After writing part one of this series, it is time for a recap. This entire bout of thinking was brought on by my own behavior, where I regularly make a mental note of the menacing guilt that comes along each time I open Google Maps on my mobile phone for any simple need.
This is despite that fact that my current residence is located at the end of about meters of unpaved road and driveway that has no existence on Google Maps. Navigation directs me to a plot in the middle of US Highway 93 then gives a dashed arc indicating I need to kindly hop through the woods onto the property.
OpenStreetMap becomes better data simply because I can fix that it already exists as a road but needs extra cleanup , and because I can add all the places I regularly navigate to, as well as new ones as I come across them. But the data is not the problem. The problem is that every mobile app available is just not as a good from a product perspective. The interface, the aesthetic, the functionality, the general experience, are always inferior.
This is not a critique of OSM itself, but of the mediums through which it reaches mobile users. It is also an extremely difficult feat to make a great OSM-based app for general use as opposed to very specific uses like hiking because there is such a clear market leader in Google Maps.
As I claimed in part one, however, there was a decent contender: Maps. It had its drawbacks, but those aside, it also seems to have lost its momentum. The Tale of Maps. Some light background: Maps. It was registered as a company in Switzerland, however. The initial project was a mobile app with OpenStreetMap data as a basemap, which allowed some submission of edits to OSM. It required the user to download data for any local area, for example zooming into my town required downloading all of the state of Montana, while in other places with denser data I may be prompted to download just an entire city.
