[SushiHippie]

1. Everyone can contribute, like wikipedia (except no edits without account like wikipedia has, we can't have nice things)

2. Way more metadata about places, something you'll never find on google.

3. It's free

4. You can get complete data dumps if you want to.

5. It's not from an ad company/No tracking

[SushiHippie]

Also, if you contribute the data back to OpenStreetMap, many more people will benefit from it, even if they don't know your app. There are so many applications/APIs/services which use OpenStreetMap, which would benefit from more people updating/contributing data to OpenStreetMap.

[ryandrake]

This project is such a natural fit for using OSM as the entire backend. Surprising choice not to!

[lucb1e]

6. Better worldwide coverage. The USA and perhaps some other English-speaking countries are the main areas where Google is better than OSM in most practical categories (probably still not in things like trails), but in most countries you've got better coverage with OSM