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Comment by m-localhost | Hacker News Reader

I wish it would be easier for people to contribute to open source projects (like wiki voyage etc) than to Google Places. (it's a bit off topic and I like the Places API, but that's a huge amount of valuable data that contributors are submitting there for free)

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Agreed. I contribute to Google maps a lot and I've looked into contributing to open street maps but the options seemed pretty clunky. I recommend mapbox to all of my clients over Google maps.

Just click the edit button on https://www.openstreetmap.org/, I find the interface quite nice. It's quite addictive!

That being said, I don't know of a similarly easy to use editor on Android for simple things like adding opening hours or addresses.

Thanks, yeah I should have clarified. I would like to easily edit OSM on android :)

http://vespucci.io/ is active developed and pretty powerful. For simply adding opening hours or a phone number I use https://maps.me/download/ (iOS, Android).

I think maps.me is one of the few apps that are easy to use and contribute to OSM. Unfortunately there was some controversy, because maps got vandalized or filled with trivial/garbage data, because user didn't understand that their notes ended up in a public database.

StreetComplete is a very nice, targeted OSM editing app

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/StreetComplete

I've been looking into Mapbox lately. What types of things do you find they're strong vs. weak at?

Definitely strong with map visualization. They're based on OSM map data, so weaker on anything that as to do with geocoding and routing (business data, speed data, traffic data). For good routing and search, you need to look at professional platforms from TomTom Maps, HERE, ESRI or similar.

I'm a Mapbox employee so take my note with the typical grain of salt - live & historic traffic is available via maps and APIs in these geographies, https://www.mapbox.com/api-documentation/pages/traffic-count... and you can add turn by turn navigation into your own applications with the SDKs, https://www.mapbox.com/navigation-sdk/. Let me know if we should dive deeper ;)

Main/only weak thing of Mapbox is that they are not free and unlimited for mobile apps, Google seems to remain that.

Where do you see Google is free and unlimited for mobile apps?

> I contribute to Google maps a lot

Oh cool. Will you work for me for free as well? I have a lot for you to do.

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