Justin O'Beirne

> I wish I could learn to build my own tiles, vector or PNG. I don't really understand where the data comes from, how is data gathered and assembled.

The tools are rapidly evolving. There's no great single entry point and the best advice I can give is pretty generic: find a small-scale thing you want to do and do research toward accomplishing it.

The post you're commenting on is about how PostGIS databases mostly do this work for vector tiles on its own now, so "to build your own tiles", you'd set up a PostGIS database and re-read this post. A year or two ago the advice would be pretty different. A year or two from now and the advice will be _completely_ different.

That said, from zero http://geojson.io is a dead straightforward way to do basic operations with GeoJSON data. You can paste in JSON and it renders on the map; you can draw on the map and it generates GeoJSON. (https://tilejson.io does the same for raster tile sets.)

Real-world data is massive and overwhelming to work with — just drawing your own fake maps in geojson.io and working with that might make some of its concepts easier to digest.

Maperitve[1] is a free and relatively straightforward app focused on taking geo data as input and outputting maps. Work with its rendering rules and you'll understand some of the challenges with rendering at different zoom levels or in different contexts.

Then this post from 2018[2] on Tippecanoe (tile and data converter), TileServer GL (tile server), and Leaflet…

Not going to be mild here, Google Maps is the absolute poster child of enshittification. Sorry if you've worked on it, it's even more enshittified than search, and the best example of the company being run by the Ads division.

This overview 8 years old but it's only gotten worse [1]. Everything in the UI has been optimized purely for businesses and ads, not for users. I'm blessed enough to now live in one of the few countries where Google Maps is not dominant, where local players are more popular.

I've gone and taken current screenshots of both to show the difference. Current Google Maps [2]. Note how you can't even hide those UI elements blocking the map, but more important is the map itself. Current locally popular maps app [3]. It.. actually works well as a map, like Google Maps used to before Ads took over the business. And just a single touch on the map to hide the UI.

I'm sure the Supernova Hotel and Hostel Ani & Haakien are bringing Google some great cash money though, splendid user feature!

Before I lived here, I of course used Google Maps. And when I go abroad, I have to use it. And every single second spent with it is a stark reminder of how much worse it is than the map apps that are most popular here and are not enshittified.

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

[2] https://www.directupload.eu/file/d/8755/pn47kkvj_png.htm

[3] https://www.directupload.eu/file/d/8755/ruwp2jy7_png.htm

The Google Maps thing isn’t entirely about screen size (though I would hope it wouldn’t be quite so bad on larger screens—but I’m only familiar with how it looks on a small-by-modern-standards Android phone, where it’s about the same as on the iPhone depicted in this article, or even a little less); it’s about the product’s overarching philosophy, which has changed over the past decade (in a direction I strongly dislike). It used to be about, y’know, maps, but maps are now incidental, a means to a different end, ably demonstrated by their icon change a year ago from a map to a location pin. It’s all about the destinations now, and mapping has progressively deteriorated and been deemphasised.

At least in the case depicted, you should be able to get it to show just the map by tapping once in the map area.

(If you’re interested in more about this, https://www.justinobeirne.com has some excellent long-form content analysing all the major maps products, how they’ve changed over time, &c. https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-new-app-icon and https://www.justinobeirne.com/what-happened-to-google-maps are good brief starting points.)

>> I have a suspicion that gmaps infers roads from photographs, and some of the roads are not roads at all.

> There's something called the TIGER database. [1] Of course, that needs to be populated and updated somehow and Google probably applies various corrections.

That's for the US though, it wouldn't cover Canada (though Canada probably has an equivalent).

IIRC, Google actually has a fairly large team of cartographers keeping Google Maps up to date. In addition to satellite and aerial photographs, and other maps, Google also has the benefit of Street View cars to give it on-the-ground data plus GPS tracks of customers using Google Maps on their phones.

On OpenStreetMap, there's a layer that shows all the GPS tracks that its users have uploaded, all superimposed on each other (though last I checked it hadn't been updated in some time). It's pretty easy to make out real roads from that data.

This website has some pretty good essays about Google Maps and other mapping services: https://www.justinobeirne.com/.

> 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.

There's a small Polish startup that helps people find nearest pharmacies with given drugs.

They did pretty nice analysis and found out their whole infrastructure costs $1300 a month and they would have to pay additional $5000 for Google Maps alone (right now GM costs them nothing).

Looks like GM will be ~10x more expensive to them than Mapbox or MapTiler, here's the original article (in Polish) translated by Google (sic!):

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=pl&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gdziepolek.pl%2Fblog%2Fpozegnanie-z-google-maps&edit-text=

Looks like many folks who leeched on GM's free plan will move to alternatives so maybe this dick move will turn around and became actually a good thing, would love to see more competition in the area and right now Google Maps is years ahead of competition: https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat