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by Humbly8967 1019 days ago
Yes, there are many possible conflicts of interest in mapping. This is why I'm excited to see the improving usability of Open Street Maps through apps like Organic Maps, and big commercial investments in open mapping data from the Overture Maps Foundation.

In many cases OSM has much more detail than google maps, with business listings and addresses being the biggest exceptions I have encountered. Fortunately, business listings are one of the main things added to the first data release from Overture Maps. For the curious, you can interact with the POI data [here.](https://bdon.github.io/overture-tiles/places.html)
2 comments
WA 1019 days ago
If you really just want a map, go use OSM. I love it as well and even contributed. But Google Maps is much more than OSM. The biggest difference and most important feature is its real-time traffic. OSM is just a totally different product seen through the car navigation lens.
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Doctor_Fegg 1019 days ago
Absolutely true. OSM, conversely, is an infinitely better dataset for pedestrian and bike navigation.
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WA 1019 days ago
Yup, have been using it through Komoot for many years for biking and hiking.
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jhugo 1019 days ago
For me the killer Google Maps feature is using it as a search engine. The POI data on OSM has low coverage, is often out-of-date, and lacks reviews, so while it's quite good for (non-car) navigation, it's not very useful at all for finding places meeting certain criteria.
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inadequatespace 1018 days ago
The non-starter with OSM for me is lack* of high-DPI ("retina") support, making it like rubbing my eyes with scratchy wool when I try to read it

* well, there's https://osm.rrze.fau.de/testhd.html , but that has no search.

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