3 ms·

I'm with you on the "free projects have forever, proprietary projects have a deadline" line of thinking, I use it often when talking about social networks and m

I'm with you on the "free projects have forever, proprietary projects have a deadline" line of thinking, I use it often when talking about social networks and microblogging. But one thing to consider is the motivation for predatory or destructive action. The OSM community does not have the motive or the resources for destructive activities towards Google, whereas Google has a motive and resources to sabotage OSM. This sort of thing you see historically with Microsoft and EEE, with Facebook and XMPP, and with lots of other things, including some of Google's behavior. I wrote about this in another comment in this thread (and talked about a solution to the problem), but I believe the existing OSM navigation apps that exist work well, and that the remaining friction point preventing them from competing with google in the consumer navigation market is address lookup. OsmAnd for example is very user friendly and I use it almost exclusively, but looking up addresses is the main difficulty.

distances 6y ago
I really wany to love OsmAnd, but I'm not sure I agree on the user friendliness yet. First thing user feels is how slow the rendering is while panning. I can't measure it but I'd guess about 10fps on my phone, and the area revealed by panning is all grey for a good while before it gets drawn. It's fine for a tool, but has no chance to compete for casual end users like this.
- usrusr 6y ago
  But fast OSM renderers exist. Take a look at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gr.talent.cruiser https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gr.talent.crui... for an example. It's perfectly smooth. The application is closed source but the underlying renderer (VTM) is LGPL3. The renderer, https://github.com/mapsforge/vtm https://github.com/mapsforge/vtm, is basically an OpenGL alternative for the mapsforge offline maps format and maintained by the same guy (the original mapsforge renderer is arguably a bit slow, struggling to hide its slowness behind cached tile bitmaps).
  - distances 6y ago
    Damn, that's very smooth! Way better than Google Maps. Do you have any insights why this isn't used by OsmAnd?

distances 6y ago

I really wany to love OsmAnd, but I'm not sure I agree on the user friendliness yet. First thing user feels is how slow the rendering is while panning. I can't measure it but I'd guess about 10fps on my phone, and the area revealed by panning is all grey for a good while before it gets drawn. It's fine for a tool, but has no chance to compete for casual end users like this.

usrusr 6y ago
But fast OSM renderers exist. Take a look at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gr.talent.cruiser https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gr.talent.crui... for an example. It's perfectly smooth. The application is closed source but the underlying renderer (VTM) is LGPL3. The renderer, https://github.com/mapsforge/vtm https://github.com/mapsforge/vtm, is basically an OpenGL alternative for the mapsforge offline maps format and maintained by the same guy (the original mapsforge renderer is arguably a bit slow, struggling to hide its slowness behind cached tile bitmaps).
- distances 6y ago
  Damn, that's very smooth! Way better than Google Maps. Do you have any insights why this isn't used by OsmAnd?