FWIW, where I am, the quality of the OSM dataset is way beyond what you need for routing. OSMAnd and Scout are my go to navigation apps. Anywhere which is vaguely rural, you really have to have confidence that all your map data, and your routing capability, are available offline. You can't beat having the map of the entire country on your phone.
Biggest problem with OSM is that quality is varying wildly. Awesome in many cities, but then in rural areas it can be missing half a town. And large differences between countries.
A lot of money could possibly help to get good base maps into it (by paying enough that their producers accept OSM licensing), which could help that situation...
Or, alternatively, getting more people to help with the data. I once did help a bit when I took a bike ride through Albania and for some reason I still get warm fuzzy feelings when I think back to those "mapmaking days". For some reason it feels more meaningful than my wikipedia contributions.
Unfortunately, I live in the center of The Left Wing of the Internet^tm (Berlin) and every anthill is already mapped around here.
> A lot of money could possibly help to get good base maps into it (by paying enough that their producers accept OSM licensing), which could help that situation...
Possibily. But a mass import is often not a good idea. You need mappers to map (possibly from the base map).
The UI got a major overhaul recently (switched to material design) which made some things nicer. I also saw/see the UI as a problematic part of OsmAnd however I recognize it's not easy to pack all the features OsmAnd offers into a GUI and both please beginners and expert users.
Where abouts are you looking at? The OSM community in the USA is a bit weak, so the data there isn't great. In many European countries, the data is great.
(A part of me likes the schaudenfreude, how there's this big tech/open source thing, and for once USA isn't #1 for availablility)
At Europe, heh. There was a number of incomplete spots on the map last I checked.
And coming from the web interface, I honestly thought the map is just that, a map, with no data regarding traffic other than maybe one-way streets. And that it simply doesn't support routing.
"OpenStreetDatabase" is probably a more accurate name, since it's more of a Database than a Map. But there you go. OSM doesn't have much (anything?) about traffic. But it has lots of stuff for routing, and POIs and so forth.
I used to use Navfree (which uses OSM) when I had an Android phone. It was as good as Google maps. Neither were perfect, and made errors every so often, but neither drastically more than the other. I am in Spain, so I don't know if that makes a difference.
$1B + R&D + uncertainty + sometime in the future + handing your competitors all your work for free << a $3B product of known high quality, delivered in full today with minimal uncertainty.
It's not even a contest. Especially when $3B isn't, whatchamacallit, a huge drain on your liquidity.
Yes and No. The OSM licence is similar to the GPL. If you make a derived work, you have to share your changes back.
If OSM got a big cash bump, and was improved, then if (say) Google wants to put that improvement in Google Maps, they would be forced to release all the data that's in Google Maps. Unlikely to happen.
No, but if OSM becomes good, then, say, Ford, can just grab it and use it in their cars for free. They're just going to use it, not improve it, so there's nothing to contribute back.
Then Audi, BMW and Mercedes spent $1b, and at the end of the day, their maps are the exact same as Ford's (who spend $0).