(Article from 2016 describing how all post addresses in Mongolia were switched to what3words addresses)

Amazingly this is a big problem that is worth solving. Many countries in Africa don’t have a developed address system with named roads and for the purpose of mail will either use a pin-drop (which can go wrong when described over the phone) or will just write a description (third house down the alley next to the pharmacy) which is very hard to sort and deliver.

An example of a country with this issue is Kenya.

As other people noted it is hard to compete with universality of lat/Lon pair.

I agree that supporting a finite set of languages isn't accessible enough, though.

In order to get sufficient accuracy, you need to state lat/long to 6 decimal points, meaning the full number is c16 numbers long. It’s certainly not particularly user friendly.

I’m also not entirely sure what is meant by universality - it’s certainly not commonly used (who knows their own lat/long off by heart?) or commonly used for the location of houses or addresses in most of the world (try sending mail by writing a lat/long on it and popping it through the mail). In terms of things that compete with the ‘universality’ of lat/long - the main thing is address/postcode (although it depends on the use case). You can write my address on a postcard and put it in any post box and it will get to my house - that’s the real universal standard.

Lat/Long's are actually pretty horrible to work with from a post/logistics perspective. There is a reason why nowhere in the world actually writes the lat/long on their mail!

Who's funding them?

A boycott may be in order.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/what3words/company_f...

Although W3W is a scumbag company, telling my car to set destination to some.three.words would be neat. And since it's a Mercedes it should drive me there.