Apple initially licensed data primarily from TomTom and also from others.

They've been replacing licensed map data with data they gather themselves for over half a decade now. So far, their own data covers North America, Europe, Australia as well as a few countries elsewhere. 35 countries so far.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebuilding-maps-f...

https://www.justinobeirne.com/new-apple-maps-expansions-curr...

No. GP is right. Apple Maps was originally created from a dump of Openstreetmap data. Apple then collected its own data to build its own maps from scratch and contributed none of that back. It used, and still uses, TomTom for traffic incident data. https://gspe21-ssl.ls.apple.com/html/attribution.html

Nope. They may also use TomTom for traffic incident data, but their primary data source for map data at release was TomTom.

> The main provider of map data is TomTom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Maps

> contributed none of that back

OpenStreetMap seems to think that Apple contributes both tools and data.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Apple

Almost all of the large tech companies with a mapping product contribute data to OpenStreetMap, with Google being the sole exception that I'm aware of.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Google

> OpenStreetMap seems to think that Apple contributes both tools and data.

Like I said, they contributed nothing from the maps they created from scratch back, only corrections to OpenStreetmap while they were using it.

I’ve seen an Apple mapping vehicle in my rural UK village so I assume they are spending real money on maps.

> They most likely just downloaded openstreetmap database and spent nothing. Do you have any source that the logical and easy thing is not what they did?

Yes, openstreetmap's data was WAYYYY better than Apple Maps at launch.

In central London Apple Maps had such bad data that some of the business listings hadn't existed since before Apple Inc was formed as company, which were certainly not problems in openstreetmap.