A great thing about OSM is that you can improve the data, specifically in your local area so that at the very least it will no longer have spotty coverage of the places you frequent.

I use https://github.com/westnordost/StreetComplete for doing this so I don't have to make the investment to learn the technical details of tags.

"You have to create the map to use the map" isn't as compelling of a feature for a mapping service as you think it is

OP talked about improving OSM using StreetComplete. So this is about adding missing speed limits, opening hours, roof shapes, recycling containers, tactile pavement at bus stops, etc. Hardly "creating the map".

When I travel to a place where OSM could need improvement I make sure that at least the hotel I will be staying at, nearby restaurants, bars and museums, etc are correctly tagged with phone numbers, opening hours etc. It is not much work and it gives me an opportunity to decide what I want to do before I leave.

When I get there I then have everything ready offline in OsmAnd. In a way I just update OSM instead of adding my own bookmarks/favorites.

nelgaard got the gist of it. I've never encountered an area where OSM didn't have the roads and buildings already mapped. I have encountered areas where it didn't have the speed limits and house numbers of those structures (and, once or twice, places lacking a road name, but that's pretty rare).

But, my personal perspective was a little different. It's more like: I want to use OSM, and get others to use OSM instead of proprietary mapping solutions like Google's, for moral reasons. In that context, being able to make sure my friends can always get to my house using OSM is a great boon.

I realize I didn't share that perspective in my original post, which is probably the source of the confusion here.

YMMV really. OSM in the UK has orders of magnitude more cycling and walking data than Google, for example, but fewer buildings. I don't generally find I need buildings in my day-to-day mapping needs but everyone's different I guess.

I have found this in the U.K., Canada, Japan and Taiwan - OpenStreetMaps is way better as a pedestrian or a cyclist in my experience, at least in relatively built up areas.

Its the same in many parts of the USA. For example in a college town with 50k students / 50k permanent population, streets are complete with sidewalks and bike trails etc., but good luck trying to find nearby restaurants by looking around the map, like you can do with google maps. Even the buildings which are marked with their name and type usually lack operating hours, phone number, website url and other sorts of info that GMaps has. But the situation is much better - close to GMaps level - in big cities here.

> lack operating hours

If you have an Android phone - I want to plug StreetComplete app here. I never mapped opening hours before I started using it.

It asks simple questions, there is no requirement to learn anything OSM specific.

Registration at OSM website is probably the biggest hurdle.

(disclaimer: I am one of contributors to that project)

The great thing about OSM is the currency. New developments will be added more qucikly. But for completeness and consistency Ordnance Survey data will just be better. And they do have a free building dataset, and even pre-generated vector tiles.

Even the OS data -- at least what I can see in Aurora -- might not be as complete as where someone has taken an interest in a new development, such as one near here. The OpenData building shapes are a good start, but they appear to have been auto-generated, and usually need correcting from up-to-date satellite imagery, if not a survey.

Whether buildings are mapped, and in what detail, just depends on the area; detailed mapping definitely isn't confined to London. The main utility of mapping buildings for navigation might be to tag them with postcodes, even if that's not ideal. Roads are typically at least as accurate as OS OpenData where I've looked.