You'd pay 50-100 euro a month ? Why ? How did you arrive at this number ? Even before google maps, the standalone navigation devices didn't cost that much. To stretch this, if maps is 50-100 a month, how much is the total bill of all software you use ? Surely, the h/w, OS, browsers etc. should be orders of magnitude more than what they are today too.

> How did you arrive at this number ?

Straight comparison to the other service I paid for for a while I gave up as it didn't seem worth it.

> Even before google maps, the standalone navigation devices didn't cost that much.

They costed a bunch and were a lot less useable in day to day life.

There was no device that would tell me the schedule of the next train departing from the station 10 min from where I am, when the store I am going will close, and how I'll get back when there's no train left for the day anymore. To your point there were service providing this info in part, in text format, on super small screen, and they'd cost around 5/10 bucks a month.

Now I get that with a mostly accurate map, end to end, automatically udpated as I start moving. And I also get other people's position, and don't need to text them every 5 min to know if they're lost or stuck.

The same thing goes for mountain maps, where I live the trail markers are relatively accurate and I can use it as a reference to check the official maps and on trail directions (and getting the other people's position is that much more valuable)

All in all it's a package that was never at hand before smarphones arised, and is currently only really working with Google Maps, even as we have OSM and Apple Maps at the distance.

> how much is the total bill of all software you use ? Surely, the h/w, OS, browsers etc. should be orders of magnitude more than what they are today too.

I actually think that keeping a worldwide map including cities street level details and natural paths up to date could cost a lot more that maintaining a browser or an OS.

> There was no device that would tell me a) the schedule of the next train departing from the station 10 min from where I am, b) when the store I am going will close, and c) how I'll get back when there's no train left for the day anymore. To your point there were service providing this info in part, in text format, on super small screen, and they'd cost around 5/10 bucks a month.

There is a free Android (+ iOS) app doing a) and c), it's Transit App, at least in 18 countries and 300 cities [0]. Gives you schedules and (multimodal) trip planning including car, bus, transit, train, subway, cycling, walking, rideshare, bikeshare, scooter rental. It has both scheduled and (near-)realtime information, detours, service interruptions etc. Shows you all the options you're interested in, rolled up by start time and total time, and includes cost(/estimated cost for rideshare).

In text format, on a super small screen, free.

> And I also get other people's position, and don't need to text them every 5 min to know if they're lost or stuck.

Well ok but very few people use that much. Why do you need it so much? Socializing? Hiking? Playing Pokemon?

[0]: https://transitapp.com/region

Transit looks like a nice app. I assume it's based on the open data initiatives in places where it works (France etc.). There's similar iniatives in many places now (Japan has one as well) and I'm pretty much rooting for more of those.

You're still left patchworking all these apps, switching from one another at every point and assembling everything in notes by yourself. It's super nice it can be done at all, but I'd also pay for an app that has it all in one place if it wasn't free.

To note, the c) part is not just public transport but anything from private bus network/taxi/private bike networks/just walk. While Maps deals with that decently, I'd agree it would be way too much too ask from a free transit app.

Transit App works fantastic in urban US, Canada, Western Europe, Aus, NZ. (It's also great when visiting a new location for discovering which routes get you from A to B, speed/frequencey/cost, as opposed to commuters who already know which mode, route and stop they want, and primarily want real-time updates, ETAs. Obviously you can supplement it with the local transit app/website.)

There's not much patchworking/assembling once you bookmark your preferred locations, research what times they open/close, select favorite transit modes, bookmark specific lines, research which exact stops. Don't mentally lock into Google Maps as your primary thing.

I said the c) part is already done by Transit App and generally better than Google Maps (shows rideshare time-and-cost estimates, bikeshare/scooter pickup locations etc.) Where 'taxi' has generally been replaced by rideshare and by 'private bike networks' you mean bikeshare. Not sure if by 'private bus network' you mean coaches, or employee shuttles, but those are sometimes not open to the public.

As mentioned, the amount of local detail depends on how much your municipality participates in open-date initatives; if it doesn't, ask them to. Transit App is adding new regions constantly.

> And I also get other people's position, and don't need to text them every 5 min to know if they're lost or stuck.

Are you running a package delivery service, or taxi service? I don't understand this statement in other contexts.

I'm not the commenter you're replying to, but Google Maps was the sole reason I changed from a feature phone to a smart phone. For people who travel a lot, it's hard to compare life before and after digital maps. They are extremely useful.

100 Euros per month for Maps? What do you even need Maps for when you can just see everything from your flying yacht anyway?

That’s a stretch but I agree id pay 50 bucks a month for a total Google Subscription: gmail google maps docs and drive. All of it. No ads, personalized only to serve me. And bring back reader and I’ll pay 100.

Just use Feedly. It's great and free, or $6/mo if you want to support the business.

The only case I can think of where google is the best is traffic updates. I use OSM primarily, osmand particularly for navigation, and I've tried going back to google a few times, every time I try it it's worse than the last time.

You may be willing to pay €50 a month for it, but most people can't afford that and wouldn't pay it.

Google Maps has its pitfalls, but it's by far the most up to date in the cities I've used it.

OSM lacks a lot of details that completely change how you'd move from point A to point B (I was missing overpass bridges and crossable paths in residential neighboorhoods), and point to point navigation is also not great. Then it completely lacks all the more commercial features Google has built on top of Maps (store details, position sharing, timeline etc.)

On sheer readability I also prefer Google Maps, but I've been using it so long that that might be just familiarity.

I wish I'd like OSM a lot more, but every time I ended up back to Maps for a reason or another.

For countryside locations and topographic, OTOH, Google Maps (and Apple Maps) is a joke compared to OSM, though, at least in Europe.

Yes. On the more critical part when in the middle of nowhere I often use a traditional map as reference after getting my rough position through Google Maps. I wouldn't trust any of the mapping services more than the local entities to provide accurate trail info, especially as they're the own maintaining the paths.

Sadly I'm still not good with really basic compass and map positionning, and the GPS + average location info helped a ton in the past.

Depends on what you are looking for and what country you are in. When it comes to small 'unofficial' roads, bike paths and hiking trails then OSM is much better. When it comes to finding the location of rural buildings, addresses and companies I find Google Maps much much better and complete, at least here in Sweden.

> On sheer readability I also prefer Google Maps, but I've been using it so long that that might be just familiarity.

Interesting – personally I find Maps absolutely horrible for usage as an actual map for orienting myself (as opposed to just serving as a vague geographical background for displaying POIs or navigation information).

When you zoom out, it often doesn't really distinguish between forests and other open spaces (admittedly OSM's coverage in that regard varies regionally, though at least in Europe it seems quite comprehensive and definitively better than Google's).

Then, when you zoom in everything just turns into a featureless grey-on-grey with no distinction between built-up areas and everything else (only "parks" get shown, but e.g. in France that apparently even covers large scale "natural parks" covering hundreds or even thousands of square kilometres, so in that case everything, including any towns happening to lie in that area, just gets shown with a green background, which is equally useless), and buildings are only shown when you start zooming in really closely.

Yes, there is a lot to improve. I also have my gripes about what POI are kept from the detail view to the zoomed out view, or how I'll completely lose a location if I happen to misclick on some random POI that happens to fall under my finger on the edge of the screen.

On the rougher part of the maps, I often get back to satellite view and/or StreeView if available (even as they sometimes don't show the same info as they come from different points in time -_-;). It's a handy backup that I don't get on the open source map apps

> even as they sometimes don't show the same info as they come from different points in time

And for unfathomable reasons Google Earth (the desktop version) can show historic aerial imagery, but no historic street view pictures, whereas Google Maps works just the other way round – you can view historic street view photographs there, but no historic aerial/satellite imagery. (And the browser version of Google Earth apparently can't do either.)

I'm curious if that's US vs Europe thing?

For me in Europe, Google Maps coverage quality can be best described by this personal anecdote. I used to live in Nürnberg, which is in top 10 German cities by population, and where are some major and well-recognized international companies are headquartered. Nürnberg has a subway system (U-Bahn) since 1980s, and it's significant enough: a few dozen stations over three lines (one is fully driverless, btw).

Google didn't have any representation of U-Banh in Nürnberg till at least 2017. I don't mean "wasn't supporting it in navigation and routing", I mean " stations weren't even marked and labelled on the general overview maps. And it's not like they didn't have the into: there was a widely-used user layer which added at least station labels. They just simply didn't care enough, and had other priorities.

In the meanwhile, the level of detail on OSM covered details as minor as every mailbox not only in Nürnberg, but in every small town around Frankonia (I used to participate in postcrossing and used this a lot from random places).

As a counter argument, here in Sweden I've yet to run into a place where Google maps has failed me when it comes to driving, public transport or address/POI search. OSM on the other hand is missing half the buildings once you get more then 15 km out from major city centers and even in major cities, things like house numbers and addresses is often wrong. The only scenario OSM is better than Google Maps is pedestrian and hiking routes.

Here in Poland it's fine. Maybe that's due to the war Germans waged on google street view ? I'd think some of that was also used for mapping

France and Spain had a pretty good coverage, Japan cities are decent as well. I've only seen Munchen and Kolhn's most touristic areas but there were decent enough we didn't hit any critical issue. Commerce data and opening hours was abysmal on the other hand.

OSM was pretty good too in France but has different issues: they don't get the same access to up to date commerce data as exposed through local aggregators, and there's just not enough user data to have good heuristics on navigation times.

I don't know about "most" but many people can pay 50 Euros per month for a service they care about. The problem here is that very few people would pay a monthly fee for a maps service that was free for almost 20 years.

50 eur a month is insanity. I bet that i and all the other 'poors' like me would start buying $5 permanent paper maps and asking for directions again. That's the kind of hemorrhagic price that only someone who never thinks about the cost of groceries or gas could pay. I'm not trying to tell you that you're a rich asshole or anything, but i do want to communicate that those numbers are vastly detached from the reality of most people. I'd pay 50 eur one time but monthly is a lot. Just pin me to the version i paid for, don't update road closures or any of that other bullshit and let me opt out of the parasitic subscription pricing.

I get your point of view, and I think it comes down to how much you rely on the service

As you mention gas, for instance my gas cost are ridiculously low (less than 10 bucks a month) as the car is only for specific cases, and 99% of the time I'm not driving.

Same way I care a lot more about visiting new places than going to theaters, and I'd never end up with 5$ of paper maps (to dig my own grave, I also buy paper maps of the wilder areas I go and they sure cost way more than that...)

On the other had, getting lost somewhere I have no familiarity with, being stuck at a station that has an incident and not having any backup plans, looking for someone in a town for 30 min because they're describing places in a way that is too vague are situations that are highly stressful and can cost a lot more than 10 or 20 bucks. Have you ever missed the last train and thought how much it will cost you to do something about it ?

That's where I put the price of an app I actually use a ton, it could be one of the main reasons I have a smartphone and not a combination of a dumb modem and a tablet.

What kind of comment is this? You act like the commenter has insulted you personally, just because they appreciate the service and would pay a lot of money for it. You even go as far as calling the other person an asshole, in a weaselly way. Each one of us have different means and put different value on things. People pay €50 to do a bungee jump.