding it gradually (including at Cupertino where you linked). If you enable the MapsGL experiment, the Google version also uses 3D buildings to rotate very smoothly compared to Bing.

Fantastic! Amazing to be able to rotate my neighborhood through 4 different angles here in Tokyo.

The consensus seems to be that they are leading in the "label readability" department: http://geoit.posterous.com/41latitude-google-maps-label-read...

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