[myself248]

Very tangentially related, a distributed tile service could be interesting. I'd love to just download a virtual appliance, point it at some disk space, and tell it how much bandwidth to use. Maaaaybe tell it what region to focus on, if I want to use my own local tile server for my own local projects because it won't ratelimit me because I'm me.

But if I could just do that, and with no further admin overhead, contribute to some sort of tile-cloud, I'd find that a lot more meaningful than seeding my favorite distro's torrents, you know?

[novok]

I don't know if openstreetmaps provides a free tile server, but I could see that as an option for the more privacy minded. Or to preload a basic map so your not querying a tile server, and to go even further, preload a more detailed map like older offline GPS apps.

In the iOS app you can also add an option to use apple maps instead too.

[myself248]

You're not supposed to use OSM's free servers in production, and the options for running your own are assembly-required to such a degree that I can't even assess how far beyond my own skills they lie.