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Comment by wombat-man | Hacker News Reader

Wow, can't find my parents house even with the exact address.

Kinda rough but a good start I guess.

That's not a knock against the app, but something you can actually fix - this would use the OSM backend, and adding your parent's address would take all of ten minutes if you care to do so.

Sure, but if it's to be usable as a replacement for other map apps, that's time that'll add up pretty quickly.

It's a nice proof of concept but there's a long ways to go.

You are missing the point. If you do this commercially and have that need, you usually have a separate geocoding. This data can not be combined with OSM unless it is already freely available. The point is that the data in OSM is freely useable in what ever way you want to as long as you publish the data used to create your maps.

There are no available map data that allow this except Openstreetmap.

This app's search is clearly not the same as the one on openstreetmap.org

On openstreetmap.org I found my address with no issues - I typed the address in the search box, and got a pointer on the map showing me where it is.

On OsmApp, the same exact query resulted in more than 19,000 results and the app proceeded to highlight them all on the map, which effectively means it's impossible to actually locate the address.

Just to be sure, you can try the underlying search API here : https://photon.komoot.io/api/?q=YOURADDRESS

It could be :

- a problem on osmapp's side

- komoot's photon API not powerful enough

- or more probably, your address not existing in OSM, or under a different name

Can't find my own address and I even edited OSM maps to add it a quite some time ago. Zooming in on the map and there it is. Hmmm... not a good start at all.

Could you try with https://photon.komoot.io, after zooming out to a bbox that includes your place (because the demo search locally) ? Or directly using their API ?

I believe there is some bug in Osmapp's photon handling (it's the API that powers their search field).

Yes that works.

Most buildings in OSM aren't actually tagged with numbers. (A lot of houses aren't even marked as existing buildings in my experience.) It should be have their street at least, but adding building numbers is just too time-consuming for outside of cities it seems.

That depends on the country and source of the data. In Germany, pretty much all buildings are tagged with house numbers.

In France, it's getting quite okay now with the involvement of the State https://adresse.data.gouv.fr

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