In terms of data, OSM is so far ahead of Google maps in my experience. The rendering is much better too. What's not there is obvious and easy to use tooling that anyone can interact with. I mean, there might be, but I don't know about it.
I don't have google maps on my phone at all unless I visit in the browser, and I use OSM through Magic Earth. I wouldn't go back, but it is a huge pain and sometimes I do have to just open google maps in a browser window. It doesn't usually have hours of operation, doesn't usually have links to websites. It can't find businesses by name easily (it often seems to require the exact name to by typed in), and it definitely can't find businesses by service (searching for "sandwiches" will not show you a list of local sandwich shops, it will do something like teleport you to a street called "Sandwiches" in Ireland). And even if I have the exact address, I will still sometimes end of thousands of miles away or with no hits because the street name was written differently. Honestly, it's of very little use to me because it can rarely take me to a new place.
People in the real world care about things like hours of operation. Google makes it really easy for businesses to keep them up to date on things like holiday closures. OSM makes it a nightmare.
How do they make it a nightmare? Are we sure it's not just that 96% of business owners use Google maps or maybe Apple maps and don't even know what OpenStreetMaps exists. I think this is more about network effects then anything. If they really want to break googles geo spacial business data monopoly.
I think if Apple/Microsoft/OSM should band together and make a simple tool for business owners that can update your details on Google, Bing, Apple Maps, and osm simultaneously. Although I am not sure if Google exposes that through apis or not.
I am very sure that OSM does not get this information because they make it hard for businesses to give it. I know this because figuring out how to get that information published was my job a few years ago.
Specifically I was a developer for a company whose job was to update business information in Google Maps, Apple, Facebook and so on. We'd get the data from companies like Cheesecake Factory, Walmart and Trader Joe's, then we would update all of the sites for them.
All of the sites have some sort of API or upload mechanism that makes it easy to do things like publish phone numbers, hours of operation, hours for specific departments and so on. All of them were happy to let us automate it. All were happy to accept data based on street addresses.
I tried to make it work for OSM. It was a disaster. I have an address. Google et al understand that a street often has multiple names. If the address I was given named the street something else, Google took care of understanding that route 33 is also such and so street and they accepted the data. If I said that there was a restaurant inside of a mall, Google didn't insist that I know more than that. If I was publishing holiday hours, Google accepted us as the default authority. (And gave ways of resolving it if someone else disagreed.)
OSM did NONE of that. It was all roadblocks. If I didn't have the One True Name that OSM in its wisdom determined was right, good luck matching on address. If I couldn't provide OSM with the outline of the restaurant on the floor plan, OSM had no way to accept that there was a restaurant in the mall. If a random OSM contributor had gone to the location and posted store hours, OSM refused to accept my claim of its reduced hours on Christmas Day. And so on.
All of the brands that I named and more don't publish to OSM for one reason, and one reason only. OSM make it impossible for businesses to work with them in any useful way to provide that information. And therefore OSM is not on the list of sites that that data gets published to.
In short, if it isn't perfect, OSM doesn't want your data. And the data off of a spreadsheet some business uses to manage this stuff usually is nothing like perfect. I respect how much work went into getting OSM just right. But they made it impossible for real businesses to work with them, and so they don't get that business data.
For starter, as a business owner, how do you claim full ownership of a given business on OSM?
What prevents a nasty competitor from making daily false updates to your opening hours?
If you're a verified business owner in a non-collaborative platform, you can update your holiday hours/one-off closure with a simple edit on that platform's business management page/API. How is OSM even in same category as Apple maps/bing/Google maps?
A nice UI is completely and utterly useless for a business attempting to create an automated workflow from a spreadsheet for things like business hour updates and letting map publishers know when new stores are going to open.
So yeah, OSM is a nightmare for businesses to deal with. And unless that changes, its access to business information that people expect will remain severely limited.
Is there a recommendation for OSM on mobile? IIRC they don't have an official app.
Also looking at their bike routing - it gives me an idea. Road should be rated on whether they have a dedicated bike lane and on the danger of riding on said road at particular times of day. I just input a src/dest and it gave me a really busy road with tons of "paperboy" level risky side roads on it. I would never want someone to take that route at 5pm on a weekday.
OSM is fundamentally just a DB for place locations and geometries. Directions use routing engines which choose roads and paths between locations based on constraints. The main landing page for OSM lets you choose between OSM, Grasshopper, and the Valhalla routing engines.
To figure out why directions are bad you need to see which criteria the routing engine is using to create the route and decide either to change the constraints used to generate the bike route or what added data you need to place on the streets for the routing engine to avoid/prefer certain streets.
Does this sound like an opaque nightmare? Yes. That's why very few people use it. Apple has been doing some great work doing mapping and adding it into the OSM DB, which they use for their own maps, but they have their own proprietary routing system for directions. If you're looking for a good app to use just OSM data, I use OSMAnd for Android. I still prefer Google Maps because their routing and geocoding tend to be much better for urban areas but for hikes and country bike rides, OSM tends to outperform GMaps.
OSM is a database of map data (streets/buildings/etc), so satellite and street view imagery is outside of its scope. Individual map applications that use OSM data might also support satellite imagery (and some do, like OSMAnd).
