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Comment by __Joker | Hacker News Reader

I would like to see, some mobile OS bundle OpenSteetMap or a app which becomes a hit on top of OSM. The usablity of any map will be its data, and I feel OSM lacks compared to GMap or Bing map.

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There already are many apps based on data coming from OSM. The notorious Apple Maps takes some of its data in OSM. I've also heard good things about City Maps 2 Go [0] [1], which is also based on OSM data. I personnally use OSMAnd [3] on android, which has the benefit of being open source.

> I feel OSM lacks compared to GMap or Bing map.

OSM compares quite well to contenders when talking about raw geographical data. However, where GMap shines is locations: you can search a shop, a restaurant or a diving club on GMap and it will give you its position. OSM doesn't have this power, which is actually understandable given that OSM's goal is mostly geographical data.

[0] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/city-maps-2go-offline-map/id...

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ulmon.andr...

[2] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OsmAnd

There's no (or at least very little) resistance to adding POIs to OSM. In well mapped areas, the data in OSM can be a lot more accurate than the geocoded addresses that Google often shows you.

There's not really any great search interfaces for it (where part of great is limiting the results to 'nearby'). Komoot/Photon is a nice way to find something you know the name of:

http://photon.komoot.de/

And there are people working on displaying the data that is available:

http://osm24.eu/index.php#!15/52.5173/13.4032/type=eat/mon=p...

Telenav employee here - we've been navigating exclusively on OSM since June for both iOS and Android (Scout Maps App). We also acquired Skobbler earlier in the year, which navigates using OSM if you're outside the US.

I've been wanting to look into the Scout/Skobbler SDK for a while now. I'll either be using that or Mapbox for some mobile/web apps. Do you have any insights to push me in your direction?

The points that differentiate us depend on your specific application. We have robust routing/turn by turn nav, offline maps, data visualization (heat maps) plus a whole bunch of other common features (custom styling, for example).

Definitely check out our dev site, which admittedly lacks some polish but is coming along (http://developer.skobbler.com/) and let me know if you'd like to talk to one of our SDK guys - they always want to talk to devs about their specific use cases.

If you're developing on iOS we've recently created a pod - http://cocoadocs.org/docsets/ScoutMaps-iOS-SDK/2.1.0/

Good luck!

There are a few power users of OSM. Like, MapQuest and FourSquare. However, either of those have neither the detailed information of Google/Bing nor their popularity, so I see your point.

Foursquare doesn't use OSM for places:

https://developer.foursquare.com/overview/venues

I guess Google is doing their own thing, Bing is listed as using Factual:

http://factual.com/

(Along with Yelp, Trulia, GroupOn, others).

Facebook is also in the business of having a landing page for every semi interesting place (I think this is one of the things that drove Google to push Google+ so hard).

From my experiences, OSM road/track data far surpasses Google Maps or Bing. What I find it lacks is good POI data, like restaurants, stores, etc.

Not going into details, I was/am working on map related data. And still using OSM. And would love to see OSM take off.

I don't know if it's a "hit", but Ulmon makes maps based on OSM data which are a great resource when traveling. Being usable offline is particularly awesome (and something we should be able to take for granted, but I digress).

Everything on a map is data. You probably mean labels and business names. For road networks etc I found OSM to beat other maps by a lot.

Also keep in mind that the way business can be added on Google Maps for example are all but foolproof.

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