Hacker News Reader

What they really mean to say is the more people contribute to OpenStreetMaps, the better Apple Maps will get.

So whenever I contribute to OSM I am contributing to Apple Maps commercial product?

In Germany, OSM maps are beautiful and extremely comprehensive. Apple maps are woefully incomplete and ugly as hell. If Apple is indeed using OSM data, they threw away half of it when creating their own maps.

Apple Maps are not using OpenStreetMaps. So you contributing to Apple Maps has no bearing on contributing to OSM, same with other way around.

The article says Apple Maps is using OSM data. Is the article wrong? Or is there something they left out?

To what degree are they using it? Not a large one.

Looking at the maps for Japan on OSM and iOS 6, if they are using OSM data it must be a very small subset and they're adding a ton of crap over it.

For example: they usually have one label for a train/subway station which is well placed and then a second label for the same station 200m to the south-east. OSM has nothing like this. They must be cobbling many datasets together with no fact-checking...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com