We've all already talked about switching away from google/apple maps to something like openstreetmaps, mapy, tomtom amigo, etc. But all of these services use openstreetmaps (UK non-profit) as a source and they still miss a lot of local data even for bigger cities!
If you have some spare time, think about adding a bit of data to the map with your local knowledge. There's a lot of business data missing that is on google maps like websites, phone numbers and opening hours but also stuff like parking lots and whether they're publicly accessible and free or not. Adding these makes the competition of ALL services using OSM as a source better.
I also use the mobile app https://streetcomplete.app/ and https://every-door.app/ to add data while on my walks, these make my walks more engaging and I actually take longer ones + see new places because of it. Streetcomplete also has a focus on important and easy to collect data with their default filters, and you can choose what you want to contribute.
If you really want to get into the thick of it and contribute more than just simple data you can always check out https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/How_to_contribute and see in which of the many ways you can contribute!
Can't we just scrape Google maps and add things to OSM? ๐ค
That would be illegal. Also Google puts in fake roads to detect things like this.
Don't do it.
I think there's limitations to that. I also think ideally we should cut Google out our work chain anyways, and depending on data from there makes that functionally impossible. Stuff on maps changes, if we're scraping from Google maps now we're just gonna have to continue doing that. Instead we should normalize our own community work chains to build our own dataset.
Yep, best to verify the data either in person or at least via their website instead (if they have one)
A well-mapped area on OpenStreetMap has much more details than Google Maps.
OSM allows more data point that's not accepted on Google Maps. Like people have been mapping farm and its crops type, flowerbed, road accessible for blind people, or row of trees.
Not to forget, Google Maps also have a lot of faulty data.
I believe this is against their ToS and being caught doing that would mean all that data just gets removed again. But I'm no legal expert
Yes, it is. You should not copy from other maps (satellite imagery is okay as long as the license of the imagery allows it, for example Bing).
There is an old tradition of mappers deliberately placing very small errors to be able to verify the copying of a map. So no, scraping big chunks is a bad idea. But I sometimes check details on the Gmaps satellite image or streetview.