Why Nukemap Isn't on Google Maps Anymore

(blog.nuclearsecrecy.com)

787 points | by Fej 1567 days ago

42 comments

  • underbluewaters 1567 days ago
    As a software developer for a lab within a big University, I appreciate the bit about Google offering edu discounts, but only if working with a representative _for the entire institution_. A lot of big companies offer discounts this way and it is maddening. There are so many different development projects within a university setting and they often operate with zero involvement of campus IT. It's like expecting a foreign company to involve their federal government in purchasing a software license.
    • asdff 1567 days ago
      The worst is when it's clear that bargaining has happened: limited use site licenses. There is a hypothetical microscope that costs over 250k and has a service contract. All output files are in proprietary format that can only be analyzed and exported using the proprietary software, and the license is such that only 10 people can use the software at once.

      The bean counters in the university aren't going to cough up whatever Zeiss wants for an unlimited use license, and Zeiss isn't going to expand the license without trying to squeeze even more cash from the university. In either case, demand for the microscope would be exactly the same, only now researchers are setting alarms for 3am just to export a damn file.

      • FK3LRnamzX 1567 days ago
        That really sounds like a scenario where adversarial interoperability should be applied. Maybe build a service for queueing, processing and exporting to a mail/ftp or something like that.
    • skrebbel 1567 days ago
      > It's like expecting a foreign company to involve their federal government in purchasing a software license.

      I love this analogy.

      Also please let me pick a nit: It gets even worse when said foreign country isn't a federation!

      • naniwaduni 1567 days ago
        Bizarrely, there's no good word for "pertaining to a country". The likely preferred option "national" is subject to a similar objection ("It gets even worse when said foreign country isn't a nation!"--not all countries are nation-states, and we have more than one salient example in the anglosphere!), and "state" has the unfortunate property of meaning something very different to an American.
        • bonoboTP 1566 days ago
          And interestingly, government is not that clear either.

          In Hungarian, for example, we use kormány to mean a mix of government, administration and cabinet, but mostly cabinet. Still it's usually translated to and from "government". But in English government is a very broad word that basically means all the tax funded institutions, not just the ministers. We rather call that "the state". For example in Hungarian nobody would say we have "government-funded" education or healthcare, rather we have "state-funded" ones. But in English "state" is very overloaded with many senses, so "government" took its place. It used to be strange to my ear in American movies when I knew less about the system, e.g. really the government is trying to find you? Like ministers and stuff?

        • skrebbel 1567 days ago
          "National" is a weird word in English, because it doesn't typically mean "pertaining to the entire nation" but more like "pertaining to the entire country". I think it's usually the proper term. It translates to "country-al" in the other languages I know.

          That said, I don't know about the UK. If a Londoner talks about the "national level", is that England or the UK?

          Oh damn I'm wrong and starting to see your point. Eg in German, "land" refers specifically to the federal state and not the federation. You need to use bundessomethingsomething to address all of Germany. Weird stuff!

          EDIT suddenly I realize how weird a name the UN has. There's not really any proper nation states left in the word. Bhutan maybe?

          I have no idea, but I like to think that it would've been the United Countries but then Scotland would've wanted a seat.

          • azernik 1567 days ago
            Fun time to nerd out!

            The name of the United Nations is an artifact of WWII - that was the name chosen by the alliance on 1 January 1942, just after the US entered the war, to describe their now-common cause. Given the wide variety of regimes fighting on the same side [1] and the common ideological basis of the combatant countries, "nations" and "brotherhood of nations" style of nationalism were an umbrella everyone could get behind while still having an appropriate amount of emotional oomph.

            [1] Mostly. The USSR wasn't fighting Japan.

          • MockObject 1564 days ago
            > There's not really any proper nation states left in the word. Bhutan maybe?

            I beg your pardon?

          • julienfr112 1567 days ago
            France Maybe ?
            • new2628 1566 days ago
              > Tell that to the Bretons, Alsatians, Occitans, Corses, Catalans; not to speak of the outre-mer colonies.

              They were told that, that's why they mostly assimilated. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/SpeakFre...

            • enriquto 1566 days ago
              > France Maybe ?

              Tell that to the Bretons, Alsatians, Occitans, Corses, Catalans; not to speak of the outre-mer colonies.

        • bryanrasmussen 1567 days ago
          >there's no good word for "pertaining to a country"

          In English, the question then becomes "Where are we going to import this word from?"

    • WD-42 1567 days ago
      Dealing with large institutions can be even more difficult than governments!

      We recently awarded some grants to people for them to work with an open source scientific package we've been developing.

      One of the groups actually gave the money back because it was so hard to get their University to deal with them being awarded money, it wasn't worth it for the amount involved.

    • ISL 1567 days ago
      I agree that it is maddening. The same thing happens when purchasing hardware. Companies that do B2B transactions don't always support billing to myriad small entities within a single-named organization with a single purchasing department.

      There are ways in which it makes sense. The company generally wants to interact with a legal entity, not a research group.

      A hybrid approach, that happens occasionally at the University of Washington, is that a department negotiates a discounted license for a software license and then opens the license agreement to broader swaths of the university.

    • ramraj07 1567 days ago
      When I did my PhD, we just created a lab website on it's own domain and applied for a Google apps for education account for that domain and got it. That's been our labs main collaboration tool ever since and it's been six years now.
    • mannykannot 1566 days ago
      > It's like expecting a foreign company to involve their federal government in purchasing a software license.

      Google is familiar with that business model, at least when it comes to dealings that the Chinese government might take an interest in.

    • mnky9800n 1566 days ago
      There's also many different IT departments on a campus in my experience. I've never worked in a physics department that interacts with campus IT. It's either great or terrible.
  • sct202 1567 days ago
    One of the criticisms of when Google Maps API was basically a free for all was that it was suppressing the ability of startups to exist by devaluing products; it seems like with these pricing changes Google is giving the competition an opportunity to swoop in.
    • zelly 1567 days ago
      A business model based on data hoarding will never last long-term. As soon as one open source player steps up that's 60% as good, it's over. Like Encarta or Britannica vs. Wikipedia.

      Lasting value comes from the software in between the database and the view. In the case of encyclopedias or maps, the software is the most trivial part.

      I really think Google Maps will die. It's just unlikely that for the rest of history, no one will improve OpenStreetMaps to the point that it is competitive.

      You need a massive amount of capital to create a redundant data set that has a death clock, doing nothing good for the world but extracting some small rent created by antitrust laws. No thanks.

      • s17n 1567 days ago
        Traditional encyclopedias didn't lose because of their intellectual property model, they lost because they were trying to charge money for their product, so a free as in beer competitor was able to take all their market share.

        A maps data set will require constant updating and the quality of the data set will be determined by the amount of work put into it on an ongoing basis. The question is which number is bigger: the monetary value of the time people are willing to donate making contributions to openstreetmap, or the amount of money that Google makes on map ads and can therefore spend improving the data quality.

        • mantap 1567 days ago
          There are parts of the world that have much better OSM coverage than Google maps, e.g eastern Indonesia. I don't think OSM is ever going to beat Google in for instance New York City but it absolutely can and does beat Google in parts of the world that are not profitable for Google to map. That's the problem with a for-profit map: consistency.
          • codeka 1567 days ago
            The exact same problem exists with volunteer-maintained maps. In fact it's even worse there because at least with a commercial map, quality is basically correlated with where the users are. With a volunteer-maintained map, quality is correlated with where the volunteers are, which is not necessarily going to be where the users are.
            • carlinmack 1565 days ago
              Thousands of volunteers specifically map remote areas they don't live in through the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team
          • dmihal 1566 days ago
            Every local municipality already maintains GIS data, I imagine that some day these systems will automatically integrate into a public, open database like OSM.

            Sidenote, the FOAM project is doing some interesting work into geospacial data on-the-blockchain.

            • namibj 1566 days ago
              At a regular (bi)monthly/quarterly OSM meetup we were joined by representatives from 2 or 3 local municipalities. It seems they might be interested in unification to reduce costs, but I didn't ask for details.
      • macintux 1567 days ago
        > I really think Google Maps will die. It's just unlikely that for the rest of history, no one will improve OpenStreetMaps to the point that it is competitive.

        From reading the analyses at https://www.justinobeirne.com/, plus just generally following the tech industry, I'm convinced Google Maps will never die, at least not in any timeframe relevant to this discussion.

        Between autonomous vehicles at Waymo and Google's desire to provide intelligent suggestions to their Android and web users, they need to have as comprehensive a data set as algorithmically possible.

        I suppose it's possible that OSM could become good enough that Google would only need to supply a proprietary layer on top of it for their own needs, but given that they can collect better intelligence about roads and buildings than anyone else through their unwitting spies, I doubt they'd want to give up control over the full stack.

      • minikites 1567 days ago
        >As soon as one open source player steps up that's 60% as good, it's over.

        Does this imply that Linux is <60% as good as Windows because it's not over?

        • zelly 1567 days ago
          Linux only lags behind in desktop/laptop use. (Dominates servers and smartphones.)

          Yes, absolutely, in the case of desktops, it is <60% as good as Windows or macOS. I say this as a nearly lifelong desktop Linux user. The userspace desktop software gets almost no attention compared to the kernel/systemd which actually matters for business. The major DEs like KDE and Gnome3 are full of exploits and memory leaks. The alternative to using a DE is to use a tiling window manager and spend hours a day re-implementing what would have been one-click operations on Windows/macOS. This is not to mention the lack of non-development-related software targeting desktop Linux.

          Will this change in the future? I think it is very likely, but the time horizon is key. There are thousands of possible realities where Microsoft or Apple fails--political problems, economic events, bad management, some black swan startup out of nowhere. All it takes is for one of these to trigger for mindshare to shift to Linux (or BSD or Fuchsia--any free one for that matter) and bring it over the threshold.

          (But this is kind of irrelevant to the point about data hoarding business models, since Windows/macOS is pure software.)

          • larrik 1567 days ago
            As someone who dual-boots, I would say Linux is a better OS, today, than Windows or Mac. Sure, there are areas where it sucks more than the others, but the same can be said of either of the other ones for different areas.
            • zo1 1567 days ago
              As someone who also dual-boots. I would say that Windows is definitely the better of the OSes. I've tried, so hard, to make it work. It's been almost a decade now since I switched to Linux OSes. But, software/package management is absolutely horrible in the OSS world these days. It's so bad that actually downloading + installing MSI/zip files from the software provider is a better experience and more reliable. Linux has lost almost all the benefits from having a package ecosystem.

              These days, everything on linux is either random potentially insecure PPA repos, shell scripts loaded from a server via curl and piped to sh with sudo access, or "snaps" (whatever the fuck they are). That all ontop of wildly outdated packages in the supported repos. No wonder everyone rants and raves about "docker", now we know why things moved into that space.

              I know, this is my opinion and it's biased. Yes I may not have done things properly, or there are other ways of doing things, etc etc.

              • angry_octet 1567 days ago
                I really can understand how you have gotten to such a bad place with packaging. What are you doing that needs lots of PPAs?!

                Snaps are actually a great security and packaging advance that decouples package dependencies from a common library set, while maintaining a mechanism to patch and upgrade otherwise dangling library deps. It also starts down the long road to confining software, because what you run shouldn't automatically assume all your privs. Basically iOS style apps for Linux.

                People who pipe web content to a privileged shell are on their own at present. Arguably they should be warned, but that assumes taint tracking at every level of the operating system, and no production OS has that. If the software is a dependency shit show then putting it in docker (and then into a VM) is a better compromise.

                Windows is already deprecating the installer model for the app store and cloud concept, they just didn't make it stick the first time round.

                • di4na 1567 days ago
                  Snaps have been the single provider of crash, breaking the machine or killing ny battery i have ever seen on linux. It is to the point that if all i can find is a snap, i prefer to boot windows to deal with it.

                  Snaps are a good idea in theory but do not work in practice.

                  • angry_octet 1566 days ago
                    Well, I'm surprised. Snaps have really simplified things from my perspective. Any you'd like to call out? Particularly they shouldn't be able to 'break the machine'.
                    • di4na 1566 days ago
                      I have had multiple time uninstalling a snap that installed its own X stack. And discover that it had been swapped for the whole OS to use this one.

                      No more graphical stack.

                      This happened to me with not only X. It seems to me that installing is tested. Removing is not. It was also badly documented last time i checked.

                      Happened with discord last time.

                      • angry_octet 1564 days ago
                        Okay that is seriously bad. Looking at https://github.com/snapcrafters/discord/issues they have several unresolved issues like that, seems this is unmaintained.

                        Ubuntu needs to more clearly explain whether the app is confined, and force apps to use an API to change the system environment to allow rollback, multiple packages of the same function etc.

              • mgalgs 1567 days ago
                You should try something other than Ubuntu. Fedora or Arch are my standard recommendations these days.
              • euroclydon 1567 days ago
                Oh, you think MSIs are sticking around? Package manager insanity is taking over Windows slowly too.
          • carte_blanche 1567 days ago
            > The major DEs like KDE and Gnome3 are full of exploits and memory leaks.

            Can you give any supporting evidence for this?

          • protomikron 1567 days ago
            > The major DEs like KDE and Gnome3 are full of exploits and memory leaks.

            Sry, but that is just not true.

          • seph-reed 1567 days ago
            When it comes to an OS, being 90% as good would still mean a 10% drop in productivity.

            The margins are a bit different here.

        • Armisael16 1567 days ago
          I think it implies that Windows is not a business based on data-hoarding.
        • thenewnewguy 1567 days ago
          For the average consumer, (i.e. not the average HN user, where this is far more debatable), yes.
        • pgeorgi 1567 days ago
          For the use case of running whatever win32 executable is promoted on zdnet.com (or pcworld.com or whatever is out there that appeals to computer users that aren't developers) any given day? Yes.
          • owl57 1567 days ago
            Do they actually promote non-game win32 executables these days? I thought current fashion is mostly services with mobile and web apps, and sometimes Electron ones?
        • yabadabadoes 1567 days ago
          Windows is not over? I see Microsoft as similar to IBM now. They will make a lot of money from their Rolodex, possibly more than they ever made before, but they no longer own a relevant platform someone would write new software for.
          • yabadabadoes 1566 days ago
            Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, when a platform is dying its owner:

            1. Tries to capture all profit from the edges.

            2. Extracts value "unreasonably" both to grab what they still can and to create an explanation for the death. This could be high fees, ads, or extraction of market intelligence.

            3. Begins embracing the new platform with compatibility layers.

            4. Starts making 2 offers on everything. One with their legacy and one with the rising platforms.

            5. Treats their nonfounding CEO as significant and someone to listen to.

            Plenty of companies make this transition successfully (I chose IBM as the example) and make huge profits from not having to charge uniform prices across the entire market. But the discussion was the windows platform being replaced by Linux, not Microsoft profits.

          • hossbeast 1567 days ago
            Are you aware of the video gaming industry
            • frank2 1567 days ago
              Or the enterprise software industry
              • yabadabadoes 1567 days ago
                Are you aware of IBM in the enterprise software industry? They manage to do almost all of that with their own software and open source rebundled.. No OS/2, almost no 3rd party programmers who are interested in their platform.

                That is the future of Microsoft and the non-future of Windows.

              • zimpenfish 1567 days ago
                Or, to a certain extent, the graphical industry?
            • yabadabadoes 1567 days ago
              Yes, windows developers with experience are going to go work in the game industry..
      • thw0rted 1565 days ago
        This thread seems to be forgetting that Google Maps didn't just replace the atlas (for looking up names of things) and the dedicated GPS (for routing / directions), they also replaced the radar detector (OK that's Waze, but same people and same data), and the phone book.

        I don't know about you, but I haven't bothered to look at any of the various "yellow pages" sites (to find a phone number or address), nor at Yelp (to find business reviews) in many years. And to make matters worse, I'm actually one of the volunteers feeding free labor / data to Maps, because I post reviews and make edits to business information. What can I say? They're really good at what they do.

      • traderjane 1567 days ago
        Apple Maps is way more than 60% there in terms of quality but I still don’t find it very compelling for the same reason I won’t switch to DuckDuckGo - a palpable difference in quality gets me paranoid and makes me double check a lot of stuff.

        That instinct to double check makes me go “Oh well let’s just use Google.”

        • ncmncm 1567 days ago
          Fortunately, the quality of Google searches has been declining at such a rate that you will soon be double-checking on DDG, instead.
          • incompatible 1567 days ago
            It has already passed that point for me, given that Google is a) subject to censorship, on a per-country basis b) likes to return search results that don't have much to do with your query, apparently because that's what "most people" want c) records every query you make from your IP address, with no way to turn it off if you aren't logged in to a Google account d) the results I get from DDG are generally what I need.
          • andai 1567 days ago
            Don't they get their results from Google, though?
            • Ndymium 1567 days ago
              No, I think it's Bing and their own index.
              • jakear 1567 days ago
                It’s pretty much just Bing. Saw posted a bit ago that if you DDG “what is my user agent”, the website preview text will show that it’s Bing. Which means DDG is just whitelabling Bing’s index.

                I use bing exclusively. Sometimes I don’t find what I want, and switching to google is as simple as swapping out the authority. The query syntax is the same.

        • asdff 1567 days ago
          Apple maps has gotten a lot better than release but it still has a long way to go imo. It's probably fine in the bay area at this point, but boy does it do some dumb shit in LA. It's worse than waze, and waze is worthless (an unprotected left across a six lane boulevard is just not happening, among other similar boneheaded moves).

          Google also spoils me with multi modal options, although the transit estimates seem to be a complete stab in the dark and there are quirks like invisible buses. The bike timing is also useful, but the routing is usually junk and profoundly unsafe.

          Living here has taught me that all these apps generally suck, just google maps seems to suck slightly less.

          • biztos 1567 days ago
            Last time I was in SF (last August) Apple Maps couldn’t even correctly locate the Walgreens stores downtown. I so much want it to be good, but Apple refuses to take it seriously even in their own back yard.
        • seph-reed 1567 days ago
          I'm currently testing out https://beta.cliqz.com/

          If you use Brave, you can easily choose your search engine with `:g` for google. You can also set your own shortcuts for any search box on any website.

          • sm4rk0 1567 days ago
            It's all possible with Firefox and DuckDuckGo.
          • mackrevinack 1567 days ago
            you have to use the shift key to type a colon though or if you're in mobile you have to long press. same with duckduckgo's exclamation mark.

            I much prefer the Firefox method where you add the search shortcut to a browser bookmark and then if you sync your bookmarks to the mobile app.

            I use gg for Google, gi for Google images. dd for duckduckgo and di for ddg images etc

          • nyolfen 1567 days ago
            custom search keywords have been available in firefox for at least 15 years and chrome since it was released
    • criley2 1567 days ago
      Google Maps has a multi-layered business moat that makes competition really difficult

      * Massive staff and fleet of vehicles on the ground with multiple sensors mapping the entire planet. Capital costs here are enormous * Massive network and bandwidth with caches in just about every major IX to deliver ultra high performance maps * Major established contracts with satellite mapping vendors to get the best data as early as possible * Major brand recognition with many users using the app and knowing it to be the best of the best

      I would never want to compete here, but a major institutional player could

      • CrazyStat 1567 days ago
        You're talking about competing as a consumer map/gps, which is not what the blog post is talking about (or the parent comment, I assume).

        Rather, GMaps used to be the default choice if you wanted to build an app on top of a map (in this case, looking at the effects of nuclear bomb detonations). The blog post explains why GMaps is no longer a reasonable choice, which (as the parent notes) opens up room for competitors.

      • Reason077 1567 days ago
        > ”Google Maps has a multi-layered business moat that makes competition really difficult”

        OpenStreetMap is going from strength to strength. Maps startups no longer need to duplicate Google's on-the-ground mapping efforts. Now, they can make use of open data.

        Mapbox is perhaps the most well-known, but there are many commercial services based on OSM data: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Commercial_OSM_Software_...

        • criley2 1567 days ago
          When Pokemon Go switched from Gmaps to OSM, the quality drop was dramatic and noticeable. I want OSM to be a real competitor, but I think it represents a perfect example of how difficult it is to compete with Google Maps.

          It counts as "Good Enough", but man, it's disappointing to see how inferior Pokemon Go maps are these days. Roads that don't exist, buildings in random places with roads going through them, and map data that seems manipulated for game advantage (by players contributing to OSM for gameplay reasons, not for accuracy reason) ... and this is in the midtown area of a top 10 US city.

          • Reason077 1567 days ago
            > "Roads that don't exist, buildings in random places with roads going through them"

            This is unfortunate and surprising. In my experience (mostly UK/Europe) the quality of street data in OSM matches, and in some cases exceeds that of Google Maps. (Points-of-interest data does not, however).

            If you do notice errors and omissions, fixes can be made in seconds by getting an OSM account and clicking the "edit" button on OpenStreetMap.org. In recent years the development of the "ID" editor has significantly lowered the barriers to entry of editing OSM.

            > "map data that seems manipulated for game advantage"

            Perhaps OSM needs some sort of Wikipedia-style spam detection/prevention if this is happening on a wide scale.

            • reaperducer 1567 days ago
              If you do notice errors and omissions, fixes can be made in seconds by getting an OSM account and clicking the "edit" button on OpenStreetMap.org. In recent years the development of the "ID" editor has significantly lowered the barriers to entry of editing OSM.

              This is the same argument that keeps every year from being the year of Linux on the desktop.

              "My computer crashed!" "Oh, just become a Linux kernel developer and fix it yourself."

              • rurp 1567 days ago
                Comparing a text edit on a website to becoming a Linux kernel developer is like comparing picking apples to running an industrial agriculture company.
                • Endy 1567 days ago
                  Most people who just want to eat an apple (even an apple a day) don't have bandwidth to pick them. Offer them the option of picking apples at an orchard for free vs. buying a bag of apples at a grocery, and most people will go buy the bag.

                  The same happens with an OS. Most people don't want a free labor-intensive solution. They want something that just works, runs their software and stays out of the way. People don't want to think about what OS they use.

                  • Reason077 1567 days ago
                    Yes, typical users want a "just works" solution. But yc-news commenters aren't typical users. In the time it takes to post a comment on this forum, anyone here can just fix the problem themselves using OSM's very simple point-and-click editor.

                    Contrast to Google Maps, where the process of getting a change made can take weeks or months - if the fixes ever show up at all.

                    There really is a lot of power in having a map of the world that we can all "just edit".

                    • Endy 1566 days ago
                      IMO, HN readers can't be the target audience of a mapping product that's being used as a backbone of so many large projects. You have to make it painfully simple and give people a real incentive to do it.
                • wtallis 1567 days ago
                  The act of contributing an edit to OSM is vastly simpler than fixing a kernel bug. But OSM does still have the massive barrier to entry in that if you are using an application built on OSM data, it is usually not easy to realize this and understand that OSM is where you need to go to fix a map error, unless you are already familiar with OSM.
                  • rmc 1567 days ago
                    > it is usually not easy to realize this and understand that OSM is where you need to go to fix a map error

                    The OSM licence requires that people using OSM data attribute OSM, i.e. that their users are aware that the data comes from OSM. In theory this means that the final user should know that OSM is where they should go to fix data issues.

                    But, alas, it's often not followed that well...

                    • wtallis 1567 days ago
                      If you're not already familiar with what OSM is, the copyright notice is really not going to be enough to alert the user to the fact that OSM works differently from commercial map data suppliers and can easily accept user contributions.
                    • jakear 1567 days ago
                      So when my grand mother has an issue with her app, she’s sure to notice that it says “open street maps” in the corner and go to the website, make an account, and contribute more accurate data? I don’t think so.

                      Really, it’s not even an age thing. I work in tech. I visit HN on the regular. OSM, Google, and Apple all have inaccurate data about my daily commute to work. They all say a path that exists doesn’t. Have I don’t anything about it? Absolutely not.

                    • sokoloff 1567 days ago
                      Imagine the average Pokémon Go user; if they even read the boilerplate that stood between them and playing the game, how many of them understood what role OSM data played in their experience, realized what the word “open” meant, and correctly concluded that they could do something to influence/correct the situation vs just thinking the game had a bug or glitch?
                    • red75prime 1567 days ago
                      Also 99/1 rule. Inaccuracy can be not a significant nuisance/worth the effort/known to 1% who contribute.
                • saagarjha 1567 days ago
                  The point is that nobody is going to drive a hundred miles out of their way to pick apples.
              • jschwartzi 1567 days ago
                This is exactly why Linux is such a good development tool.
          • Kiro 1567 days ago
            No idea why you're getting downvoted since anyone who plays Pokemon Go can attest to this. It has gotten unbelievably bad since they switched to OSM.
          • CobrastanJorji 1567 days ago
            I'm far from a power Pokemon Go player, and I live in a city that's likely to have very good map coverage, but those caveats asides I didn't know that this even happened.
          • est31 1567 days ago
            I agree that there are disadvantages in OpenStreetMap. In other parts of the world, Google maps is worse. However, for showing which parts of a city would be dead by a nuke, you don't need to have every road laid out accurately.
      • lallysingh 1567 days ago
        The moat's draining because more of this data is becoming commodity.

        OpenStreetmap data is quite good. I can run a local instance with all the data and the tile server and a web server in a docker image in maybe ~10 min. Source: did this a few years ago during a particularly boring meeting.

      • pja 1567 days ago
        It’s kind of ironic that Google Maps is so bad at some things then. Walking & Cycling directions are especially bad - I get much better directions from OSM than I do from Google Maps.

        For driving directions GMaps is much better. I presume that’s where the majority of their userbase is.

        • asdff 1567 days ago
          Google maps mostly avoids the cardinal sin of most navigation apps: the unprotected left across the multi lane road in heavy traffic.
        • mihagapiha 1567 days ago
          In my experience GMaps route optimizations don't account for elevation or road size in my country. When I drive outside city I strictly use OSMand for routing.
        • brewdad 1567 days ago
          GMaps driving directions failed HARD for me last night.

          I had to make a trip during rush hour. I was already going to be cutting it close on timing as this is a 12 minute drive that can take 15-20 minutes at rush hour. I plugged in my destination and GMaps routed me a way I would rarely take but didn't seem too odd. One block past my last alternate route, I saw the lights ahead. There was a 4 car crash with at least 5 emergency vehicles on scene about 1/2 mile ahead. GMaps had no clue and I had no choice but to inch through about 10 light cycles to reach the turn Gmaps wanted me to take.

          The 15 minute trip took me 35 minutes. Thanks for nothing.

          • viraptor 1567 days ago
            You mean, there was an edge case where Google didn't have real-life data for a specific accident available for you? This is an extreme case that we wouldn't even expect to exist a few years ago, (and then got annoyed by passive surveillance) but now gmaps is failing for missing it? Is this the new norm?

            Did you mark the accident yourself when you saw it?

            • CamperBob2 1567 days ago
              He shouldn't need to mark it. Maps can tell that its users are spending 20 minutes to get through a single intersection.
              • viraptor 1567 days ago
                If you have enough users with gmaps on that segment, it will happen. Can we guarantee there was enough in that situation?
              • megablast 1567 days ago
                After how long? 10 seconds? 2 minutes? 10 minutes?

                This seems unreasonable.

          • jlgaddis 1567 days ago
            For real-time data, Waze is much, much better.

            If it weren't already aware of the accident so it could warn you, you could have let Waze know about it and, at the least, helped out many others who were coming after you.

          • reaperducer 1567 days ago
            A few days ago I had a rideshare driver unable to find me because Google kept telling him to take a non-existent road through the middle of a building.
      • amundsentb 1567 days ago
        You wouldn't compete on the things that Google does well, but rather on the things they don't. Not saying it is easy. Price and user interaction is something I believe could be improved upon. Also maybe crowd sourcing info.
        • asdff 1567 days ago
          Other pain points include bike routing and unreliable (but still more reliable than any other app I've tried) transit times.
      • mackrevinack 1567 days ago
        "mapping the entire planet"

        that's not true though. I know from doing HOTOSM that there are quite a lot places where there is only a road or two going through it only google maps but there is actually a city/town there. there are some counties where Google Street view cars have never even visited.

      • buboard 1567 days ago
        all of these services sound like things a bunch of different startups would compete to provide. doesn't google outsource stuff?
    • blfr 1567 days ago
      People said the same thing when Google Apps (now G Suite) dropped the free trier. I didn't notice anything happening.
    • Hendrikto 1567 days ago
      I think that's not a great argument… If the free Google Maps API put your company out of business, it didn't have a great product in the first place. If these companies did not provided added value, what was the justification for their existence in the first place?
      • laumars 1567 days ago
        Providing an embeddable map solution with developer friendly API used to be a great product. The fact Google disrupted the market with a free solution doesn't mean the product wasn't great up until that point, it just means someone also saw that product idea and undercut them on price.

        Source: I was using mapping tools before Google Maps came to market.

      • reaperducer 1567 days ago
        If the free Google Maps API put your company out of business, it didn't have a great product in the first place.

        So when a book store giving away books for free puts another book store out of business, that second book store didn't have a great product?

        • chii 1567 days ago
          If the store is able to continue to give away books for free, then obviously the first store that had to charge for the books isn't generating enough value.

          Unless the end-game for the 2nd store is to price out every single book store, then obtain a monopoly. But then anti-monopoly laws should come into place.

          But if the end-game for the 2nd store is to subsidize their cost via a different business - then it's the same as a newspaper using classifieds to subsidize their subscription business. You can't then argue that another newspaper that charge for subscriptions goes out of business is unfair.

      • rstupek 1567 days ago
        Most people will take free and good enough over a superior product any day. Google basically killed the market for mapping products and now have started charging everyone for theirs when used commercially.
      • macintux 1567 days ago
      • spookthesunset 1567 days ago
        That maps api was used by all kinds of hobbyist websites. Once they pulled the plug on free, all those sites bad to scramble to find alternatives.
      • lonelappde 1567 days ago
        What is your business that can survive arbitrary increases in costs?
  • spaethnl 1567 days ago
    I develop an application at a university that allows users to share and lookup accessibility information on public places that uses Google Maps and the Google Places API. We have run in to exactly the same issues as described in this post and we have had a few meetings on what to do about it. I would like to switch to OSM but I haven't been able to find a quality replacement for the Google Places API, which is critical to our application.

    We could switch to using OSM + Places, to at least partially alleviate our problem, except that Google requires any Google Places API results that are displayed on a map to be displayed on a Google Map, which really locks us in.

    Is anyone aware of a good Google Places API alternative, including any paid self-hosted databases?

    • nathancahill 1567 days ago
      What type of accessibility information are you getting back from the Places API? OSM seems like a great fit for this since information is tagged in a structured way: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disabilities

      Feel free to email me, this is my area of expertise. For projects like that I can often help pro-bono.

      • spaethnl 1567 days ago
        We actually aren't using the accessibility data from the Places API, we are collecting and displaying custom data that is provided by users (detailed ratings, reviews and pictures from regular users, and highly detailed building assessments from trained users).

        We only need the places API for having a comprehensive list of nearby places. Other services had too few places in general, but didn't necessarily lack information about the places that were available.

      • rmc 1567 days ago
        > OSM seems like a great fit for this since information is tagged in a structured way:

        OSM both is, and isn't, structured. It's free form tagging system, where anyone can start adding new tags whenever they want, without any gatekeepers.

      • spaethnl 1567 days ago
        I just spent some more time looking at OSM's place data, and I'm not sure if more has been added since last looking at it, or if I wasn't using it correctly, but it seems to have more than I remember.

        I see that a couple of popular restaurants that have been around for at least a decade are still not shown, but maybe that is anomalous? I'll have to re-consider OSM.

        • nathancahill 1567 days ago
          If you're collecting accessibility data consider adding it to OSM or making it available publicly for others to add :)
    • rmc 1567 days ago
      > I would like to switch to OSM but I haven't been able to find a quality replacement for the Google Places API, which is critical to our application.

      I know a lot about OSM, but next to nothing about Google APIs like this. Can you explain what you're looking for, what your requirements are? Maybe OSM can help you...

    • ailideex 1565 days ago
      > Is anyone aware of a good Google Places API alternative, including any paid self-hosted databases?

      I think you can achieve this with wikidata / wikibase : https://addshore.com/2016/05/geospatial-search-for-wikidata-...

      You will have to populate it yourself though.

    • Demiurge 1567 days ago
  • cowpig 1567 days ago
    Maps has gotten progressively worse in most ways over the past decade, and it drives me crazy. I asked a google employee about this who told me a lot of the changes I hate stem from a refactor around 2014-2015. Obviously there was some big culture shift on the team though...

    Google maps is

    * Much, much slower than it used to be. My machine in 2012 was able to drag the map around and everything would load just fine.

    * Harder to read/understand, especially street names. A lot of the time I have to zoom in 100% and scroll up and down a street to see what the name of the street I'm looking at is.

    * Much worse at text parsing e.g. I can no longer loosely type something like "10th and grove to Jim's Hardware" and get directions. In fact most of the time I can't even type in a major intersection and get what I'm looking for.

    * Obnoxiously spammy: they push new "features" on me all the time that I don't want to use (including a recent popup mid-directions when I turned on location tracking because I was lost on a busy, complicated highway intersection. It felt pretty dangerous, getting confused by a popup in the map like that mid-intersection), and the phone version asks me to turn on location tracking EVERY SINGLE TIME I OPEN THE APP.

    * Addresses seem to be getting replaced by some weird google maps-designed address format in Colombia (maybe other countries?) that are useless to humans

    * While every good review site seems to fail for whatever reason (tough to monetize, and fighting spam/fraud is also hard?), Maps seems to have become the de facto review site in many places. But the UX is so godawful I can't even wrap my head around it. For example, search for a restaurant, and you get one (ONE) possible filter in browsers: star rating. There's also a "more filters" button which brings you to a separate view where star rating is the only available filter. On the phone app, sometimes I can select "open now," and a few other things about 20% of the time I use the app, and it's not clear why those options are gone the rest of the time...

    I think it's a real shame, because I remember in, e.g. 2012 I thought Google Maps was an incredible revelation. It was so much better than MapQuest, it was free, fast, and just worked. If only they had open-sourced the old version before the refactor...

    ---

    Anyway, I hope someone writes a nice open-source view layer that sits on top of OpenStreetMaps someday. Like a wikipedia for maps

    • simias 1567 days ago
      You made me realize that I share all these grievances but the degradation has been so relatively slow that I never really thought about how worse it had become, boiling frog style.

      I've definitely experienced the "wait why won't it show me the name of that street I'm clearly focused on" problem multiple times. It's especially ironic because I remember that once Maps readability was first class and an example to follow, IIRC mainly because they had a relatively simple but elegant algorithm that would aim to maintain a relatively constant information density over the area of the map at any zoom level. So if you had a very dense area only the very important labels would show and the rest would be hidden until you zoomed in, while in more sparsely populated areas you'd have a lot more detail pop up even at relatively high zoom level. That was a good compromise.

      In hindsight it's completely obvious but I remember that when Maps started that was relatively innovative, I remember that many predecessors tended to emulate paper maps more closely (probably because that's what people expected back then) and were a lot more cluttered as a result.

      >I think it's a real shame, because I remember in, e.g. 2012 I thought Google Maps was an incredible revelation

      That seems late to me, are you sure that's the right date? I remember spending hours zooming in and out of Google Maps (and Google Earth) in the mid-to-late 2000's. Having a full map of the world to explore was mindblowing to me. Apple Maps launched in 2012!

      • cowpig 1567 days ago
        You're right! 2012 is definitely too late... it feels weird to be old enough that things I vividly remember happened ~15 years ago
    • SkyMarshal 1567 days ago
      >Harder to read/understand, especially street names. A lot of the time I have to zoom in 100% and scroll up and down a street to see what the name of the street I'm looking at is.

      To add another nitpick, I often want to see the name of the street I’m standing on, especially in San Francisco which doesn’t like spending money on street signs it seems. But GMaps usually requires zooming way out or panning a non-trivial distance to find that. All the other nearby streets on the map have clearly visible names without having to do that, just not the one I’m one. It happens regularly enough to be annoying.

      • SamBam 1567 days ago
        Adding to the chorus, but the decisions on what street names to show is simply insane. Opening the map right now on Android and scrolling around, almost none of the major streets near me are named, and tons of tiny streets are. Why would anyone do this? What AI got programmed that learned to make these decisions with no oversight?
        • zimpenfish 1567 days ago
          Apple Maps does this too. Or it'll show the street names in tiny, tiny font and then keep the tiny font when you zoom in. "Hello, I'm zooming because I can't read the font, you arseholes!" (although I will grant it's impossible to distinguish between "can't read font" and "need more detail" zooms but still.)
      • bitbuilder 1567 days ago
        More annoying, to me, is how much of a struggle it is to determine the names of streets that a navigation route follows.

        I'm the type that prefers to look at a map to see where I'm going, and it drives me absolutely insane to have to pan up and down my route just to try to determine the name of a street I need to turn down.

        For other use cases, I can somewhat empathize with the complexity of determining what street names to show. And over-cluttering with street names wouldn't be much better. But for a navigation route, the logic should be dead simple: throw a street name within the viewport if that street is part of the route.

        (Yes, I fully realize I can switch to step by step directions. Maybe it's because I'm more of a visual person, or maybe I'm just old and used to using maps for directions, but I just can't stand using that view to figure out where I need to go.)

      • thrownblown 1567 days ago
        this
    • tvanantwerp 1567 days ago
      Every time I open the app, half the screen is taken up by some "Explore your neighborhood!" nonsense. Makes it very difficult to actually use the map, which is the only reason I use the app. 99% of the time I'm in my neighborhood, which I've already thoroughly explored to my satisfaction, and I'm just trying to find some single specific item.
      • wtallis 1567 days ago
        I've simply set my phone to stop updating the Google Maps app and stick with the ancient version the phone originally shipped with, because my phone's screen hasn't grown in resolution to counteract all the screen space Google Maps now wastes.
        • marcosdumay 1567 days ago
          That works until Google releases an incompatible change on the API. Then you either upgrade or are out of the app.

          Worse is that the app will capture any link to the web maps, and AFAIK, you can't change your mapping app on Android.

          • wtallis 1567 days ago
            I find it a bit surprising that such an old version of the app still works today, but the fact that they haven't broken the backend in over 3 years means I'm not too worried that they'll do so before my hardware bites the dust. (I'm expecting the shutdown of 3G to be what finally kills this non-VoLTE phone, though I am likely to stop using it as my primary phone before then.)
        • zentiggr 1567 days ago
          Thank you for reminding me I can do that... going to give it a try and see what I'm missing/forgotten, and what features I might miss.

          Wish there was a VCS-ish way to get an intermediate version.

    • thawaway1837 1567 days ago
      Why is it so hard to find the name of the street I’m on in Google Maps. It often takes a minute or so of zooming and panning to reveal that.

      It seems to me that Google Maps is far more focused on being a suggestion engine than a map now.

      • leggomylibro 1567 days ago
        Yes, and this even happens with major highways! I'll be trying to pick a ~200-mile route, and I have to play zooming gymnastics just to see the difference between I-84 and I-95!

        Okay, I should just know the difference with roads that big. And okay, generally East/West interstates use even numbers representing what % of the country lies to the South while North/South use odd numbers representing what % lies to the West. But I shouldn't have to know that when I'm wondering how to avoid the accident on "that big yellow stripe that passes through D.C."

        Sometimes I'll use a mapping app designed for outdoors activities, because it is so much easier to read than Google Maps.

        • amadeusw 1567 days ago
          I had no idea about the interstate numbering system. This is awesome to know, thanks.
          • munificent 1567 days ago
            It's a cool system. The numeric rules are (though there are lots of exceptions):

            * Primary interstates are one or two digits. Shorter spurs, loops, and connectors are three-digits.

            * East-west primary interstates are even-numbered, north-south are odd.

            * Major arterials are divisible by five. (The longest interstates are I-90, I-80, I-40, I-10, I-70, I-95, and I-75.)

            * Odd routes increase in number going from west to east.

            * Even routes increase in number from south to north.

            * The last two digits of a three-digit interstate usually identify its main parent interstate. (For example, the I-310 spur connects I-10 to US 90.

            • whyaduck 1567 days ago
              Even routes increase from south to north (e.g. I-10 runs through Arizona, I-90 runs through Washington).
          • mynameisvlad 1567 days ago
            Another fun tidbit is that any 3-digit interstate is an auxiliary route of the 2/1-digit mainline. The first digit determines the type of route, with odd being a spur and even being a bypass or beltway. So I-405 is a bypass of I-5, and I-110 is a spur off I-10 connecting it to the Port of LA.
            • wahern 1567 days ago
              I-110 is also a spur connecting I-10 to downtown Pensacola, FL, Biloxi, MS, and downtown Baton Rouge, LA.

              And apparently there's a I-405 in Seattle. (All the I-110 spurs I've driven on.)

        • lotsofpulp 1567 days ago
          > And okay, generally East/West interstates use even numbers representing what % of the country lies to the South while North/South use odd numbers representing what % lies to the West.

          The idea that the highways are designed and numbered to represent the proportion of land area of the contiguous US seems specious. Source?

          Edit: the interstate highway going north from Kansas City is 29, but obviously much more than 29% of the US is west of I-29.

          • alexhutcheson 1567 days ago
            The semantics aren't exactly meant to be "% of land area", but they do represent a rough coordinate system[1], from (5, 8) in the SW corner of the contiguous US (San Diego) up to (95, 90) in Boston.

            Interestingly, US highways follow the opposite system[2], going from (1, 2) in the NE corner of the country (Maine) to (former) (101, 80) in San Diego.

            [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System#Numb...

            [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Numbered_Highway...

            • jimktrains2 1567 days ago
              Those us routes came first and the interstates are purposely numbered backwards of it to avoid confusion.
            • lotsofpulp 1567 days ago
              Numbering from west to East and south to north and using evens and odds to mean East-west and north-south makes sense.

              But that doesn’t imply anything about proportion of country, however the measurement is defined.

          • leggomylibro 1567 days ago
            Sure it's anecdotal, I just heard it from my parents as a kid.

            And obviously it's not exact, just look at how close I-94/I-90 are around North Dakota and compare it to I-90/I-80 or I-80/I-70. And a lot of the "East-West" interstates go diagonally or even North-South in places.

            But I doubt they made the roads by laying rulers across the map (except maybe in Kansas or Oklahoma), and it does seem like they generally increment from 0-100 in each direction with odd/evenness decided by the primary axis.

            Wikipedia has a lot to say on the matter, but I got bored reading all the special cases like how they number loops that connect two highways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System#Numb...

        • aphextim 1567 days ago
          Thank you I had no idea how the numbers were chosen until now!
      • v7p1Qbt1im 1567 days ago
        That‘s arguably what many people use it for, though.

        Regarding the street names. I usually approach the service from these 2 directions:

        - Address or name of place is known. I use Maps to find out where it is and how to get there.

        - Trying to find places in a certain area (Laundry, restaurants, shops, etc)

        Only very rarely do I need to know a street name specifically. Not saying it‘s not important for other people though.

      • whlr 1567 days ago
        This also happens with rivers! It's incredibly annoying.
    • GuB-42 1567 days ago
      > Much worse at text parsing e.g. I can no longer loosely type something like "10th and grove to Jim's Hardware" and get directions. In fact most of the time I can't even type in a major intersection and get what I'm looking for.

      That's the part I don't get. Google is all about search. Their main engine is so good it's creepy. and yet, for me, it is unable to parse a perfectly well formed street address, written as recommended by the postal services.

      I know it is a hard problem, but that's Google we are talking about. I also live in France (i.e. not the US) but our street addresses are not so different, and Google has a presence and generally works well here.

      For example search something like "building X, 123 street, postal code, city" next to your current location and it will find a shop called X on the other side of the country. Search "123 street, postal code, city" and it will find exactly what you want, to the letter. Why? Is it that hard to throw off a small bit of information to perfectly match everything else instead of searching for an insignificant random detail? Probably harder that it looks but if there is one nontrivial thing Google can do, that's it.

      • iudqnolq 1566 days ago
        I get very annoyed copy-pasting addresses into Google Maps because it completely fails on some forms of zip codes and countries. Just deleting from the end of the address until Google shows the right result works.
      • seriesf 1567 days ago
        I can't find any examples of this not working. Can you give an example? The GP's complaint of "x and y to business" works perfectly well for me. E.g. "55th and 5th to barclays center" works perfectly.
    • LannisterDebt 1567 days ago
      > * Harder to read/understand, especially street names. A lot of the time I have to zoom in 100% and scroll up and down a street to see what the name of the street I'm looking at is.

      This one is hugely aggravating, but there's another one that annoys me more. Try searching for "food" or "restaurants" at an intersection with 10-20+ options, Google will completely hide plenty of results. Just show me where I can eat at nearby...

    • megous 1567 days ago
      I don't understand how anyone can prefer Google maps's style (probably lack of knowledge of alternatives). It's pretty much unreadable, extremely low contrast, doesn't show like 20% of streets even if they're there and fit easily on a selected zoom level, and thus is useless for orientation/printing for walking types, like me.

      Thankfully I only ever have to use Google Maps if the website integrates them into the contact section, and we have much better local mapping website/app.

      Same zoom level:

      Gmaps: https://megous.com/dl/tmp/fbcf80d0eda5570c.png Local app: https://megous.com/dl/tmp/5cbe3d860874717b.png

      I can use one to comfortably find my way in the city center even without zooming, and it's not the Google Maps.

      I can look at the better map, figure out where I am and where I want to get to, figure out my next few skips and turns and forget about the map for the next 5-10 minutes.

      I don't need to constantly zoom around or use GPS at all. Actually, I wonder if Google made such a garbage map style just to force people to fiddle with their devices more, while they're navigating around the city, and to make them use GPS, because it's really hard to orient yourself and plan if you lose so much detail when looking at lower zoom level for overview.

      • andromeduck 1567 days ago
        I'm guessing most people using gmaps are looking for something like places to eat or landmarks/attractions then use the navigate feature to get there and so it focuses on presenting that information.
        • megous 1567 days ago
          Well that's my point. Stupid map that forces you to enable GPS, and fiddle with the device constantly, instead of presenting useful information to plan a walk for several streets and enjoy/be aware of the city.
    • dkarl 1567 days ago
      Harder to read/understand, especially street names. A lot of the time I have to zoom in 100% and scroll up and down a street to see what the name of the street I'm looking at is.

      This is so bad, incredibly bad. The legibility of street names is also extremely sensitive to lighting conditions (at least on iOS) which is a rare accomplishment in this age of screens that adapt their brightness in response to ambient light.

    • r1nkgrl 1567 days ago
      The color design of their iOS application is also terrible.

      So many elements in the navigation UX are a similar color.

      The worst is the Current route (light blue) and alternate routes (grey). Both of these colors are fairly similar and have very little contrast compared to the background. I have a hard time picking out the difference between a road (grey) and an alternate route (grey, slightly thicker line).

      At night, when it switches to a dark color scheme, everything is a shade of dark blueish grey, with very little contrast.

      • chihuahua 1567 days ago
        The colors drive me crazy when looking at forest service roads in the mountains. National Forest land is some shade of green, and the tiny roads are light gray and there is virtually no contrast between the two. So if I want to be able to see the roads, I have to zoom in a lot, and then I can only see a radius of half a mile, so I have to scroll the map constantly to see where a road goes. Absolutely maddening. Presumably some designer is really pleased with how elegant and subtle these colors look, but without contrast it's useless.
        • macintux 1567 days ago
          It's not just tiny roads that are swallowed by green with the latest updates. I couldn't find my favorite state highway while trying to show it to a friend recently until I zoomed in so far as to lose all context of its route and surroundings.
      • mesoman 1567 days ago
        That low contrast stuff is what bugs me. I often go out into rural areas. Try making out where the (white) minor roads are against the (almost white) background. Now, try that in bright sunlight!

        A good mapping app would have different modes for this. Garmin GPS's are much more readable, which is one reason I recently bought one, even though GM in theory is better. GM is better at routing, but it is really hard to see the detail, which is dangerous if you are driving.

    • Stratoscope 1567 days ago
      The Maps feature I hate most on Android is the "answer a few questions about places you've visited by tapping on these colorful cards."

      The UX here is one of the worst I've ever seen. Once you tap an answer you don't get a chance to change it, or even see what the question was you just answered. It's on to the next question.

      Many of the questions are insane. Like "Safeway: can you buy meat here?" Hello? Safeway? It's a giant supermarket!

      But one design feature constantly leads me to giving wrong answers: every card is a different color, even for questions about the same establishment.

      These frenetic color changes overpower the actual business name, so it's easy to get in a rhythm of "Safeway: can you buy meat here? Yes. Can you buy paper towels here? Yes. Can you get an oil change here? No, of course not!"

      Oops, what? Did that card say Safeway or Jiffy Lube? Well the card's gone now, no way to go back and check it or fix it.

      The color changes are a distraction from feeling confident which business you were answering a question about. With the lack of undo, they make me feel stupid. I like software that makes me feel smart.

      • mkl 1567 days ago
        I have never seen these, but I wouldn't answer them if I did. Does it not give you a way to just use the map instead?
        • Stratoscope 1567 days ago
          Oh, it's not something you have to do, and never prevents you from using the map. I think it comes up as an Android notification like "help people by answering a few questions about the places you visited."

          I like to help people, so I tried it out for a while. I would probably still be answering questions if they didn't make it so annoying! :-)

    • mustacheemperor 1567 days ago
      I empathize greatly with these complaints - honestly, this is one of those threads I'm kind of happy to see appear on HN since I know some of the feedback might actually make it back to people who can make an impact. I also feel like Google Maps has spent the last few years in a backslide from a really incredible example of the promise of the web to surprisingly frustrating and not useful. I'm somewhat mystified that while the "discover around you" section of the app has been iterated on nothing has been done to improve the actual experience of searching for places on the map. I really hope someone builds an alternative like you suggest - I want to be able to look for bars near a music venue and see the walking distance within the results, for example. Why can't I search for a lunch spot within 5 blocks of the office I'm meeting in and without any steep hills on the way?
    • brentonator 1567 days ago
      Google maps 2012 refactor was what made it amazingly useful to me. The street names are much more readable now, they actually had a decent breakdown of the before and after and how the street names are much more readable overall now that they switched off of a "dumb" text fitting model vs their scaled text and "smart" placement of street names.

      I wonder if your area has more trouble than most areas due to street shapes/density? The before and afters for me everywhere I've traveled and where I live are a huge step forward compared to old maps.

      core77.com/posts/21486/google-maps-designing-the-modern-atlas-21486

      I don't note that it's changed much from this 2012 release.

    • schnable 1567 days ago
      Another gripe, in the US they have gotten into the habit of calling street names by their state route number (that nobody knows), rather than the common name (that is on the street signs).

      On the other hand, a couple times Apple Maps has screwed me over badly by trying to route me down closed roads. Google seems to have much better knowledge of road closures.

    • dawnerd 1567 days ago
      The one that hurts me the most, search for a location I know is in town, Google decides the best match is somewhere across the US and zooms me there.
    • arprocter 1567 days ago
      Recently searching the name of a town overseas in a browser detects my IP, pops up a local map and returns 'overseas place not found'

      It works normally if you bother to include the country, but telling me a place doesn't exist isn't how I'd expect it to behave

    • slumdev 1567 days ago
      > I can no longer loosely type something like "10th and grove to Jim's Hardware" and get directions

      I've had the same issue, and I find it bizarre. It's really become a much less natural interaction.

    • skunkworker 1567 days ago
      A couple of years ago I implemented the Google Maps location API which at the time said it would give you a consistent location_id for each physical location in the world, a couple of years later and a bug report is still open and it's still not consistent. It's to the point now where I won't touch the Google Maps API anymore because of the price and lack of fixes.
    • throwawayGMaps 1567 days ago
      Justin's theory is that the design focuses on a clean (empty?) look for mobile users. And on POIs, not streets.

      https://www.justinobeirne.com/what-happened-to-google-maps

    • joe-collins 1566 days ago
      * I searched for "chinese restaurant". Why is it showing me taco shops at all? I don't care that there are several open this late at night, I want to see my _search results_.
    • ben174 1567 days ago
      Wow. You just nailed everything that is wrong with google maps and I didn’t even realize it was happening. Frog in boiling water.
    • haecceity 1567 days ago
      Have you tried Waze? It shows you the street you’re on and the incoming perpendicular streets.
    • rjsw 1567 days ago
      > Much, much slower than it used to be.

      It may be using OpenGL to display it now, you could try disabling webgl in your browser to check.

      • rjsw 1567 days ago
        The appearance is different when drawn with webgl than when it is disabled so it is fairly easy to see if that is the cause.
    • will_pseudonym 1567 days ago
      One of the real travesties of our time is the active, continual sacking of the libraries of Alexandria inherent in every public website and application which is lost to the sands of adtech, paywalls, and the changing whims of anyone called "stakeholder"

      Like, it's a metaphorical question I must give you, but who owns the information that we as a people produce? Take away the considerations of current law, and think about it in a different paradigm. Imagine that we had some impending apocalyptic event heading towards us, and we needed to as a people work together instead of competing. (Just a rough thought experiment, not that exactly, but just come along for a bit of a ride)

      In that circumstance, the human population of earth forms this more cohesive collection, and in that frame, a group of people who produce some great work of art and invention and function, and then they or other people ruin it or destroy it, or simply bury it underground. In the frame of humanity as a collective being, that happening is akin to if you have some brilliant idea that you're scared of whether it's good or not, and so you write it down and decide it's not good and throw it away, but it could have been the seed of the creation of cold fusion, or romeo and juliet, or whatever.

      The metaphor breaks down quickly, but this societal, special (as in species) loss is such a cancer on us as a people, and I wish there was a way to remove its crippling effects. But then again, it's akin the balance between to the law of nature and selection, and human societal safety nets. It would be easier without it, with a safety net built around everyone, but would we be inspired to such greatness? Or, what things wouldn't have been produced without the incentive of billions? Are you sure that number is zero? Please, don't take my positions as argumentative in the debate sense. This post is part complaint and part thought experiment. I also wonder what brilliant art we've lost because a child died of malnutrition or ~~malattention~~* neglect.

      * instead of erasing "malattention" the unnecessary word I just coined†, I'm striking it with pen, so that it exists. Yeah, that's a bit meta and on the nose, but I like it.

      † 148 Google Results at time of writing‡, so "independent of, but created after, a few others"

      ‡ Receipts: https://web.archive.org/web/20191214060156if_/http://web.arc...

      By the way, I really wanted to delete this instead of clicking "reply", so: You're welcome/sorry.

    • lonelappde 1567 days ago
      This is off topic. OP is about the Maps API. Perhaps submit as a separate post.
    • Gatsky 1567 days ago
      If only we were paying for it, then we could legitimately complain.
      • cowpig 1567 days ago
        We are paying for it in:

        * personal data & attention

        * opportunity cost (b/c their market domination deters investment interest in alternatives)

        * advertising costs (each $ that businesses have to spend on advertising is a $ taken from R&D, profits which get reinvested in the economy, and/or consumers' pockets)

        Just because you don't pay directly with money doesn't mean there isn't a cost.

        • Gatsky 1567 days ago
          Sorry, but this seems like nonsense to me. You are telling me that the curtailing of your attention by an app which you voluntarily install and voluntarily use is a ‘cost’ such that you are a stakeholder in the app?
      • switchbak 1567 days ago
        Oh I can complain just fine. Just because a corporation monetizes via a different means than selling software doesn't mean that I forfeit my ability to gripe about it (see Facebook).

        They've also taken all the air out of the room such that there's very little ability for competitors to gain traction. So it's not like there's really many real options out there.

        I don't really see a problem in complaining about a software product, especially when:

          - It was actually BETTER before
          - We're basically giving them a list of high-priority UX stories to make their product better
        
        (edit: formatting)
  • Diesel555 1567 days ago
    I switched from Google Maps to Apple's Mapkit JS. It's awesome. And they respond to bug reports and make quick fixes. https://developer.apple.com/maps/web/
    • saagarjha 1567 days ago
      Like, Feedback Assistant reports?
  • heisenbit 1567 days ago
    Taking the power e.g. search, the profits from one domain e.g. advertisement and going into another domain e.g. 2-D maps and charging nothing or little until competition has thinned and dominant position has been achieved and then raising prizes tenfold is the sort of behavior regulators find interesting.
    • nojvek 1564 days ago
      Unfortunately US regulators are too sissy (or probably already in bed with the big corps) unlike the old days where Microsoft was getting sued left and right due to antitrust violations.
  • sailfast 1567 days ago
    This is a great write-up - thanks to the author and for their continued work in this space to bring home the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons.

    Leaflet is an amazing library and I've found it a very useful and powerful tool with a great plugin ecosystem. Glad they managed to land the page someplace that was less dear to them monthly.

  • SlowRobotAhead 1567 days ago
    It definitely should not cost 10 cents per visitor to use the maps API to toy around with nuclear scenarios.

    The idea that he could apply for a “grant” to escape a poor pricing model is insulting and I think good for him for just dumping Google instead. I look forward to seeing how far the 2019 Google backlash goes.

    • ravenstine 1567 days ago
      Too bad the backlash will only be among the modern archmages than hang around HN. The average people whom I know still get a warm fuzzy feeling from The Google. They're largely shielded from the obvious problems the pricing models. As long as the peasants don't have to pay with their pocketbooks, not much will change.
      • SlowRobotAhead 1567 days ago
        Maybe, but I see a lot of the censorship and demonetization on YouTube getting attention first from conservatives and second from lesser liked candidates like Tulsi, the antitrust investigations in USA and EU, and some of the Facebook and Twitter criticism being rightly shared by Google. I would say “fuck Google” is extending beyond geeks.
    • wizzwizz4 1567 days ago
      We've already got a co-ordinated YouTube Walkout which, whilst small, is international. It might go further… though I'm looking forward more to people properly beating Google by doing what they do better, and without spying on people to do it.
      • jeen02 1567 days ago
        Good ol' internet boycotts...
    • madengr 1567 days ago
      Jack up the price, give grants, and deduct the grants from your taxes.
  • rotrux 1567 days ago
    Google maps is only profitable on the basis of advertising syndication & data collection. If you're not pumping google information about how people are using your map service or directing people to the sites of google's ads customers, they are probably losing money by serving you.

    The issue is similar to the one that ruined their custom search offering: it doesn't make them enough money to justify its existence as anything more than a public service. Unless charity is what Google had in mind when they launched the api, their behavior makes business sense.

  • pbw 1567 days ago
    Google has 100,000 employees not one can offer up anything in defense of their pricing? That's sad, I'm sure they have some explanation for what they did, and why they did it, and how they want things to evolve from here. Would be nice to hear something even if it was PR laden.

    This pricing hike is over a year and old and everywhere I see complaints and about it and not a shred of explanation from them.

    I'd expect something like "Yes Google Maps was free for a long time, but it's a very expensive service to run, for the service to exist long term we needed to increase the cost. Here are some resources how to contain your costs. Here is how to apply to be a non-profit."

    I have to believe there are hundreds of people at Google who fully understand this has ruined many people's projects, do they not feel some obligation to at least open up a channel of communication? Seems like a no-brainer.

    Or are they just so embarrassed and so wracked with in-fighting that they can't stomach even authoring a post?

    • nojvek 1564 days ago
      I'm sure Google employees are probably not allowed to comment on HN without legal approval. BigCos have a lot of red-tape for communication.
  • lemoncucumber 1567 days ago
    > [B]ut they do have a way to request discounted access to the Google Cloud Platform, which appears to be some kind of machine-learning platform

    This line in the article made me laugh out loud. GCP is a full blown competitor to AWS, but it sounds like whatever marketing page the author landed on is hyping machine learning so much that they didn't even realize that.

  • WD-42 1567 days ago
    In this post the author speaks a lot to how inaccessible Google is for any kind of support. This is one of the under appreciate reasons NOT to use services provided by the big cloud providers: AWS, GCP, etc.

    I recently started a small SASS project for a client and decided that Heroku would be a good fit for the situation. That led me to use smaller independent service providers like Mailgun for email, Mapbox for maps, Transloadit for video encoding. I haven't needed much support but when I have I actually talk to real people (and developers on the other end). It's a very pleasant experience. I get much more of a feeling that they actually care about developers using their products. Plus it feels "good" to be supporting independent shops, instead of giant tech monoliths.

    Consolidated billing can be annoying if you decide to go with many smaller, independent providers. At least Heroku covers that well.

    • specialp 1567 days ago
      IDK about the other cloud providers, but if you have the support on your AWS account for businesses the support is excellent, skilled and fast. We have had support doing TCP dumps and other advanced troubleshooting whenever we've had a problem with their services. Google for their free* services is terrible yes. Which I don't use their services for anything important. I'd imagine they are better with GCP.
      • MisterOctober 1567 days ago
        there's a lot of evils about AWS, but even their personal/developer support account has delivered good service for me -- they've really dug in and helped me on some tough questions, and not only limited to configuration.

        At the office, we have AWS business level support, which has been really excellent for troubleshooting.

        • robohoe 1567 days ago
          Agreed. Their business support has more visibility into your account than you do. They’ve been superb at finding issues fast and explaining things better than I can phrase the question.
      • LaserToy 1567 days ago
        You imagined wrong :)

        Before using GCP I thought highly of them. Not I actually understand why they are number 3 or 4, well deserved.

    • tomcam 1567 days ago
      I pay a ridiculously small $100/month for AWS support and they get the job done however I want it (chat, voice, email) at any hour of the day. I basically signed up for it so I'd have someone to blame if something went wrong, but they resolve every single issue to my satisfaction.
      • PetahNZ 1567 days ago
        I don't think it's that small, it 10% of your bill for business support. ($100 if you are spending less that $1k).

        And the support is ok sometimes. But when you actually discover an issue on their end they constantly try and flog you off, and then don't get back to you for ages.

        • yellowapple 1567 days ago
          I've yet to replicate that latter observation, having worked with AWS as an individual, part of a small company, and (currently) part of a recently-unicorn-statused startup. AWS support has always been pretty acutely responsive. This is obviously better if your company's big enough to shell out for enterprise support, but even the middle support tier (the one presumably being discussed here) ain't bad at all.
      • henryfjordan 1567 days ago
        I used to use the free tier for the 1 year period, turned everything off, and have an alert set to go off at 1 penny of spend. Even with a lifetime spend of <$1 I still get to talk to real people for support at AWS.
      • seph-reed 1567 days ago
        You pay a small monetary amount for now.

        Most of these companies are super powers with blatant disregard for humanity. When it comes to the good in your life, the things around you; opportunities, options, community health... they are slowly but surely drinking your milkshake.

        • Spooky23 1567 days ago
          That's a little extreme.

          I got hooked on Unix when as a dev/DBA I inherited Solaris administration that I wasn't really qualified for. Sun support bootstrapped my skills and taught me alot. In another gig I had similar experiences with IBM.

          It contrasted heavily against Microsoft, where even the $$$ Premier offerings are pretty awful, with lots of ridiculous hoops between you and super-skilled SEs.

          Companies may suck or not, but that doesn't mean their support organization sucks.

        • Terretta 1567 days ago
          On the contrary, if you find a company with a policy of gaining maximum market share through time on a break-even cost structure, and if the market is very big, you can essentially ride “at cost” through the entire growth/capture era.

          If you notice, since inception AWS consistently returns its economies of scale as pricing drops to customers, allowing AWS to capture more market share.

          They’re drinking the milkshake of incumbent IT, and you can benefit like a remora riding a shark.

        • MaxBarraclough 1567 days ago
          I honestly don't know what you're saying here. Please explain.
    • MiroF 1567 days ago
      It's crazy the extent to which for big companies this experience is different.

      The large tech company that I work for has AWS developers& support lingering in dedicated Slack channels on our company Slack where they will help talk you through any issues and keep you updated on feature requests/bugs moving through the Amazon system.

      • celim307 1567 days ago
        yeah but Enterprise level support with TAM's cost upwards of 15k a month. That's pretty prohibitive for most small startups
        • specialp 1567 days ago
          You can pay $100/10% a month on Amazon and get good support. They will debug and guide you on. Hiring someone with the expertise you get would cost magnitudes of order more. And if your enterprise is at the level where it warrants 15k a month support, it is still worth it. Considering that still would barely get you only one skilled person hired.
          • kawsper 1567 days ago
            This service is incredibly useful, my newly built EC2 instances rebooted randomly and I couldn't figure out why, so I opened up the chat, and they helped me debug, identify and mitigate the issue.

            It turned out to be a bug between the newest Linux kernel available for Amazon Linux 2 and EC2, the mitigation was downgrading the kernel until an update was available.

        • tedivm 1567 days ago
          I've worked in a lot of startups and have never had to pay that whole price until we had decent revenue. The AWS Activate program [1] has been pretty solid for my current company.

          There's a big joke going around that AWS is basically a VC that invests in startups with free services and then makes their money back on revenue once they've grown.

          1. https://aws.amazon.com/activate/

    • mrtksn 1567 days ago
      Actually, I had a great experience with Google Firebase support.

      Suddenly, my apps were unable to connect to Firebase, after making sure that it's not me doing something wrong I contacted support and they came back to me in minutes, Together with the support engineer we debugged the issue, turned out that it was a configuration deployment error on their part and got if fixed.

      What I am terrified of is having an issue with a free service that I depend on, like Gmail.

      • dudus 1567 days ago
        Google one is a support plan for consumer services. With some added benefits such as extra drive space. I had a good experience with them.
    • moralestapia 1567 days ago
      On this line, shoutout to Vultr for their support. Just today I opened a ticket with a relatively simple technical issue. I got a reply in 5 minutes ... yes 5 minutes, I couldn't believe it. My business with them so far is worth about 2 dollars, they will get many more from me, for sure!
      • BoorishBears 1567 days ago
        I was using Retool and was looking for a feature.

        Mentioned it in the chat window and within 60 seconds I got response, 10 minutes later the feature was pushed to production.

        The velocity of startups can be really nice

    • nodefortytwo 1567 days ago
      I have always found AWS support to be pretty fantastic.

      We have enterprise support at work with a named TAM who is amazing.

      On my personal projects I have standard support and was able to speak to a very very capable tech on a sunday morning within 20 minutes.

      Azure are pretty decent too, although they offload a lot of enterprise support to their partner network, but that works well enough.

      GCP on the other hand...

      • robohoe 1567 days ago
        Judging by the AWS support role interviews, I must say that they hire fantastic individuals who care about cases and the tech.
    • pard68 1567 days ago
      I think this is more a factor of percent of total earnings.

      For example, my consumer and small business experience with Microsoft support is very negative. But working in an enterprise that always elects for the most expensive support package... I have never experienced better or more personal support than from Microsoft.

    • core-questions 1567 days ago
      > That led me to use smaller independent service providers

      I believe in doing this as well. These companies make or break themselves by delivering one product, and so you can trust they're going to do a very committed job of it. In comparison, services from Google seem like they're done by rotating groups of people who don't really care about what they're doing, and there's no longevity in the services unless they're super profitable.

    • GordonS 1567 days ago
      I don't kno about AWS or GCP, but I've used Azure's technical support a few times over the years, and I've always been happy with the feedback, and the competence of the person providing it.

      I'd assume GCP's support is poor, but I admit I'm basing that bias solely on my AdAwords support experience, which is and has always been, ludicrously bad.

    • 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 1567 days ago
      I find that support for free products is impossible, but support for paid products is actually pretty good. For example, I was able to chat with a google checkout person to cancel an order pretty quickly, and when I had a domain issue, I was able to chat with a google domain person very easily as well.

      I guess you get what you pay for.

    • alasdair_ 1567 days ago
      I paid for the $150/month support option for gcloud and found it very good - they had engineers go over the code I wrote to help debug an issue on three different occasions, for example.
    • foobarbecue 1567 days ago
      Isn't Heroku using AWS under the hood? So you are still supporting AWS?
    • Qub3d 1567 days ago
      You've stumbled across the Fox and Rabbit Product paradigm: https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/fox-and-rabbit-pro...
    • anovikov 1567 days ago
      AWS support is in general nice and helpful. GCP, abysmal indeed.
  • seshagiric 1567 days ago
    Since the Google Maps price hike, there are a number of such projects that have got affected. However I am curious why no one seems to be considering Bing Maps (from Microsoft) at all??

    Bing Maps actually has a pretty decent free usage quota that should fit most such projects (either free or low cost).

  • upofadown 1567 days ago
    >But in 2018, Google changes its pricing model, and my bill jumped to more like $1,800 per month.

    Presumably, Google has done the market research here and had found that this level of pricing will end up maximizing revenue. It would be interesting to have a generally accepted model for these no money now, money later business models based on some measure of industry lock in. That way it would be possible to do the pricing at the start of a project rather than part of the way through when everyone had forgotten to budget anything.

    The Googles of the world get to know how much our projects are going to cost, why can't we at least get an idea?

    • TheRealPomax 1567 days ago
      That presumes a project starts with people who intend to charge from the get-go, but defer that step to later. Rather than being started by folks who love what they're doing, getting funneled into a PM'ed project where the enthusiasm is curbed by "product viability", and then goes through a period of a few years where the original project folks rotate out until no one left is invested in how useful the product is, and a lot of folks are invested in how much money can be made by pivoting to a model that heavily monetizes on scoping down to purely the most used features used by its biggest, financially secure customers.
      • takeda 1567 days ago
        That reminded me of a project where person leading it estimated that it will be cheaper and faster to use AWS, they only forgot all the hidden fees that AWS adds, most commonly the network fees (which are charged between AZs) or EBS etc.

        On top of that an instance that claims to have specific parameters won't deliver the same performance as supposedly equivalent physical machine, so you will need to use bigger instances etc.

        Ultimately the project did not have resources to set up DR version which was originally planned and still went way over the budget.

  • nik736 1567 days ago
    We switched to Mapbox as well, the only downside we faced was the horrendous satelitte maps. They apperantly bought a lot of satellite imagery, but it still looks way way worse compared to Google or Apple Maps. The weird thing is that when zooming in it gets pixelated, even though the maps actually look more crisp when not zoomed in completely.
    • jeen02 1567 days ago
      The streets are pretty offset as well :(
  • kuroguro 1567 days ago
    If you're not afraid of breaching Google's ToS you can load Google tiles directly with leaflet. The tiles themselves have no API key requirement. Obviously not a proper solution both legally and technically as the routes are undocumented and can change at any time (tho I've seen only 1 major change in the past ~7 years).
  • sebasmurphy 1567 days ago
    Their documentation seems to be lacking as of late or at least the last time I checked. I was attempting to get geocoding working on a project and was having a hell of time getting the api keys issued with the correct permissions. Swapped over to mapbox and had everything working in a few minutes.
  • nojvek 1564 days ago
    > They clearly don’t care about small developers. That much is pretty obvious if you’ve tried to develop with their products. Look, I get that licensing to big corporations is the money-maker. But Google pretends to be developing for more than just them… they just don’t follow through on those hopes.

    That is really true. Google isn't for the small devs anymore, they're too big to care about us. They need to cross that trillion dollar mark and it seems everything's about profits right now.

    Lesson: Don't even touch google apis unless you're a really large corporation willing to spend >10k per month. Even if you're a really large corporation, have a plan B, because google will still fuck you over with their APIs changing without much notice.

  • chihuahua 1567 days ago
    There is something called "Here maps" that's a pretty good alternative to Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Bing Maps for mobile phones. Obviously that's not what Nukemap is talking about, but for those who are frustrated with the shortcomings of those 3 apps, "Here WeGo" is a free Android/iOS app. It was developed by Nokia and then sold off.

    I like it because I can download an entire state with just a few clicks. And the UI isn't cluttered by "explore your neighborhood" nonsense.

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

    • henriks 1566 days ago
      Here wasn’t really developed by Nokia; it existed as Navteq before Nokia bought it in the 00’s and was headquartered in Chicago. At some point at least they were a fairly big player in in-car navigation systems.
  • FpUser 1567 days ago
    For business, dedicated servers are the only thing I am paying for (also mirrored on me on premises). Well there is still some storage fees from Mediafire but I am in a process of moving it to dedicates servers as well. Following few very unpleasant experiences with the cloudy stuff I've develop a simple rule. NOTHING gets done/developed for my businesses until I can run it on premises and rented dedicated servers.
  • forrestthewoods 1567 days ago
    I wrote a commute visualizer. Imho it’s better than anything else widely available - free or paid. Given a home/office it can visualize commute times for multiple modes of transit.

    Google’s new pricing scheme makes it cost multiple dollars for a single map. Their new pricing scheme is beyond absurd and has no basis in reality.

  • komali2 1567 days ago
    > fobbed me off onto a non-Google “valued partner” who was licensed to deal with corporations on volume pricing.

    Haha what? Who managed to set that up with Google, and how does it even work? Do they transfer gcloud credits to you? Do you use their gcloud account to make a maps app?

    • beering 1567 days ago
      It's Google's strategy for selling Maps and maybe some other enterprise services. I think it makes sense, actually. The reseller deals with things like basic support, consulting, drafting up contracts, limited negotiations, etc., basically the sort of high-touch stuff we know Google hasn't always been great at.

      The reseller infra is built into Maps, so you still work with your own Google account, but you pay the reseller. It's not fully in gcloud, afaik, since I remember there being a Salesforce portal you had to use to manage your Maps premium account.

      • wolco 1567 days ago
        SugarCRM does this. I don't like the setup when support is required because the reseller tries to sell additional products.
        • komali2 1567 days ago
          Holy shit that's the worst when you're barely holding on trying to get through support tickets, but management wants you to side-sell as well.
    • jimktrains2 1567 days ago
      They do the same, have authorized partners who you buy through, for analytics.
  • Uptrenda 1567 days ago
    1. Give product away at a loss / or even for free.

    2. People say 'great', and start taking advantage of it.

    3. Competitors (for profit) can't keep up and slowly stop offering products.

    4. Over time the majority of the market is capture by a single company.

    5. People become overly dependent on that company, allowing them to build an even bigger, better 'moat', and discouraging any new competitors from emerging.

    6. $$$$$$$$$ Prices get jacked up. Customers have no alternatives.

    Kind of like an army besieging a walled city. A company doesn't need to build the best product or have the best fighters to win. They just need enough resources to outlast the competition and they automatically get access to the left-overs.

    • stoolpigeon 1567 days ago
      In the linked post he states that the changes mystify him because there are alternatives. So if Google is following the plan you've laid out, they are not doing it well.
  • bpodgursky 1567 days ago
    I've found MapBox (if you're using MapBox GL) to have pretty decent pricing on my own hobby projects, albeit higher than I'd prefer

    I have to assume the fact that nobody is just cheap-hosting opentiles mapsets for a tenth of the price indicates that the underlying infrastructure (bandwidth?) is pretty pricey.

    Anyway, I'm glad Nukemap found a way to stay up. I've had fun playing with it, and have used it as a reference before.

    • barnabask 1567 days ago
      Mapbox is awesome, but there are alternatives for hobby projects, such as https://www.maptiler.com/. I wrote about some more here: https://barnabas.me/articles/webmaps.html#map-tile-servers-a...

      If your project is confined to a limited geographic area and you don’t need super high zoom levels, you could even host the static tiles yourself without too much trouble and disk space. It can be very cost effective.

    • NetToolKit 1567 days ago
      > I have to assume the fact that nobody is just cheap-hosting opentiles mapsets for a tenth of the price indicates that the underlying infrastructure (bandwidth?) is pretty pricey.

      Mapbox charges ~$4 for a thousand map views, while we charge $0.10 for a thousand map views (less than a tenth of Mapbox's price). How do we convince you to switch to our services? https://www.nettoolkit.com/geo/about

      • wizzwizz4 1567 days ago
        Privacy guarantees (or, rather, an explanation as to what you do with the statistics you can gather from people using the tile server) – currently it's not clear what's the policy for your site v.s. the API.

        Plus, actually knowing about it in the first place would be nice! You have a piece of text saying "you don't need to credit us; just credit OpenStreetMap contributors because they made the thing", but it might be a good idea to say "but if you're feeling generous, you can tack a 'via NetToolKit' on the end". I found out about Mapbox, Leaflet and OpenStreetMap via those little copyright signs at the bottom of maps – and if asked, I'd certainly put one in for you if I were using your services.

        • NetToolKit 1567 days ago
          Thanks for your answer and for your suggestions. We'll try to find a place to clarify the privacy policy (we don't do anything externally facing with it, but might use it to track down performance issues), and I like your wording regarding attribution.

          I agree that we have a marketing problem (letting people know about our services). However, even if we to solve that, I want to understand what it would take for someone who is aware of our services to actually convert. Hence, I appreciate your answer and hope others chime in as well.

          Thanks again.

    • usrusr 1567 days ago
      Last time I checked, Google was mostly charging per viewer instance, whereas OSM tile providers where universally charging by actual volume. That way, Google pricing would be unbeatably attractive for an SPA where users are panning and zooming a lot in a single map instance, but prohibitively expensive for sites where users open a lot of pages that each contain a little map viewer (or multiple) that is hardly ever interacted with.

      A clear horses for courses situation. Unfortunately the site I had in mind was just as clearly a "both".

      The main reason for not self-hosting is data updates I think. Setting up that "data supply chain" might not be very hard or expensive, but it can adds a lot to the overall maintenance demand of a site. Chances are that automation will keep working precisely as long as you can remember how you did it, plus a few more days.

    • lukeqsee 1567 days ago
      > opentiles mapsets for a tenth of the price

      We are! https://stadiamaps.com

      But we don't skimp on infrastructure (8 datacenters around the globe), etc. We built all of it from the ground-up to be as effective as possible, and thus are able to pass significant cost savings to our customers.

  • tpmx 1567 days ago
    The general underlying reason:

    Google has shifted from the innovation/growth phase run by engineers to the MBA/marketing/lawyer-managed monetization phase.

    • ysopex 1567 days ago
      Thank you, I was about to comment it's not a service it's a product. And frankly this has always been the case they were just more subtle about it in the past.
  • aagha 1564 days ago
    It's frustrating that with the number of Google engineers out there--many of which reach HN--to not see any comments from them about a post like this.

    It's almost as if they don't care, or are now worried that saying something could negatively impact them.

  • Qub3d 1567 days ago
    >It’s that they push out new products, encourage communities to use them to make “amazing” things, and then don’t support them well over the long term. They let cool projects atrophy and die.

    This is the absolute root of the problem, and one that is unique to Google among the big cloud providers. Yes, AWS may roll out new features, but generally the core stuff stays put.

    I'm not losing sleep over route 53 getting "sunset" with a 1 month notice. Can't say the same about Google. While it won't sink them, I can see this becoming a bigger and bigger obstacle as the number of IT pros who get caught in the fallout of Google's internal ADHD grows.

    If Google, or a vendor using a product on top of Google services contacts me, I'm not touching it unless they're willing to enter into an SLA where they pay for the trouble of migrating my stuff when they axe the service.

    In other words, I'm not using it, because no one would ever offer such a thing.

    • mesoman 1567 days ago
      It's internal Aspergers, not just ADHD. Google seems to have no insight into its users.
  • jaimex2 1567 days ago
    Google's pricing change is a really good thing. Diversity is needed on the Internet and since their changes things like MapBox and OSM have had a big increase in uptake.
  • alexellisuk 1567 days ago
    What are the main limitations of OpenStreetMaps here? I used Google Maps back when the pricing was at that lower point, and am working with Mapbox now for a project.
  • buboard 1567 days ago
    google's business is ads, monopoly ads, and all these side projects were good for distracting people from their monopoly. they don't care because they don't need to care and i wouldnt be surprised if all their services incl. gmail have the same fate. good thing that the market abhors a vacuum
    • xvector 1567 days ago
      > good thing that the market abhors a vacuum

      Indeed. I greatly prefer Apple Maps on iOS. The directions barely take any longer and the UX is just so much better.

      • ViViDboarder 1567 days ago
        The new voice prompts on Apple Maps are great. “Turn right at the next stop sign” is way more helpful than “In 1000 feet, turn right”
        • wolco 1567 days ago
          If they combined them turn right next stop sign about a thousand feet. Otherwise it's like this stop sign here or do they mean that one..
          • dbt00 1567 days ago
            They say things like turn left at the second light.
  • daveheq 1566 days ago
    I dont know why the author can't download a cached map every month and use that for the hits.
  • Symmetry 1567 days ago
    I'm excited to hear about the new fallout feature in Nukemap.
  • ilaksh 1567 days ago
    Google wanting to get paid for use of its APIs doesn't seem like the most significant aspect of this post to me.

    I hope some of us are able to escape from this planet before it is destroyed by a nuclear holocaust. This is why I think that the lunar and mars missions should be a bigger priority.

    • incompatible 1567 days ago
      I suspect that even after a nuclear war, Earth will still be far more inhabitable than either the Moon or Mars.
  • perspective1 1567 days ago
    Kind of predictable. Google's a business. Surprise, surprise, you can't rely on its free services long-term.
  • mrtri 1567 days ago
    because nukes dont exists, research it, look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, compare it with photos of Tokyo, almost the same damage, flat with some trees and buildings standing.. no crater, no radiation, how can trees and building survive at groundzero? undamaged buildings, and bridges at groundzero but miles away from center concrete buildings collapsed , blown away . no radiation problem, they started walking around and started rebuilding the cities just days after. search hiroshima Tram that restarted service just 3 days after the bombing. nuclear tests are fake with huge pile of normal explosives, and some hollywood editing. all fake. you can see clouds not moving because they use layers, and colors dont match.
  • SeanFerree 1567 days ago
    Very interesting!
  • shreyamathur651 1567 days ago
    Use Google Maps In Google Chrome Browser! You will defined able to find the Nukemap
  • loriverkutya 1567 days ago
    "By which point I had already, in my heart, given up on Google. It’s just not worth it. Let me outline the reasons:

    They clearly don’t care about small developers. That much is pretty obvious if you’ve tried to develop with their products. Look, I get that licensing to big corporations is the money-maker. But Google pretends to be developing for more than just them… they just don’t follow through on those hopes.

    They can’t distinguish between universities as entities, and academics as university researchers. There’s a big difference there, in terms of scale, goals, and resources. I don’t make university IT policy, I do research.

    They are fickle. It’s not just the fact that they change their pricing schemes rapidly, it’s not just that they deprecate products willy-nilly. It’s that they push out new products, encourage communities to use them to make “amazing” things, and then don’t support them well over the long term. They let cool projects atrophy and die. Sometimes they sell them off to other companies (e.g., SketchUp), who then totally change them and the business model. Again, I get it: Google’s approach is throwing things at the wall, hoping they stick, and believes in disruption more than infrastructure, etc. etc. etc. But that makes it pretty hard to justify putting all of your eggs in their basket.

    I don’t want to worry about whether Google will think my work is a “social good,” I don’t want to worry about re-applying every year, I don’t want to worry about the branch of Google that helps me out might vanish tomorrow, and so on. Too much uncertainty. Do you know how hard it is to get in contact with a real human being at Google? I’m not saying they’re impossible — they did help me waive some of the fees that came from me not understanding the pricing policy — but that took literally months to work out, and in the meantime they sent a collection agency after me."

    • somehnguy 1567 days ago
      Yes, that is what is written in the article, thanks
  • fastball 1567 days ago
    I feel that the author is seriously underestimating the cost of his traffic to the Google Maps API.
  • tssva 1567 days ago
    The average after financial aid per student cost to attend Stevens Institute of Technology is $35k. As of 2017 they had an endowment of $184 million dollars. If they thought this was enough of a priority they could allocate the additional funding for this. The fact that they haven't and that the lower $200 a month was coming out of pocket versus being paid by Stevens indicates the level of importance they place on this work. Why should Google in essence help fund work that the organization doing the work can afford to but doesn't want to fund?
    • detaro 1567 days ago
      > I’ve had the good fortune to be associated with an institution (my employers, the College of Arts and Letters at the Stevens Institute of Technology) that was willing to foot the bill.
  • jaquers 1567 days ago
    Lots of comments (bitching) here about not showing street names. Can confirm, there are definitely bugs regarding street names being off-screen / not showing at the right zoom levels.

    But are we technologists, or what? Figure out the behavior and suggest a solution.

    I find that it happens to throw street names close to major intersections, which happen to be offscreen due to panning. Seems to me that there could be a change to detect when a street name is not present on the screen and make an adjustment to do the same. In other words tweak the heuristic for showing names +- zoom level. They do have _a lot_ of data.

    I think it's really popular to hate on Google right now for a myriad of reasons—but I also think that people who work on Gmaps want to improve their product.

    Y'all know how to file bug reports. Expected behavior, current behavior, steps to reproduce, etc. Stop complaining about a service that is free, or else—don't use it.

    BTW; agree w/ the majority of OP's points regarding contacting humans & lack of features / price etc for API. That's valid feedback.

  • crazygringo 1567 days ago
    > ...people at educational institutions (even not-for-profit ones, like mine) are disqualified from applying. Why? Because Google wants to capture the educational market in a revenue-generating way, and so directs you to their Google for Education site, which as you will quickly find is based on a very different sort of model. ...you have to claim you are representing an entire educational institution (I am not) and that you are interested in implementing Google’s products on your campus (I am not), and if you do all this (as I did, just to get through to them) you can finally talk to them a bit.

    The base Google for Education used by most educational institutions has always been free, it's not revenue-generating.

    And even if the author had gone the non-profit route, Google for Nonprofits is the same -- you have to represent your entire nonprofit institution.

    Because when you're part of a large institution, your institution is responsible for licensing, grants, policies, etc.

    Google (justifiably) doesn't want to deal with 100 different professors setting up 100 different free quotas and not talking to each other. They want it to all be tracked at an institution level.

    • yborg 1567 days ago
      Professors are accustomed to requesting grants from individual entities all the time and while they may often have internal institutional review or coordination, the granting entities don't typically require all requests from say Harvard to be submitted by Harvard as an institution. tl;dr professors are used to submitting proposals for grants directly to an organization, Google's approach at least in higher education would not be what a professor would consider the norm.