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Comment by asimova | Hacker News Reader

Why would OpenStreetMap be a better solution than using Google Map apis?

1. Everyone can contribute, like wikipedia (except no edits without account like wikipedia has, we can't have nice things)

2. Way more metadata about places, something you'll never find on google.

3. It's free

4. You can get complete data dumps if you want to.

5. It's not from an ad company/No tracking

Also, if you contribute the data back to OpenStreetMap, many more people will benefit from it, even if they don't know your app. There are so many applications/APIs/services which use OpenStreetMap, which would benefit from more people updating/contributing data to OpenStreetMap.

6. Better worldwide coverage. The USA and perhaps some other English-speaking countries are the main areas where Google is better than OSM in most practical categories (probably still not in things like trails), but in most countries you've got better coverage with OSM

This project is such a natural fit for using OSM as the entire backend. Surprising choice not to!

How would you handle corrections? Surely Google's API doesn't let you submit changes, and it's not like their data is infallible. Particularly for things like whether a place has AC, I wouldn't even know if Google collects that data in the first place.

OSM has tags for a lot of things, you get the data at cost price (that is, you can keep a local copy for free and serve your own queries, or contract some third party that hosts an API like overpass-turbo for you), and so does everyone else when you contribute back.

Because your dataset would come out of the gate very well-populated, and any changes that you contribute back would benefit a large, welcoming community. I highly recommend it, please reach out if you'd like any pointers on how to engage with OSM.

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