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Comment by tholman | Hacker News Reader

All for extra tools to help in emergency situations, that said I would also like it if I could see street names without zooming to a microscopic level which could be helpful in these situations especially.

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I would be happy with a brief persistence of street names at a larger scale when zooming in. IOW, when zooming, street names to persist at the larger, zoomed in size for 400..800 ms or so, then shrinking to the typical size. Don’t know if that is possible with whatever map layers are now in use.

No thanks. Make the names visible at all times. Apple Maps is infuriating to use while driving because there is no clear indication of scale and it constantly zooms in and out. Do I need to turn now or in a few seconds or a minute? Impossible to tell at a glance. Changing scale should be done rarely. I don’t look at my cell phone every 800ms while driving.

Lol. I was coming to the comments section for this. There must be some challenge here that isn't immediately obvious because I feel that no one has solved this well.

I’m confident it’s two reasons:

- too many street names make for a noisy/busy/ugly map, and we all know maps must be beautiful and nothing else

- streets don’t pay for ads, businesses do, so between the two they prefer showing the latter.

Technically now you can tap anywhere on the map once to place a pin and get more info; In practice tapping in Google Maps has become horrendous, it never does what you expect. One such example is tapping on a business near a “walkable area”: you can’t. The area will always focus instead, even if painted behind the business.

Apple Maps does this really well (at least for NYC). It's the only reason I keep it installed, to look at street names while using Google Maps

> There must be some challenge here that isn't immediately obvious

the challenge is profit maximization, this to emphasize it is not a technical challenge (earlier versions of maps were good at this)

If you're willing to sacrifice other features in favor of configurable display* and better hiking trail coverage, OpenStreetMap has the kind of design that tries to show everything at once that most people find awful to look at. I've gotten used to it and to me Google Maps is just empty, I can't find anything, basically the problem you describe.

* with OsmAnd at least, the most popular app for it. The official website at osm.org is more of a demo to show what's in the database than really meant to be a gmaps replacement, though there are still a few rendering styles to choose from on the right.

I've been using OSMAnd almost exclusively for close to ten years. I would describe the app itself as rough but adequate. There are a lot of settings you can poke at, and the way you navigate through the menus of the application to poke at those settings has never been particularly streamlined, however it gets the job done for me.

The map data itself is superb though, with the single exception of having inferior (relative to gmaps) data about businesses. Many businesses aren't mapped, or don't have their open/close hours listed or up-to-date. For this sort of information, I use a web browser and search engine to look up the business's website. For gas stations or restaurants while traveling, I do it the old fashioned way. I look for signs along the side of the road using my eyes. The same way I used to do it when I first learned how to navigate using AAA road atlases. It may seem old fashioned but it's just fine for me.

In other respects, the OSM map data is very detailed and I love the aesthetics of the OSM tiles. In particular, OSM maps are far superior to gmaps in places like parks. In places where gmaps simply says "Whatever Park", OSM will have park benches, water fountains, picnic tables, etc all accurately mapped to within a meter. It's earnestly impressive and very useful. I think gmaps excels at mapping businesses because that's where the money flows, but doesn't give a single damn about useful things like water fountains because water fountains don't buy ads.

> I think gmaps excels at mapping businesses because that's where the money flows, but doesn't give a single damn about useful things like water fountains because water fountains don't buy ads.

I think it's rather the other way around: people that operate those businesses want their information to show up correctly on Google Search (or as many non-tech people call it: the internet).

It's not that Google can sell ads about those businesses so much as those businesses having a financial interest in being accurate on Google search and, which then became big due to being tied in, google maps. It seems like the very definition of using your monopoly in one market to also dominate another, but TomTom (and whatever other commercial services came before Google's map) don't seem to agree or I imagine they'd have taken action.

Meanwhile OSM sucks at this compared to benches/fountains because it's so ephemeral. People do map businesses, but it's out of date so fast, it's easy to stop bothering. Half the stores I mapped in a town near me went out of business in the past few years. Wooden unmaintained benches in a forest last comparatively longer.

And adding STOP and road SIGNAL signs to the maps please too. Apple Maps does it for a while.

Both Google and Apple Maps are poorly named. They are not maps at all. They are navigation services at best. Location sensitive marketing platforms at worst.

#1 struggle!

So frustrating when trying to find out what a road is called and your panning around waiting for the algorithm to show you the street name.

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