Telenav Takes On Google With New OpenStreetMap-Based Offline Navigation SDK | Hacker News Reader

Telenav Takes On Google With New OpenStreetMap-Based Offline Navigation SDK

techcrunch.com

31 pointschippy5 comments

Make no mistake, this is a major announcement in the mapping space. Scout is consistently the leading navigation app on smartphones after Google Maps (perhaps by quite a margin, but still ...) and given how core mapping is to apps like Strava, this probably means that OSM is now mature.

The real question is how this will affect the ability to OSM to attract new contributors and improve the map even further. While routing works well on OSM, the POI layer and the address layer (important for geocoding) still needs a fair bit of work, at least in the US.

Here are some stats from the project: http://osmstats.altogetherlost.com/

With Telenav and their users on OSM going forward, the maps will only get better.

> While routing works well on OSM, the POI layer and the address layer (important for geocoding) still needs a fair bit of work, at least in the US.

OSM is built from the contributions of hundreds of thousands of individuals mapping their local area, and it would be great if you wanted to help them with that work!

If you're wondering how to get started, these guides might be helpful:

http://learnosm.org/en/ http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Beginners%27_guide

Or, jump right in and sign up for OSM:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/new

If you don't feel like signing up, you can simply add "notes" for OSM members to check out places where the map isn't accurate:

https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2013/04/29/openstreetmap-open...

Once you've mapped your local area and are looking for something else to help out with, these tools are a great way to find other problems to fix:

http://maproulette.org/ http://keepright.at/

Steve Coast the founder of OpenStreetMap who now works at Telnav also wrote about this on this on his homepage:

http://stevecoast.com/2014/05/19/why-openstreetmap-is-now-na...

Since an announcement about this is currently at #1, I guess we'll bury this post as a dupe.

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