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Comment by Closi | Hacker News Reader

> Because developing nations really want to use a 3rd party app with a 'proprietary naming convention' to help them map and develop their land.

Amazingly this is a big problem that is worth solving. Many countries in Africa don’t have a developed address system with named roads and for the purpose of mail will either use a pin-drop (which can go wrong when described over the phone) or will just write a description (third house down the alley next to the pharmacy) which is very hard to sort and deliver.

An example of a country with this issue is Kenya.

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I don’t see Kenyan or any other African nation language for that matter in their supported languages list.

As other people noted it is hard to compete with universality of lat/Lon pair.

"Kenyan" is not a language. I see Swahili in the list of languages, which along with English is one of the lingua franca of Kenya.

Swahili, which they do support, is the national language of Kenya and a lingua franca in the region. They also have Amharic (Ethiopia), Xhosa and Zulu (South Africa).

I agree that supporting a finite set of languages isn't accessible enough, though.

> As other people noted it is hard to compete with universality of lat/Lon pair.

In order to get sufficient accuracy, you need to state lat/long to 6 decimal points, meaning the full number is c16 numbers long. It’s certainly not particularly user friendly.

I’m also not entirely sure what is meant by universality - it’s certainly not commonly used (who knows their own lat/long off by heart?) or commonly used for the location of houses or addresses in most of the world (try sending mail by writing a lat/long on it and popping it through the mail). In terms of things that compete with the ‘universality’ of lat/long - the main thing is address/postcode (although it depends on the use case). You can write my address on a postcard and put it in any post box and it will get to my house - that’s the real universal standard.

Are people who can't afford to name their roads really going to pay a premium for a slight usability improvement over plain GPS coordinates?

Apparently yes - See Djibouti-post.

Lat/Long's are actually pretty horrible to work with from a post/logistics perspective. There is a reason why nowhere in the world actually writes the lat/long on their mail!

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