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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

Google Maps has its pitfalls, but it's by far the most up to date in the cities I've used it.

OSM lacks a lot of details that completely change how you'd move from point A to point B (I was missing overpass bridges and crossable paths in residential neighboorhoods), and point to point navigation is also not great. Then it completely lacks all the more commercial features Google has built on top of Maps (store details, position sharing, timeline etc.)

On sheer readability I also prefer Google Maps, but I've been using it so long that that might be just familiarity.

I wish I'd like OSM a lot more, but every time I ended up back to Maps for a reason or another.

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> On sheer readability I also prefer Google Maps, but I've been using it so long that that might be just familiarity.

Interesting – personally I find Maps absolutely horrible for usage as an actual map for orienting myself (as opposed to just serving as a vague geographical background for displaying POIs or navigation information).

When you zoom out, it often doesn't really distinguish between forests and other open spaces (admittedly OSM's coverage in that regard varies regionally, though at least in Europe it seems quite comprehensive and definitively better than Google's).

Then, when you zoom in everything just turns into a featureless grey-on-grey with no distinction between built-up areas and everything else (only "parks" get shown, but e.g. in France that apparently even covers large scale "natural parks" covering hundreds or even thousands of square kilometres, so in that case everything, including any towns happening to lie in that area, just gets shown with a green background, which is equally useless), and buildings are only shown when you start zooming in really closely.

Yes, there is a lot to improve. I also have my gripes about what POI are kept from the detail view to the zoomed out view, or how I'll completely lose a location if I happen to misclick on some random POI that happens to fall under my finger on the edge of the screen.

On the rougher part of the maps, I often get back to satellite view and/or StreeView if available (even as they sometimes don't show the same info as they come from different points in time -_-;). It's a handy backup that I don't get on the open source map apps

> even as they sometimes don't show the same info as they come from different points in time

And for unfathomable reasons Google Earth (the desktop version) can show historic aerial imagery, but no historic street view pictures, whereas Google Maps works just the other way round – you can view historic street view photographs there, but no historic aerial/satellite imagery. (And the browser version of Google Earth apparently can't do either.)

I'm curious if that's US vs Europe thing?

For me in Europe, Google Maps coverage quality can be best described by this personal anecdote. I used to live in Nürnberg, which is in top 10 German cities by population, and where are some major and well-recognized international companies are headquartered. Nürnberg has a subway system (U-Bahn) since 1980s, and it's significant enough: a few dozen stations over three lines (one is fully driverless, btw).

Google didn't have any representation of U-Banh in Nürnberg till at least 2017. I don't mean "wasn't supporting it in navigation and routing", I mean " stations weren't even marked and labelled on the general overview maps. And it's not like they didn't have the into: there was a widely-used user layer which added at least station labels. They just simply didn't care enough, and had other priorities.

In the meanwhile, the level of detail on OSM covered details as minor as every mailbox not only in Nürnberg, but in every small town around Frankonia (I used to participate in postcrossing and used this a lot from random places).

As a counter argument, here in Sweden I've yet to run into a place where Google maps has failed me when it comes to driving, public transport or address/POI search. OSM on the other hand is missing half the buildings once you get more then 15 km out from major city centers and even in major cities, things like house numbers and addresses is often wrong. The only scenario OSM is better than Google Maps is pedestrian and hiking routes.

France and Spain had a pretty good coverage, Japan cities are decent as well. I've only seen Munchen and Kolhn's most touristic areas but there were decent enough we didn't hit any critical issue. Commerce data and opening hours was abysmal on the other hand.

OSM was pretty good too in France but has different issues: they don't get the same access to up to date commerce data as exposed through local aggregators, and there's just not enough user data to have good heuristics on navigation times.

Here in Poland it's fine. Maybe that's due to the war Germans waged on google street view ? I'd think some of that was also used for mapping

For countryside locations and topographic, OTOH, Google Maps (and Apple Maps) is a joke compared to OSM, though, at least in Europe.

Depends on what you are looking for and what country you are in. When it comes to small 'unofficial' roads, bike paths and hiking trails then OSM is much better. When it comes to finding the location of rural buildings, addresses and companies I find Google Maps much much better and complete, at least here in Sweden.

Yes. On the more critical part when in the middle of nowhere I often use a traditional map as reference after getting my rough position through Google Maps. I wouldn't trust any of the mapping services more than the local entities to provide accurate trail info, especially as they're the own maintaining the paths.

Sadly I'm still not good with really basic compass and map positionning, and the GPS + average location info helped a ton in the past.

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