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When moving in, some two years ago, to an apartment located close to the very centre of Kraków - one of the biggest and well-known cities in Poland - I discovered that Google somehow got the postal code wrong for the entire street. The code they had on record actually pointed some 20-30 kilometers outside of Kraków. It took more than a year of sending corrections to Google Maps before they finally fixed the postal code... of my building alone. The rest of the street still has the wrong code. Want to know why I bothered to try and get it fixed all this time? Because this little mistake made it nearly impossible to order food via any of the food order services. Uber Eats, Glovo, Pyszne.pl, etc., in their infinite tech startup wisdom, all integrated with Google API to fetch postal codes based on address, and use them to filter out restaurants that can deliver to the user's location. With my address mistakenly mapping to a village 20+ kilometers outside of Kraków, do you care to guess how many options I had to order from? That, plus it also messed up ordering taxis via FreeNow and Bolt, which also integrate with Google API for stupid reasons. This also means the drivers need to use separate apps to navigate around the center, because Google doesn't have data on which roads are banned for traffic except buses and taxis, and the parent companies are too cheap to license from a provider that has this data. All while in the apps themselves, if your route starts, ends, or even crosses anywhere near the city center, the estimated time data shoots up to some ridiculous values, while the map gets entirely confused, as Google Maps integration is adamant that the route we're on is physically impossible. |