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0 pointsjorvi3d ago0 comments

It doesn't matter if Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook contribute or pay huge sums.

Even Apple Maps is heavily, heavily behind Google Maps simply because very few users are entering Point of Interest info into Apple Maps.

New restaurant opens, or store closes, or opening hours change? Google Maps has the updated info within a few days. Apple Maps in a year or two, maybe.

That's the moat. The only way either Apple or the other corpos catch up is by offering massive financial incentives for their users to contribute PoI data.

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chucksmash3d ago

> It doesn't matter if Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook contribute or pay huge sums.

It may not matter for your purposes (i.e. replacing Google-Maps-the-product in your daily use as a consumer).

I'd naively expect that having hundreds of thousands of Amazon drivers dogfooding these maps daily does help with data quality though. So maybe OSM dataset works best as a Google Maps replacement if you can shoehorn your usage into something that overlaps with the things a gigantic logistics operation cares about.

philwelch3d ago

A few years ago I got annoyed at Google and switched to Apple Maps. Earlier this year I got annoyed with Apple Maps and tried Google Maps again before switching back. Point of interest data was a minor factor in all of this. It might be enough to lock me into using Google to find local businesses I didn’t know about before, but that doesn’t force me to use Google Maps for turn by turn navigation.

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