Comment by schabernakk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by schabernakk | Hacker News Reader

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I tried switching to OSM in an effort to get away from google maps. People always say 'OSM is consumer ready' but forget that OSM first and foremost is the dataset. And as far as i am concerned, there is no good maps app on the iOS appstore that even comes close to google maps. and i think i tried pretty much all relevant ones. skobbler (which i just found out is part of coast) seems to be the most polished. but as long as there is no unified search and you have to enter streetname/adress/city in seperate boxes which excludes searching for the names of buildings (for example university buildings) for which the names clearly exist in the database and are shown onthe map, i have no choice other than switch back to google.

i really hope this changes soon and the UI/apps catch up to the greatness that is OSM.

edit: i have an iphone and although i live in canada i still use the german appstore (CC requirement).

that's why i can't comment on the app the original post was about as it's only available in the US store. it was more of a general remark about my frustration with the state of apps using the osm dataset. I want to get rid of google maps and I feel the maps part of osm would be ready for that. I can tolerate if the commercial store data is not as up2date. But if the general usuability suffers, i rather opt for gmaps.

I tried using OSM a month ago when I was travelling around Bali, Indonesia. Google Maps is terrible there, so it wasn't like I had much choice. I looked on Google Play and found an app called "OsmAnd Maps & Navigation" that was well rated, it was also offline which was a plus as there is limited mobile coverage outside of the main parts of the island. I downloaded it then the dataset for Indonesia (200mb, it took a while), and tried finding a route. After a few minutes (!) it had calculated one, but the route definitely wasn't optimal. I tried another app "Sygic: GPS Navigation & Maps", it was premium but had a 7 day free trial (perfect for my 3 day road trip). The route it calculated seemed a lot better, so I went with that. I was actually really surprised by how well it worked, even in the north of the island which is quite undeveloped in places it was able to find the best routes.

TL;DR; Even though the dataset may be ready, you still need supporting consumer ready apps to use it.

(Originally posted this as a separate comment, but it is pretty relevant to this).

Have you tried the Scout App (which the article is about)? How does its search work?

I agree that geocoding has been a problem for OSM, especially for building numbers, where the data often isn't there. But on the software side there seems to be progress recently, for instance, here are two open-source geocoders released in the last few months:

Photon, made by Komoot: https://github.com/komoot/photon, used in production at http://www.komoot.de/suggest/?&hl=en

Pelias, made by Mapzen: http://stateofthemap.us/session/pelias/, live demo at http://mapzen.com/pelias/

On building numbers, we need geocoders which can interpolate between sparse data, and then use that system to highlight where the gaps are. People tend to add data to OSM when they're confident that it's actually being used, to its full extent. If there are a hundred buildings along a road, in theory you don't need to add many of them before you can get a very good idea of where an address might be.

The map should communicate that it is interpolating the geocoded address by a circle of probability. Or even show known addresses and then an alpha blended triangle between them.

As you are saying, assistance from a mapping service need not be binary, just add some extra information and communicate cleanly the probability of result.

Interesting projects! I have tried to use the Mapquest geocoder API but for anything outside the US it's worse than useless. Will definitely check those out. It's great that they're based on Elastic Search since obviously geocoding is about full text search more than it is about "geo".

not even Google Maps have full building number information. at least not world wide - I've been to several European countries where building numbers are ignored in Google Map searches (sometimes you actually get no result at all if you include a building number)

Agreed. Google Maps isn't just about addresses. For example I just searched for "museum about noodles in tokyo" and it correctly came up with the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum. I typed in "mona lisa museum" and it came up with The Louvre.

It's not perfect but it doesn't seem like a map based solely on map data is going to be able to compete with one that has all of the internet behind it.

This is my biggest complaint about Apple Maps on iOS. Searching doesn't work. And if I get an address or name partially correct, Apple Maps usually fails.

Google can find me places of interest, without an exact name or address. That's my most common use case when using navigation on my mobile device.

It's not just maps. No matter where you are searching, Google is very aggressive about trying to figure out what you meant. Almost no one else bothers to try. Amazingly, even Amazon didn't try to correct misspelled product searches until recently (a year or two ago, IIRC).

That's a huge and under-appreciated advantage for Google's mobile apps and services.

The screenshot they posted on top of the blog site is very illustrative. Although I may be used to the "Google Maps look", the OSM map displayed there is much harder to understand. I can't put my finger on it exactly, but there's too much color and detail I'm not interested in when looking at a map. This feeling does not occur to me when I use Bing Maps or Here Maps either (and I have used these quite a bit in the past).

Let's hope the increased use of the incredibly detailed and free OSM data will one day lead to better applications that make use of it. User experience comes first.

MapQuest Open is probably the style you are looking for. You can even select that as a layer on openstreetmap.org

http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/#14/52.5147/13.3899&num=4&mt0=m...

that style was never meant for end-users! It is dense so it can show a lot of features and please the contributors.

Yeah, the actual style they use for the navigation app is shown in the next picture down, and is far more sparse.

I just tried the OP's app (Scout Maps), which is free, and it looks pretty good so far for where I'm at. Not as clear or concise as Apple or Google maps, but the road data seems good so far.

Isn't apple based on OSM? Which basically means we got more players here. All that's left is for google to jump on the bandwagon and we're in business.

Apple used some of the old data, before OSM changed its license to share-alike. That data is probably still in there somewhere, but I think it's very unlikely they are incorporating any OSM updates, past about five years back, because the license would mean they'd have to release their combined dataset.

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