The fundamental flaw for me goes deeper. Both services mimic the principle of URL shortener applied to geographic location. (Even if, as you point out, one is

The fundamental flaw for me goes deeper. Both services mimic the principle of URL shortener applied to geographic location. (Even if, as you point out, one is public domain machine readable and the other is proprietary human readable one). But why are url shortener so popular in the first place? Why are they perfectly usable even if competing services exits? (and I'd bet most popular are self-generated like youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ). I think they are popular mainly because they rely on the ubiquitous HTTP protocol to be fully interoperable with almost any HTTP client. There is no such universal protocol or library to manage geospatial data provided in "custom hashed format". But all of the various tools available will gladly accept a latitude/longitude XY coordinate pair because they are perfectly machine readable and while not human friendly they actually mean something so that professionals can make sense of the numbers if needed. Also as far as variable precision is needed, let's throw a round(,) function and be set with it. So as of now both solution are essentially some kind of private API with no widely available and stadardised support to revert to a usable latitude/longitude. So I would guess many GIS power users look at this suspiciously secretly hoping that no one will ever share such obfuscated data format to them for any critical use. NB : For more complex data representations there is a whole standard defining organisation https://www.ogc.org https://www.ogc.org that define horribly complex (yet useful) data structures and gladly make the standard freely and publicly available. Maybe they could enforce a flavor of geohash into a FOSS standard so that tooling could refer to it, but I'm not sure it's on their roadmap.