Ola replaces Google Maps with in-house 'Ola Maps', announces API for developers

indianexpress.com

18 points·thunderbong··12 comments

wow. a mostly empty press release that mentioned an xitter post. how lazy are PR teams nowadays?!

they spent several paragraphs to say "we now have a rebranded openstreetmap solution".

i bet "olamaps" is not even something that exist. just a 15 line middleware api handling local cache to OSM.

they may not care for making it too public, might be mostly an internal cost-cutting measure

It's always good seeing FANG losing market

"Ola maps has attributed OpenStreetMap on its app, indicating the Ola Maps solution has been built on top of it, along with proprietary data from Ola"

Almost all Google maps competitors are built on backs of OpenStreetMaps though.

MapBox which is super popular, and probably the #2 solution is built on OSM too.

heremaps are another option, it has its own map data and map model

Grab did something similar in their Southeast Asia markets a couple of years ago, if I correctly remember the timeline.

What is Ola?

Ola is an Indian homegrown version of Uber/Lyft. They have pretty identical flow of hailing a cab via an app. There's some localized features like hailing autorickshaws, hailing motorcycles for single person riders. Not sure if they still have it but for a while they did have an implementation to hail via SMS for smartphone users with limited/slow data connections.

Thanks! That's super cool. I'm glad there's regional competition in this space (and in mapping too).

I wish more cities and states would do something like that.

They also sell electric scooters to the public, so they can collect tons of traffic data.

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