For the youngens here on HN: TomTom was once one of the leading manufacturers of GPS navigation systems for cars - purchased as an accessory that was stuck to the wind screen. This was in a time before every car had a screen built in, and before everyone had a smart phone with Google Maps in their pocket.
I guess that product is a prime example for becoming irrelevant by society progressing. I actually still use an old TomTom in my old car that doesn't have a screen (well, it does, but didn't come with a GPS built in - adding it after the fact would have been around 1000£), since I don't have a smart phone. But it has been years since I updated the maps, probably wouldn't even be supported any more?!
I have a modern car with a built-in satnav as well as Android Auto support, and yet I still use my TomTom 5000 - it's just better. Definitely better than crappy Google Maps, definitely better than volvo's built-in maps, and it's without any kind of comparison how much better it is than Apple Maps. You get in the car, it auto-selects the destination based on the patterns it learnt(so if you get in at 7am on a workday, it automatically selects "work" as your destination. Then around 4pm, it will select "Home". At 8pm it doesn't select anything because it has no record of you going anywhere around that time usually) - something super basic that no one has ever done.
And it has a lifetime subscription to traffic updates with a built-in SIM card that works internationally as well. Drove with it across Europe several times and it's still the best satnav you could have.
> It's just better. Definitely better than crappy Google Maps
I struggling to see how anything could be "definitely" better than "crappy" Google Maps. To me, GMaps has made navigation about as exciting as using a door knob. It works without fail, and is so incredibly mundane, that the thought of forming a strong opinion about it makes me drowsy.
In my experience - it's just frequently wrong, to a point where I don't feel confident using it. Telling you to turn where you can't, going wrong way up one-way streets, showing you that streets connect on the map where they actually don't.......I could keep going. I keep reporting errors and they never get fixed. Like I mentioned in another comment there's a road near my work which has a no-left-turn sign but Google maps still keeps telling me to turn left there - I've been reporting that error since at least 2018 but no one cares. One of my friends lives on a new(5 years old) estate and Google still doesn't recognize his address despite many submissions to Google to fix this. Another lives in a Victorian house that hasn't moved for over a century last time I checked, yet you won't find it on Google maps - Google still insists his address is several streets over.
Maybe it's just the UK maps and it works fine elsewhere, I don't know.
It’s interesting how anecdotal people’s perspectives on Google maps navigation ends up being. Personally GMaps has never failed me (UK based) in the best part of a decade, if anything it has been consistently worryingly accurate, and everyone I know has had a similar experience. As I’ve seen others say in this thread “it just works” without fail. Due to that it’s unbelievable (to me) that others have had such an experience as yours. Do you think a fault in alphabet’s mapping processes in certain geographic areas may have caused this?
I've experienced both sides. My rough sense of it is:
If you're in a city or suburb with a Google office, it's spotless, including transit options that are often customized to the city itself.
If you're in a city or suburb without a Google office, it's reliable on roads but probably doesn't cover transit particularly well. I'm not sure if the Google vs. non-Google office is just a bias towards the kind of cities Google would put an office in as opposed to the presence of an office making a difference, but Pittsburgh is much better than Columbus or Jacksonville despite being a smaller city.
If you're in a rural area, it's much rougher. Private roads marked as public roads are the biggest thing I've noticed (presumably because aerial maps can't help much there), but also things like ATV tracks and driveways marked as roads and missing one-way indicators (i.e. routing the wrong way up a one-way street).
I think Google has some kind of presence in Amsterdam (though not a big one), but they frequently have problems. I think there are two kinds of situation that Google Maps handles poorly:
* Bicycle route. They're just terrible at it. Better now than they were some years ago (when major bike routes were completely ignored), but still not great. They still prefer to send you along car routes instead of dedicated bike routes, even when those are shorter.
* Construction work (I don't think TomTom will be any better at this, though). Sometimes they do know construction work is ongoing; for example the Piet Hein tunnel near my house is closed for more than a year, and Google is aware of this. But they also don't show routes across the Amsterdamse Brug, which is still open, and the only real alternative. So instead they send you across crazy detours all over the city. But recently I was riding to Diemen along the Amsterdam-Rijnkanaal, and it turned out that dike was closed due to construction work. Big work with signs everywhere, but Google had no idea, and because there wasn't an easy way around, I had to take a big detour that would have been a lot smaller if Google had been aware of this.
There's no google office where I live, but google maps will show detailed transit information including exactly where on its route the bus you are waiting for is.
There's an attribution saying the data is coming from the local metro provider, who has their own interface for accessing the same data, but having it in google maps is nice as it integrates well with other navigation.
So I would say it comes down more to who has partnered with google to make the data more accessible.
Maybe more anecdotal, but I have had great mileage with google maps for navigation while driving too. The government department for land information does make almost all GIS data publicly available which probably helps too.
It's not just the UK. I'm in the Philadelphia Area US and Google Maps has only failed me once out in the suburbs where it didn't know a road was blocked (and that was probably just timing/lack of reporting).
I use it daily to make sure my commute doesn't have any wrecks I'll have to work around, and any time I'm going somewhere unfamiliar. It really got stress tested on our way back from Tenessee during the eclipse exodus a few years ago, routed us (and lots of cars around us lol) through all sorts of Appalachia back-roads when the main highways were clogged and got us home just fine.
FWIW I live in a newer house on a country road, told google where it was and what number it was, and it was there on the maps a few weeks later. This was in NZ.
With the incredibly large sample size of two I have to conclude it's region specific.
does it rely much on user reporting? I figured google maps was smarter than that. it would have the data to see that no one takes a left at that no-left street you mentioned.
Except that people absolutely take that left turn despite the sign - it's just a very convenient shortcut, and UK has extremely lax enforcement on the road. The chances of getting a ticket for taking an illegal turn are close to zero. So Google will have the data that a left turn is indeed possible there, because clearly - people are taking it. Me reporting the "no left turn" sign is probably treated as malicious since clearly - in real life people are taking this turn all the time.
I try to not use Google services where I can help it, but not using Google Maps to me just feels like risking screwing up my day. The fact that it's what everyone uses makes it the safe bet. They have so many users being tracked in real-time to reroute me around detours and traffic jams as soon as they happen, I don't really want to try anything else.
If I use an alternative and get stuck in traffic, I'm not gonna be thinking about how proud I am of myself for sitting in traffic in the name of sticking it to Google. I'm gonna be thinking "should have used Google Maps"
Have you tired submitting an issue? No one could map to a place I used to live out in the sticks accurately but I submitted a bug/issue to Google Maps and Apple and they fixed it.
No I haven't. Will totally do that in order to save time explaining to friends why they can't use Apple Maps for navigation to my house. I just assumed that submitting maps bugs is the same /dev/null form as normal bugs for Apple software, but it seems it's a separate process and they are actually responsive. Thanks!
FWIW, I have submitted Apple Maps corrections several times in the app, and have always received notifications that my map updates were completed within 1-2 weeks.
Ranging from simple updates like hours, address corrections - to more human-oriented updates like "The end destination point is about 500 ft off from the actual location".
I believe someone really is looking at them and correcting them.
It (and all other GPS apps I've tried) work well enough, until you try to go somewhere you know well and have to turn it off to stop it from trying to reroute you over & over again.
If any app would allow me to have some sort of ability to let me set a level of "pain" (traffic, stoplights, smaller roads, extra turns) that's acceptable vs. a level of time savings, I'd use that app and never look back.
The number of times I've gone seemingly way out of the way only to rejoin a highway 30 minutes later in order to save 2 minutes total (vs the traffic I would have sat in) is way too damn high.
Google maps actually tried to kill me once. I was driving down Hwy 59, to a remote farm I'd never been to before, and for some reason Google Maps thought that there was a break in the highway. Like someone with an eraser just swiped a 1-inch stripe across the highway that was impassable.
I trusted it because I didn't really know where I was going, and it had never let me down before. So I followed its instructions down a series of little farm roads to detour around the "break". Except one of the roads crossed under a raging stream, and was only passable during the dry season. I actually fishtailed a little to stop, because the road was slightly downhill and made of dirt. If I had followed the instructions, I would have died.
Anyway, I submitted a bug report about that highway break, and 5 months later Google wrote back and said my fix had been accepted! How thrilling.
I just ignore it when it's going on and on and I'm headed to a destination I know well. Or I'll turn it off when I'm within a mile or so, I just want to use the traffic awareness to make sure I don't end up in an unexpected jam.
One slight oddity - it doesn't seem to care about which side of the street your destination is on in a lot of cases. Sure, in a suburban neighborhood, that's irrelevant. But in a city with two-way traffic on the street, it can matter quite a lot.
>If any app would allow me to have some sort of ability to let me set a level of "pain" (traffic, stoplights, smaller roads, extra turns) that's acceptable vs. a level of time savings, I'd use that app and never look back.
In all seriousness, have you tried Waze? Gives multiple options each time you search, allowing to choose routes that are simpler, or maybe partially but not fully use tolls.
I used Waze constantly in the DC area, was a godsend. Then I moved to Seattle where apparently comparatively nobody uses it -- without a ton of users, Waze isn't much better than the rest, sadly.
I'd love a setting that would silence directions when I am within $distance of home, and have home set as my destination. I don't really need to be told to turn on my own street, or the streets I always use to get to my street.
The short version is that Google Maps is 'free', it's not terrible, and it's better than nothing. (And often better than the integrated in-car satnav systems - although that's not so much because Maps is good as because the in-car systems are often quite bad - the Tomtom & Garmin integrated options being a notable exception).
But Maps is definitely worse than dedicated navigation devices, although it does improve over time.
There are certain things it is particularly bad at, for example routing down slow 20mph residential roads with speed bumps.
But... are the dedicated navigation devices so much better than Google Maps to justify the increased cost? Probably not for 99% of people.
I used to use a Garmin satnav, and plug it in to my laptop and use Garmin's software to do my travel expenses, full tracking of all my movements, and it's my data to do with as I wish with no concerns. I can do the same thing through Google Timeline... but it's not even close to as well executed, and gives me serious data privacy concerns... because Google.
Same, the integration and sharing and real time traffic of Google and Apple Maps are basically impossible to compete with, in areas where they are available.
Google Maps is quite terrible in many parts of the world that are not-America. In Europe, it routinely suggests absolutely insane "shorcuts" because it doesn't seem to understand that even though a narrow, winding country lane with stone walls on either side may have a 90 kph speed limit, it would be suicide to actually drive at that speed.
YMMV. Google sent me to shortcuts that couldn't be called roads at least 3 times since i've been using it.
They also have a tendency to make you stick to the main - congested - roads. You won't notice unless you're a local to the area though, so let's say that's good enough.
Waze in my experience seems to have more realistic ETAs and is better at routing around traffic jams. Even though it's built on Google Maps.
However I'm in Romania and I do long weekends in mountain retreats in the middle of nowhere. As I said, YMMV.
- And don't trust the routing in the actually remote areas, and prep your drive by putting GPS coordinates in your driving route -- but that's true of the competition too.
- And have a vehicle that's the size of a normal passenger car. (I used to own a special "RV GPS" that had better data on bridge heights and weight limits.)
It really depends on where you live and what you do.
One time it wanted me to walk through the waste/sewer pipes of Mallorca to go from a beach to the city center, let me tell you it's not a pedestrian path.
I've seen a marked decline in the speed and usefulness of google maps over the last 10 years or so. I'm not sure whether they are cramming too many features into it, so the UI becomes too cumbersome from it's original use case, or that they are having issues with data quality, but I find needing to retype different searches more often, and just interacting with the UI more to get the same information (which in my case is almost always "find the nearest X" and then "plan a route from where I am to X".)
I remember how many years it refused to save route preferences like "avoid tolls" or "avoid highways". You would have to set them anew for each route search.
If it has planned the route while within service, it actually does. It guided me from Vegas to Yosemite (via Lee Vining and the Tioga Pass) without trouble despite several areas of no service. It had registered the waypoints and knew where it was, even if I couldn't load any additional map data. (I had not saved the area for offline use.)
Tom Tom used to charge for map updates, which became a no-go for many. The same thing thing with built-in ones. Toyota asked 60 euro for the map updates and unfortunately no android/ios auto.. i am going between google maps / apple maps. I find routes better in google maps but i love apple maps voice indications better. I still have also a free lifetime update tomtom but it very slow to add destination etc.
> Tom Tom used to charge for map updates, which became a no-go for many.
There was also an instance when they unceremoniously stopped supporting updates on “old” devices that were not actually that old and were in fact still actively being sold in stores (in the UK at least). I know people who switched to alternatives (the smartphone option in all cases IIRC) and vowed they'd never pay for another TomTom device again after that.
So I'm not sure what device you have in mind, but the one I mentioned(GO5000) still receives regular and free map updates despite being 12 years old now.
It was a fair few devices, including some that has been sold as getting lifetime updates (one of those sketchy instances where the lifetime in question is the lifetime of the product and they define the end of that by stopping the lifetime updates): https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/42859546.amp
To be fair, perhaps more fair than is deserved IMO, the devices still did (probably still do) get qgps updates so function normally apart from having outdated maps and can, somewhat disingenuously, be said to be still be getting their lifetime updates.
I seem to recall that a map refresh would be similarly priced to just buying a new one. The device was probably sold as a loss leader. Back then the devices were super nice, I recall thinking, but the business model doesn’t make any sense now, to me. They did have products specific for huge trucks, such as route planning, maybe it makes sense for those use cases still?
Right, but the customer doesn't have TomTom over a barrel either. If producing maps for older devices doesn't net a lot of customers, they either charge quite a bit or don't bother.
The device you link wouldn't net updated maps of Australia. Looks like world map devices are closer to $400.
No; their demise was the rise of smartphones who can do pretty much everything they can, for free. GPS navigation was commoditized as part of the smartphone arms race.
That's not at all what I am saying? Tomtom's updates were very expensive though. A smartphone with non-free map alternatives won't get you there so it's not the smartphone either. Both developments were necessary, either one on their own isn't sufficient.
I would say so (that and the smartphone as ppl points out) - they announced subscription service around 2009-2011 from what I can see online and we can see the interest falling drastically since:
.. that's also when I stopped using them I think, and what's interesting is that once you get into the habit of using a new map+navigation service it seems quite hard to switch or is that just me? (I want to try Apple because I like them more than Google but I'm just so used to Google Maps)
> once you get into the habit of using a new map+navigation service it seems quite hard to switch or is that just me?
I don't think it's just you. :) I know a fair number of iOS users who switched to the standalone Google Maps app during the, shall we say, rocky first year of Apple Maps, and who I've never been able to convince to look back -- and these are people who live in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Apple Maps is arguably at its best.
Give Apple Maps a shot in an area you know well. In my experience, GMaps is better in terms of knowing what's around you and the traffic - but AMaps gives much more easily-followed directions and doesn't do silly routes to save five seconds' time.
DonHopkins 5 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: TomTom to cut 10% of jobs due to improved automati...
I worked at TomTom in Amsterdam from 2007-2009, and had a fun time and learned a lot working with some smart people at a great company that treated us well and had good leadership.
But TomTom was just on the cusp of a small company turning into a big company.
And the savings and loan crisis was about to cause the economy to collapse.
Then TomTom got into a bidding war with Garmin over Tele Atlas.
So they ended up borrowing a whole lot of money at a really bad time.
Just as the iPhone was hitting the market, and Google and Apple were rolling out free maps and turn-by-turn navigation on smart phones that everybody already had.
I wrote about that earlier in the discussion about Etak:
DonHopkins on Feb 27, 2017 | parent | context | favorite | on: Who Needs GPS? The Story of Etak's 1985 Car Naviga...
"Etak eventually became a part of TomTom, ensuring that its map data, some of which was first digitized back during the Navigator's development in 1984, would live on to this day."
The story of how TomTom and not Garmin ended up owning the data originally digitized at Etak is interesting. At the time, there were only two digital map companies: Tele Atlas (from which TomTom got their map data) and Navteq (from which Garmin got their map data).
From Wikipedia [1]:
"On July 23, 2007, a €2 billion offer for the company by navigation system maker TomTom was accepted by the Tele Atlas board. This was then trumped by a €2.3 billion offer from United States-based rival Garmin on October 31, 2007 initiating a bidding war for Tele Atlas. TomTom responded by upping their bid to €2.9 billion, an offer which was again approved by the board of Tele Atlas. Garmin had been expected to counterbid once again: with Tele Atlas' main global rival Navteq subject to a takeover bid from Nokia, the company had stated that it did not wish both companies to fall into the hands of rivals. However, after striking a content agreement with Navteq through the year 2015, Garmin withdrew its takeover offer, clearing the way for TomTom. On December 4, 2007, TomTom shareholders approved the takeover. The European Commissioner for Competition cleared the takeover in May 2008, and it closed in June."
TomTom (where I worked at the time) was shocked and dismayed that Garmin outbid them by €300 million on Tele Atlas, because while it made a lot of sense for TomTom to buy their own map data supplier, it would have been prohibitively complex and expensive for Garmin, who used Navteq data, to switch map data sources and retool their entire map data digestion, distribution and error correction pipelines.
TomTom was so determined to buy Tele Atlas and keep it out of Garmin's hands, that they raised their bid by €900 million.
In the meantime, Garmin renegotiated their deal with Navteq, so they didn't have to pay as much for the data, and didn't have to switch map suppliers.
The stunt that Garmin pulled off was, in my opinion, an ingenious head-fake that cost TomTom an enormous amount of money, almost a billion euros, and at the same time saved Garmin a whole lot of money by enabling them to renegotiate a better deal with Navteq, who was faced with losing their major customer if they didn't lower their prices.
That's definitely why I stopped using TomTom. Like gambiting, I really liked their product. They were compact, fast and the UX was great. But Google Maps is free.
We need a new alternative word for "free" when it comes to advertising companies. Something short to say "the cost is too abstract and indirect to understand fully or describe, but does impact society at large". Maybe "free-ish"?
That is all already assumed by the word free, if one understands it, which most do not.
Nothing is truly free as people commonly conceptualizer it in their mind. Just alone receiving something at all comes with strings, even if they are not apparent. There is a term that describes this issue rather well in German, “vogelfrei”. It refers to being as free as a bird, which is assumed to be a great thing, but it also means you are free to be hunted and predated.
Free is also the theme of a deal with the devil. I will self-censor here a bit about what is the devil, because the devil’s censorship is more consequential than if I do it to myself for the time being.
There is no free lunch. Its more like you expect some idealized absolutism in market economy from people who need to eat and pay their mortgages. Its uncommon to meet an adult with such expectations, its mostly reserved for children up to certain age.
> It’s uncommon to meet an adult with such expectations
I don’t think this is an accurate assumption. Many adults probably have a nagging feeling about this version of free, I doubt most of us can accurately describe the cost (and most wouldn’t care to try).
I mean it really does “feel” free in that the costs are so abstract and externalized. In fact I’d argue that it has completely changed our perspective on pricing, value, and entitlement.
Traffic and accidents might push you into different routes, especially if you have major decision points like which route you take around some geographic feature. When I drive in Los Angeles decades back even people who’d been driving there for ages wanted traffic reports to pick between roughly equivalent freeways because almost inevitably one of them would have much worse congestion due to an accident and you could save 20+ minutes.
Distances in LA aren't measured in miles, they're measured in time -- and the distance between two points changes based on time of day, direction, and events like sportsball or presidential visits.
Knowing where to switch between freeways and surface streets, and what route to take in what conditions, can cut half off the driving time.
Some examples of varying conditions from my personal history, even with optimal routing:
Commute to work: 22 minutes. Commute home: 1h 16min.
Go visit a friend: 45 minutes. Come back home at night: 16 minutes.
> Knowing where to switch between freeways and surface streets, and what route to take in what conditions, can cut half off the driving time.
Yes - I remember as a kid learning how to read maps and noticing my dad's face when I was like "These cities are only 10 miles apart. Why does it take an hour to get to grandfather's?".
The surface streets are an especially interesting blindspot a lot of drivers have. There was a period around the turn of the century where I was commuting between Santa Ana and Garden Grove and freeway traffic was generally manageable early in the morning but on the trip home it was often better to cruise down the surface streets where the lights were timed around 20mph than to sit in stop-and-go traffic on 405 or 55/5.
Driving in the London suburbs, I know how to get most places I want to go. In fact I usually know several different routes that are roughly similar in travel time. Google maps is excellent for telling me which one of those routes is least congested right now. So I'm not really using it for navigation, but for congestion information. It very rarely suggests a route I don't know, but I use it all the time anyway.
There is a gate right behind me that is closed with chains.
It isn't possible to drive through there, though you can walk in and out from the smaller gate.
Google still always tells me to drive through the gate.
I don't think Google Maps auto-learns.
Maybe it needs a bigger sample size so people don't abuse it?
If you use the reporting interface they seem to update promptly. There’s a major road near us where Google used to tell people to make a illegal left turn across 4 lanes of traffic, which was common enough that I used to see it almost every time I went by for years. Once I found the well-hidden reporting UI, that stopped two weeks later.
There is a no-left-turn street near my work, and Google maps keeps telling me to turn left there. I've been reporting it every now and then since at least 2018 and it does nothing.
It learns other patterns, too (which is kinda creepy). On Thursdays, I like to swing past a local taco shop on my way home after work and when I plug my phone into CarPlay, it prompts me navigation to the taco shop; it doesn't do this on any other day.
Kinda a neat feature, but it makes you wonder what else it is learning.
The Tesla maps do it too, when you tap on the navigation address entry there's a list of 'Suggested' which is learned based on time of day / day of week.
Very tangentially related, on the front of "stupidly useful features that nobody seems to think seriously about": The fantastic Citymapper app shows a HUGE "Get Me Home" button if you open it past 3am. Just brilliant.
I don't know, here in UK they just seem to be barren, with major roads still missing, they don't know about "no right/left turn" signs in places, they don't know about one-way streets......it's not a good system.
I don't know how it can be using TomTom's data if TomTom doesn't have any of the same issues.
There's definitely a passable road in my neighborhood of Baltimore that Apple Maps doesn't know about, and always tries to route us around until we turn onto it.
Traffic awareness, I'd guess. I use Google just for that whenever I'm away from home (which is a small city, I don't have to go far, and I know all the alternate routes if one is busy). I already know how to get to 90% of the places I'm going in some cities, but they're the easy-to-remember routes, not necessarily the fastest ones.
Problem is, for me at least, Google is useless for predictions or recommendations. Search is still better than DDG, but way worse than peak Google.
Their recommendations are all over the place despite the fact that I have been logged in permanently in some form or another since GMail where still invite only.
No one else except my wife and my parents know more about me (and to be perfectly clear they know different subsets of me) but yet Google still insist on showing me the most irrelevant and annoying ads and suggest I call people at work in the middle of the night etc etc.
It is not just in the search engine, Google Now AI keeps pushing mostly nonsense.
The most annoying thing is they had this nailed. Google Desktop Search had some bonus features like the feed sidebar that automatically predicted what I wanted to read more of based on what I had read before and it was crazy good.
Search used to be amazing and these days I feel it is barely better than DDG.
> ou get in the car, it auto-selects the destination based on the patterns it learnt(so if you get in at 7am on a workday, it automatically selects "work" as your destination. Then around 4pm, it will select "Home". At 8pm it doesn't select anything because it has no record of you going anywhere around that time usually) - something super basic that no one has ever done.
This is exactly how Apple Maps works, for me. It suggests a destination based on my patterns.
The auto-nav feature is very nice. However others do this, Apple Maps, at least, will suggest a destination based on behavioural patterns.
Tesla also have a "simple" version of this, if you are at home, it will automatically to go to work in the "morning", and in the afternoon it will automatically go "home" if you are at the office. But this seems to be location/time based, and not behavioural.
> Tesla also have a "simple" version of this, if you are at home, it will automatically to go to work in the "morning", and in the afternoon it will automatically go "home" if you are at the office.
Yes, and this feature drove me crazy until I figured out how to turn it off. The two places I know how to get to are to work every morning, and home from work every afternoon! It's the _other_ places that need navigation.
My car has in built (TomTom) sat nav too with a nice wide-screen display. The tom tom maps make full use of the screen and very legible.
Android auto gets forced into this like 4:3 resolution in the middle of the screen which sucks and I can't find a way to fix it, even after looking in developer settings.
People have said it's the car manufacturers fault, I really don't understand why it has to be this way though
Waze had this auto learning feature as well. It is agressieve in rerouting but I feel it has hit the sweet spot between saving time and the extra hassle of getting off the highway.
It's also important how they're doing this. GMaps in my car constantly fails to show anything useful (or even start navigation) because there's no signal in my underground garage.
Such a simple thing and yet TomTom can do it and Google can't.
My car's built-in navigation can use dead reckoning based on steering angle and wheel speed, so is still better than TomTom in this respect. I really think this person who is clinging to their old TomTom is a bit oblivious to what all the alternatives now do and how they do it better.
I don't know if I'm oblivious - on long drives I usually have the TomTom setup and Waze on the android auto screen - TomTom knows about traffic and issues on the road that are just not on Waze, most of the time. Also Waze keeps directing me on most idiotic side little roads, recently I nearly got stuck in a muddy road somewhere in the British countryside because of Waze because I decided to trust it. Again, no such problem with TomTom.
waze acts as if it treats all roads as wide, level, straight paths, and expects ppl to speed on them bc it sends me on twisty, steep, narrow 25mph roads with low visibility so they canxt be sped on.
Mhm - note that with "TomTom" I now mean Android app (which has Android Auto integration) and not an old standalone device :)
I've also seen that same very app as a builtin navigation with all the features (including live traffic) in a new Fiat 500e, so it seems like they're licensing the tech to car manufacturers.
That is an edge case that Google could but does not seemingly accommodate, but very well could. It’s likely not just that you have no GPS, it’s also likely that you have no mobile or Wi-Fi signal reception, both of which could inform on your location, if implemented.
That being said, why do you need your navigation to start while in your garage? Just start it before you enter your garage or right as you drive out of it if you want to benefit from GMaps benefits.
Despite having my area downloaded in Google Maps, the navigation and recommended routes won't load in my garage. It usually fails horribly (mostly because, like many poorly programmed mobile apps, it doesn't handle scenarios with poor connectivity well).
I've had some pretty poor experiences with offline maps on Google Maps. There have been a few times where I've made a point to download the maps for an area a couple of days ahead of time because I knew service would be spotty. I would then drive out to the areas with spotty connectivity, and more often than not Google Maps would refuse to generate a route for a route definitely within the confines of the selected offline map. I'd have to drive back a bit by memory to find reception and then try to generate the route again. This would even happen if I was on a route, cancelled it for some reason, and then attempted to restart the exact same route while along the route it was just on.
Google Maps offline has been extremely unreliable for me and mostly unreliable when I had the greatest need for it. This was true years ago and this was true less than a month ago.
If I'm going to someplace with spotty connectivity, I make sure to put in all the main addresses and locations on my car's navigation system ahead of time. The maps might be dated but at least it'll generate a route somewhat towards the destination, even if I might need to take a detour along the way.
You can only download them in explicitly specified chunks (not e.g. one whole state, much less whole country), and they expire if you don't update them regularly.
Technically you can download a particular region as well. e.g. search for "Belgium", click on the ... > Download offline map.
However, it still downloads an arbitrary rectangle, and there is still the same maximum size; it just automatically centers it on what you selected and gives it a reasonable name.
Oh wow that's an unclear graph, putting the first tick-mark at 1B gives the impression that you're starting at 0, but there is in fact over 0.5B missing from the bottom of the plot.
There's very rare cases where it's justified; e.g. if you want to show a drop in company profits from $60.0B to $57.0B, you might want to cut the y-axis so that you're showing more detail of the loss over time (maybe so that you can correlate to the CRO's lame new "motions" that they started in January). I do think it should always be called out visually when doing that though.
I'd love to see this overlaid with the price of an additional map or an update to your existing map.
The last time i checked in about 2007 the price of a yearly UK update was eye watering. I just accepted that if i take the new by-pass Tom will scream thinking im in a lake.
Check the licenses in the about section on the maps app and see... and also, go use Streetside, Bing Maps' version of streetview, and see what cars gathered those images!
I find your post funny, since I'm regularly using TomTom on my Android phone because it has a better UI and some nicer car navigation features than Google Maps. Based on the number of downloads and TomTom's financials, I'm not even close to being alone.
I've also seen it as a default navigation provider in many car brands so I find your bubble biased post pretty funny - and kinda sad, because we see a lot of those here these days. Is it really so hard to stop for a second and think whether there might be people out there that don't share your preferences?
Well, obviously TomTom is still in business but only because they adapted their original business model drastically. I think the original article is also along the same lines.
The portable GPS market was a blip on the timeline; popular for only about 5 years. Several technologies converged to make them possible: public GPS, sensitive GPS chips that didn't require large antennas, cheap solid state storage (this was huge), and high resolution color displays. As soon as they all existed, we could get portable GPS units for $400-800 USD.
Unfortunately for these manufacturers, all these technologies also enabled smart phones with GPS which quickly destroyed the market.
I can trace the history of TomTom GPS devices: my first one was bought in 2008 at BestBuy in Seattle during a US trip (we called it "Dave" after the voice's name, grew kinda fond of it and even used it in Germany despite or maybe because of it reading German place names with a funny US "accent"). Of course it was limited by the technology available at the time: the touchscreen was low-res and reacted sluggishly, and the memory was limited, so you had to constantly swap between maps that you could store on the device and those backed up on your PC. I kept around a Windows installation just for updating this TomTom, because I wanted to avoid the hassle and was afraid of losing the maps when trying to transfer them. Then I finally bought a new TomTom in 2019, and it was much better: bigger, better screen, could fit a map for the whole world in memory, free lifetime updates, could connect to Wi-Fi to update itself, so no more fiddly PC software needed etc. But unfortunately TomTom's maps were extremely lacking in the very first country we wanted to use it in (Ecuador).
TomTom started with mapping software for PDAs/smartphones. I remember using CityMaps on a PocketPC phone edition (with a separate GPS device) in the early 2000s. They only got into standalone devices in 2004 probably because they were more profitable than software alone. It's only when smartphones (with built-in GPS) went mainstream in ~2010 that standalone devices didn't make sense anymore.
>TomTom was once one of the leading manufacturers of GPS navigation systems for cars - purchased as an accessory that was stuck to the wind screen.
I'm of an era where my first TomTom was an external GPS receiver that connected to a PDA (Palm Pilot?) via Bluetooth, with all manner of cradles, wires and such. The GPS receiver needed to be re-paired each time I made a journey.
> old car that doesn't have a screen (well, it does, but didn't come with a GPS built in
I used to pick up and deliver lease cars from/to customers, and I'll never forget the Audi which had navigation, but no screen! There was a two line text display, which would show textual directions. It was an interesting experience!
My dad's early-2000s Peugeot 407 also had a similar set-up: a red/orange monochrome dot-matrix display, with a surprisingly hot backlight, capable of displaying only the most rudiminary of roundabout diagrams and now-and-next directions. It did use TTS to pronounce street names with the wrong inflection and an overemphasis on "yAAARds" as units-of-distance for some reason. It was controlled by an easy-to-lose infrared remote-control D-pad: entering an address meant picking each letter one-by-one from an A-Z list until it could autocomplete the street name.
I was always envious of kids whose parents had contemporaneous Mercedes with their full-color 3-4" LCD screens - until they'd told me of how bad UX was across the board: stuff like sub-usable frame-rates, overpriced map-data updates, etc - and this never got better over time until Tesla showed-up with 17" full-screen 60fps Google satellite imagery right there. And still the rest of the car industry doesn't "get" good UX. Le sigh.
(Yes, I drive a Model X and I'll decide the next car I buy squarely on the car's software UX - because if they can't get something as simple as smooth framerates right then what else are they getting wrong in the car?)
(Gonna be the lightning rod of hate here for a moment)
> And still the rest of the car industry doesn't "get" good UX. Le sigh.
Imho, a giant 17" touchscreen that replaces most physical controls in a car is also not good UX for a car. Why do you need high-res satellite imagery of your route on a screen in the center of the car? Just look out the window!
I'll grant that most other manufacturers also do a poor job of a lot of the UX elements, but Tesla ain't the great saviour either.
no hate here - the "replace everything with an iPad" movement of car dash design has been generally, IMO, a horrible change. When driving, you need tactile feedback when adjusting things like the cabin temperature so that you can keep your eyes on the road. Replacing knobs with GUI sliders on a screen that you have to see to manipulate is a step backwards. I would love it if auto manufacturers came to their senses and went back to old-fashioned knobs and buttons, but I suspect that just sticking everything on a screen is cheaper to manufacture and maintain, so I won't hold my breath. :(
I think part of the problem is also the expansion of functionality in infotainment systems, especially if you're using android auto or similar. You end up needing to have a touch screen for some things like text entry (or having a much clunkier input method) and once the touch screen is there, the temptation to cut costs by replacing physical buttons and switches with some software is just too great.
Adding a touchscreen to the vehicle's infotainment system is absolutely not required for text entry when you are already connecting a device with a touchscreen to that infotainment system. Carplay/Android Auto devs just aren't creative, I guess.
> Adding a touchscreen to the vehicle's infotainment system is absolutely not required for text entry when you are already connecting a device with a touchscreen to that infotainment system.
It is, because a lot of car-makers intentionally make the phone physically inaccessible by being out-of-reach when plugged in for CarPlay/AndroidAuto (they don't want to be complicit in texting-while-driving deaths - would you?). Most societies agree it's okay to use a large touch-screen keyboard thats part of the dashboard because (at least it's meant to be) positioned such that your eyes can still see the road ahead to some degree, and big chunky virtual keys go a long way too.
...telling me to fumble around for my iPhone, then somehow unlock it, get to the right app, then precisely poke its tiiiiny keyboard keys and hope autocorrect doesn't get it wrong (and it will) just to enter a new navigation address when I'm trying to negotiate traffic is a bad idea.
I agree entirely. Heterogenous (I.e. distinctly shaped) physical controls are essential for safe driving without taking one’s eyes off the road.
…but that doesn’t mean my last car’s abysmal “Ford MyTouch” or “Ford Sync” or whatever they rebrand it’s as was ever fit-for-purpose. How can a UI that can’t render faster than ~5fps be considered acceptable by the world’s leading carmaker? Where is the pride in their work?
You have a very good and valid point. Incidentally, despite being not a fan of Tesla's UX, I also see a bit of the silver lining in that it at least got people to start talking about it, both via the point you're making (that all other car UX sucks too) and also starting to ask the questions about what makes a good UX rather than a pretty one.
You speak as though this is something new. It isn't. It was the same story back with Apple's iPod's clickwheel-and-drilldown UX. Nothing was stopping Apple's competitors from innovating on their own and potentially making something superior (and I was particularly fond of the contemporaneous UI of MS's PocketPC 2000's Media Player[1]). But they didn't. Instead everyone: Creative, Dell[2], Rio/iRiver, everyone just kept on putting out unusable plastic flash players that took 30 minutes to sync 10 minutes of 32kbps mono MP3 over COM1 or bulky HDD players unusuable to everyone except those people with ponytails who run that strange new "Linux" operating system I've been hearing so much about.
And before that, it was probably Braun vs. Philips.
For noncoherent reasons that I can't string together into a readable paragraph (I wasted over 10 minutes trying to already) I'll just say I think it's inevitable that in any consumer industry there will eventually be only one company with a monopoly on good taste and good design. Also consider how companies will hire people who are already aligned with the company's values, and we know Apple hires people with an eye for design regardless of their role, but Apple's competitors never had an eye for design, so they neve hired people with an eye for design, so they're never able to compete with Apple on the design front. Upstart competitors might be formed with an objective to wrest-away Apple's monopoly on good design but (post-1997) how could any design-focused small-fry compete with Apple on design? They can't. They'd ever get bought-out before they become too big to become a threat (if Apple's feeling nice), or end-up as another also-ran Android vendor with a nice handset, but you're still stuck with Google, and without the leverage of Samsung.
I don't know where I'm going with this post now, so I'll just end it here.
> Why do you need high-res satellite imagery of your route on a screen in the center of the car? Just look out the window!
Because it’s incredibly useful.
It means you can navigate dirt tracks. See over treeelines. Judge the quality of parking lots. Find out what side of the building the driveway or entrance is on. Etc.
Yeah, VAG cars totally support having navigation with no screen! It seems quite funny by today's standards, but I guess the idea is it's like having your passenger navigate and read directions to you.
I bought my 2009 Audi in 2014, it was missing some new roads and updates in my area, I approached the dealer about an update, they wanted €250 for the disc and €250 for the license key.
I remember a time when my family called any GPS head unit a “TomTom” - not sure if it was that way outside of my family though. Almost like they nearly had “Kleenex” levels of brand recognition. Unfortunately for them the iPhone moment happened. iPhone GPS wasn’t nearly as good, and they even had an app on the iPhone (That sold for almost as much as a separate unit, at a time when developers could actually sell paid-up-front apps on the app store…)
Nowadays most people just use their smartphone, but there's definitely one market where an "old fashioned" navigation thing like this is still relevant: motorcycles. They need to be high contrast, low power usage (because most motorcycles don't have a power outlet), waterproof, offline, and resistive touch screens (because gloves).
I did look into them at one point, but they had a €500 price tag which is a bit steep.
Most motorcycle GPSes like Garmin do have wiring harnesses to connect to the battery. You can also load OSM maps on them for cases where Garmin's are too expensive
Edit: they are also weather resistant which is a huge plus over most phones
I don't know I just watch for the main clues before the ride and memorize the main highway roads and exit numbers, follow the signs and if at some point I have doubt I just stop by the side or take the next exit, remove one glove and check on the smartphone.
I think my security would be compromized if I had to look at a screen regularly while riding my motorbike.
I'd say a better option is to use a headset and follow vocal instructions.
I ended up just purchasing a phone mount that connected to the motorcycle. Set the destination before I left, seemed to work fine. But if you are willing to go to a bit more effort you can purchase USB charger that connects to the battery, and also get gloves that work with capacities screens.
It's not irrelevant. The quality of roads TomTom guides you are way more optimized then Google maps for example. The road graphics are also way much more clear.
TomTom is what I use on every vacation trip. Wouldn't do that with Google Maps.
Google Maps always picks strange roads and often I see me driving through a red light district or something, where TomTom would pick more conventional roads.
I had one. It worked pretty well but sometime took a little while to “lock onto” the gps signal.
I think the cloud based gps on phones won for being free and having traffic info.
My Tom Tom had the “mr T” celebrity voice yelling directions at me. A friend had John Clease. This is before gps directions told you street names, but with ai I think they could manage this again.
If it doesn't lock on straight away, it also asks you if the clock is set correctly.
I think those older GPS chips might only use the US-operated GPS system while modern ones can consider other positioning satellites as well. And they also can't download AGPS data of satellite drift from the internet, so they need to get it from the satellites themselves.
Asssited GPS[1] solved that exactly problem, since not network connected GPS devices need download GPS almanac and ephemerides via GPS 50bits/s connection, which can take a while.
My father in law had a TomTom and maps were always years behind reality (and he paid for several updates as they promised the changes would be in there, but no), so updating or not does not matter.
Good point. I've certainly run into situation where my TomTom got confused with reality, but on the other hand, just a couple of weeks ago the built-in GPS in my wife's car was totally unaware of some high-way in France and thought we were going cross-country through some fields for quite a long time :)
I have a TomTom GPS device for my motorbike that I purchased 8 years ago. The build quality is excellent, but the software is abysmal. It takes over two minutes to boot (!); changing the type of route takes maybe 5 or 6 touches; search results are not ordered by proximity, and offers at first suggestions, destinations that are thousands of miles away (on a motorcyle!); updating the maps means connecting it to a PC and downloading a huge, horrible app; etc.
> a prime example for becoming irrelevant by society progressing
There's still the use case of driving in remote areas with less-than-ideal or expensive connectivity (though probably those spots don't really require sophisticated nav), and also that you might not want to tell ad monopolies your location data.
You don't need the connectivity all the time; it is enough when calculating the initial route. After that, GPS signal is enough, and can be intermittent (in tunnels or deep valleys, for example).
But I've seen another uses of dedicated GPS appliances: bikers. They use rugged ones, they don't break so easily as phones.
Despite using Google maps I like having a separate GPS navigation system like this running in the background as a backup. That’s in case if something happens to my phone and it no longer works, then I have a secondary GPS device.
Not necessarily irrelevant, just a lot more niche. For example there's still a market for navigation systems for the trucking industry that consider factors like vehicle height in route selection.
I think you misread - I was talking about the screen in my car which is used mostly for the in-car entertainment system (formerly known as "radio") and some other controls. But it is not connected to a GPS, so I'm using an external TomTom device for the rare cases where I need it.
I worked at Tele Atlas/TomTom until 10 years ago. There is literally nothing new in this announcement except that they are going to "steal" data from OSM now.
sensor derived data, user generated content, camera vans all of that is not new. All this existed when I left, so did the people mentioned in this announcement that are still running the show. I always hoped they would eventually realize that they need a fresh top management, but they seem to just keep doing the same old stuff with the same old people until the final collapse of the company.
Do you know that Microsoft Bing maps also "steals" the OSM data? They did some very clever "reverse stealing" as well when they contributed back to the project by providing millions of accurate building footprints.
Yes, I'm being sarcastic. It's a win-win situation when ANY large mapping group joins OSM. At the very least; they will accidentally contribute road-level improvements when they work with the data. I rely upon OSM data and need these large players throwing their weight behind this mapping system.
I think you're missing the forrest for the trees here - they put "steal" in ""s because they know it's not stealing.
The point of their comment was to criticise TomTom for not doing much interesting themselves, not to discuss the nuances of OSM. In this context, "steal" makes sense because it's something that TomTom can claim to be innovative with while actually the innovation credit belongs to OSM.
License aside Microsoft at least provided Bing satellite imagery source for OSM mappers before there was Maxar and others. Actually there were others before (was it Yahoo?) but that is not the point.
in practice you can't trust a bounty system like this, so the next best might be to sell your company products in such a way as to minimize the system friction between new sales, new data coming in from those new sales, and feeding back to the open ecosystem. In that latter case, you can't trust the company management, but to my mind .. that's the breaks
How is it stealing data? Most geospatial companies use OSM data, with OSM's permission, and it's a smart thing to do b/c they have a great map. Why wouldn't a mapmaker work with OSM data?
I don’t know what OP meant by “steal” but the complicated thing with using OSM data as a mapmaker is that if you “derive” any other data source with it you have to make it available which means (as I understand it) you have to contribute it back to OSM.
If TomTom was planning on conflating OSM data with other sources then in theory it hurts their business model because they will potentially have to make their entire map (or large parts of it) freely available in OSM.
If they can somehow set up clean room conditions and keep all their other data sources physically separated from the OSM data then it might be avoided, but then how do you do the map conflation? And that would certainly impact how quickly they can make updates.
Maybe they came up with some clever way to avoid having to contribute data back to OSM and that’s what OP means by “steal.”
except google. They copied OSM data in the past, and used in their proprietary offering that includes reselling the data. A blatant offense of the OSM license.
They were caught red handed in 2018 i think, and blamed on some contractors. But most interesting, despite this being a widely know fact for the mapping community, i can't find any mention of it anywhere today.
There are suspicions, but no hard proof has ever been found about this.
However, there is a well-known (and non-problematic) case where OSM-data is used in GMaps. Some polish bus agency used OSM to create their GTFS-feeds, which were ingested into GMaps. Selecting the bus line will thus show an OSM-based line layer; but as that line layer is clearly attributed with OpenStreetMap, that is totally fine; both legal and ethical. See https://twitter.com/MapAmorePH/status/1453863816110952450?t=...
Google Maps has one of the most abusive license practices I've seen; effectively they force every one of their competitors to use OSM. As a consequence, OSM is the default for every company in this space.
If it was about wanting everything to be free, Mapbox wouldn't be the most common non-Google map provider. Google's free tier is more generous and their data is usually better. A few points that particularly bother me:
1. Google gets a lot of this data from their users (both from traditional crowdsourcing and sneaky things like tracking Android phones) and then locks it up so you have to pay to use it.
2. The way they license their services forces you to stay in their ecosystem. For example you are only allowed to use Google Places Search on a Google Maps map.
3. There are APIs Google just doesn't provide for various reasons and because they "own" the data, everyone else has to start from scratch (or use OSM). There's no way to download some subset of the data for a one-time sum or even a subscription license and provide your own service on top of it.
Yes, these things mostly fall into what people consider a company's freedom to do business however they like. But Google is more than just any random company and the data they gatekeep is more than just any random dataset.
That Riak based platform they presented eons ago at a Meetup in Amsterdam could have been a mind-blowing real-time traffic flow optimizer. But I think it just withered to an API for syncing your POIs across devices. SMH
There are three groups each with their strengths and weaknesses.
One are the carmakers, OEM’s. Take for instance CARIAD, the Volkswagen software arm. They are a TomTom partner. Their strength is sensor data. There will be 40 million Volkswagen brand cars where the front camera sends data to the servers. Their problem is that they don’t have mapping expertise. They do want to build their own services on top of a base map. For instance all charging stations that are theirs. (ionity).
Then you have tomtom. Their strength is AI and machine learning and how to fuse those vehicle sensor data in the map. Also they have a team of 1.000 mapping employees in Pune, India. Making edits every day and checking change reports with other data like sattelite imagery. Their challenge is that they need those data from car sensors (and they get them)
Then there is obviously OSM. Where the strength is the wisdom of the community. But also a weakness that people can make mistakes and from time to time vandalism happens.
In this new venture you get a best of both (or in this case 3) worlds.
The India people in Pune can do quality checks on OSM data. For instance comparing with other sources. And their tools and AI can fuse sensor data from cars of tomtom partners. Those are Volkswagen group but also Stellantis (merger of Peugeot-Citroen and Fiat-Chrysler-Jeep), Toyota and others.
The TomTom base map (lowest layar) will be provided to OSM.
Forgot to mention one thing, which is Apple. TomTom gets their probe data which helps in street geometry and traffic. With the help of OSM TomTom now has a Japan map. Very important for carmakers in Japan. Big market. Because in Japan 80% of mobile phone users are iOS users (huge iPhone marketshare) this is an opportunity to get data from many sources together. Also from Japanese carmakers like Toyota who do research with TomTom on HD maps for autonomous driving and assisted driving (ADAS).
This looks like a win-win-win for all three. Carmakers, TomTom and OSM. And a worry for Google Maps and HERE technologies.
10 years is quite a long time for things to change though.
Sure many sources might have existed for a long time, but it sounds like the way the company is going to use them, how quickly it will turn them around will improve. It's not transactional per se any more, more real-time (depending on the specific use or update). As for the same management, depending on your perspective, that might be a sign of stability. Judging by the press release this morning, company has solid order book and is reporting a record 2.4 million euro automotive order book.
Of all the fundamental shifts in my life that smartphones have enabled, having an ever-present map with GPS has been subtle but gigantic. I (we?) interact with cities so differently now
It sounds like TT will be a net taker from OSM, I hope they contribute as much as they benefit, as otherwise it would sound like they're giving up on prop-mapping by cutting costs.
It's a press release I suppose, but saying the world lacks an open platform, and processing to use such open platform, sounds a bit weird
Every company starts as a "net taker" until they find their contribution niche, so I'm not concerned. Besides, the positive effect of more eyes seeing OSM and more companies caring about its quality cannot be understated. (I can point to dozens of examples of this.)
I doubt what I saw will really add to what Doctor_Fegg says in his talk. However, a few examples:
https://daylightmap.org is built by Meta (Facebook) to allow their maps to meet their quality needs consistently while still pulling and encouraging OSM updates. This unlocks OSM data for a large amount of sensitive corporations.
I personally have made quite a few edits on behalf of customers who pointed out errors in the map.
The popularity of OSM-based navigation apps has made it useful for people to download editing apps to ensure their locale is as up-to-date as possible (this is getting better and better every year).
> Some of these contributions may have intentional and unintentional edits that are incompatible with our use cases. Our mapping teams work to scrub these contributions for consistency and quality. In the course of this work, we also build additional tools and technologies on top of OSM to increase mapping speed, and more importantly, drive a higher level of detail, quality and accuracy on the map.
Why so negative? OSM is now business critical to a lot of companies. These companies are of course being selfish. But the side effect of this is a lot of investment in the data and community itself.
Tom Tom have got their work cut out, this space is super competitive. Just passively taking the data is not a way to compete in this space. You need to step up to stand out. Tom Tom is doing this out of necessity. They've been active in this space for a long time but they are now getting a lot of competition from other companies; many of whom are pooling resources via open data efforts, like open street maps. That gives these companies a cost advantage because maintaining maps is an expensive business and the base map is now a free commodity.
That's the nice thing about shared resources, everyone can be a net taker, because all of them get everything and nobody contributes more than small fraction.
Welcome to the party, TomTom! A little more healthy competition never hurts. :)
Seriously though, the prestige of OSM and the companies building on it is only growing—a success story of epic proportions to the open source and open data communities!
Yeah, we were in Ecuador in 2019 with a TomTom device, and the newest maps were years behind "ground truth" - at one point we ended up on a bypass road and the GPS kept telling us to "turn right" when there was no intersection anywhere to be seen. We then turned to OpenStreetMap (OSMAnd app) and it was a lifesaver...
Curious, does anybody navigate without GPS? Why do you do it?
I occasionally challenge myself, and I am always surprised how much more active my mind is, compared to GPS where my mind is passively glancing at the screen every few seconds to see if I'm on course and next turn.
I have a pretty good navigational memory, so if I've driven the journey once I can usually remember the way again. The advantage of apps like Google Maps and Waze is they provide real time traffic data, so can reroute you if there is congestion. It's not perfect, but I use it for driving to and from work now and it has helped me avoid a lot of congestion.
I've found that the re-routing is good if you happen to be lucky enough to be one of the first cars to get rerouted. But pretty quickly the alternate route gets congested too because everyone is getting rerouted.
I do it, because I lived in a time when you had to and I want to keep that part of my mind sharp. I'll use GPS to go somewhere novel, but after once, maybe twice, i make a point to just go there without assistance.
If you don't navigate you lose spatial awareness over time, I know some people who can't tell you how to get to their job from their house.
Yes, I find it more fun and engaging whether driving a car or riding a bike.
It also helps to build up a mental map of the city I live in, which I find to be one of those skills you can learn which feels like a bit of a superpower. Being able to find and navigate along a route, deal with detours, or navigate yourself around congested areas.
Recently I was trying to leave a large complex parking area when we noticed it was gridlocked. We were able to navigate a way out the back that hadn't become congested yet, and save ourselves from 4+ hours of waiting and ending up on the news.
I used to work with TomTom when I worked on navigation solutions at a former employer. The maps are top notch quality and very up to date, but shit expensive. I think we had a minimum amount of licenses we had to commit to pay (something like a couple of hundred thousand euros per year) and we were a small shop.
We had split the map data sources to not drive customers away and we split our licensing between our app and the map subscription. It was an interesting problem, we had one employee that only did OpenStreetMap - keeping maps up to date, manually solving problems etc - this was actually much cheaper than buying TomTom, but still we couldn’t match the quality of TomTom. So, we would recommend: do you need high accuracy maps, buy TomTom, otherwise use the cheaper variant.
We were also implementing Here Maps (the old Nokia Maps), when I left, and it looked really promising, but I think the same licensing scheme, only “cheaper”, we could make do with only about 100k in pre-bought licenses
OSM and OsmAnd seem great except when you want to search for something. If I search for "mcdonalds" typed lazily I get 5 results hundreds of miles away. To find the local Mcdonalds restaurant I have to type "McDonald's" very specifically. This lack of fuzzy search makes these apps unusable.
Its an unfortunate situation of the two parties involved in this software each pointing at each other and blaming the other with neither willing to budge.
OSM, I would argue rightly says it's up to map makers how to query the data their project puts out there. The app makers claim (this sounds like BS) that OSM's data or API makes that too hard to do.
Either way absolutely unusable. If TomTom can just make a search that works better than this and layer that over the OSM data they've got a win IMO.
Someone should build a good, open, web API-based search for OSM data. Not everyone cares about 100% offline capabilities, and improving search would be a massive gain in usability for OsmAnd and other OSM clients.
I'm pretty sure this exists, but the tooling around OSM all seems pretty obscure and badly documented. There aren't really flagship apps, which I'd argue there should be. It took me a lot of research (on official OSM pages) to find Organic Maps.
Why could it? Don't you somehow have to teach it which words are synonyms and common combinations for autocomplete etc.? It seems to me at least that this is where the major work would be, and even then it's expensive to run this for the whole world just for free.
> I search for "mcdonalds" typed lazily I get 5 results hundreds of miles away. To find the local Mcdonalds restaurant I have to type "McDonald's" very specifically.
Very true. I do cut them some slack when I remember that they're essentially competing against the world leader in search. (Not that I use their search engine, but it's not for a lack of quality that I stopped using it.)
> If TomTom can just make a search that works better than this and layer that over the OSM data they've got a win IMO.
Exactly! I'd love to pay for such a product. Even better if they don't reinvent the wheel and instead just polish OsmAnd that can almost do more things than any individual person can ever know about.
Yeah I tried switching to OsmAnd for a while. It works fine as a map. Interface is a little clunky. The real problem is I mostly use Google Maps to search for places and OsmAnd was terrible for that. I reluctantly switched back to Google Maps, but I look forward to the day I can drop it for an OSM-based solution.
It's not as good as on Google Maps (where google can show you most popular places based on reviews) but it's good enough for me. For example I didn't had "macdonalds" problem described by the parent comment.
Plus it's very fast app with a clean interface. 100% open-source and actively developed. I can totally recommend it.
The "open-source" refers to using other's open-source data, no mention of TomTom's.
e.g.
"The world lacks a truly open and collaborative mapping ecosystem, one that doesn’t follow a one-size-fits-all model but is flexible so that businesses can build according to their needs. One that fosters collaboration, data sharing and open innovation."
What does "open" really mean in their doublespeak?
The article says "Many of us know TomTom for its PNDs" - yet I am sure nobody would know what a PND is as that acronym. (I haven't looked it up, but from the context I am sure it is Personal Navigation Device - you know the thing that everyone wrongly calls a GPS)
Yeah, I worked with TomTom a while back and you are correct, it was an acronym that was commonly used internally, but at least the people I was working with knew that nobody outside the company had any idea what it meant.
Had very bad impression with TomTom. Needed a car navigator badly but the Go-6200 never made it on time thus had to go with Go-6100.
It was slow initially, but more or less enough, the cellular data was only good for real time traffic update. But in less than 2 years that was gone too coz TomTom decided to use a 2G module when 4G was everywhere and there was already a time table to retire 2G. That was just genius.
Put all that aside, the battery went bad just around a year, it becomes even slower after each firmware upgrade. But what really p*ssed me off was their explanation to lifetime map updates.
What they do need is really someone with better vision and ethics I would say.
Yes. They sponsored the last annual State of the Map-conference and already did some mapping work. They also released some analysis datasets which highlighted possible problems in OSM (with the intention to improve OSM)
Reminds me of an encounter in Nepal, where a Chinese guy with Baidu maps was lost finding his hotel, and Google on my phone wasn't exactly much better. OSM to the rescue (and thanks to everyone who contributed data for that)!
I'd like to see open-source topo maps with accurate elevation data, and accurate GPS position data. Doesn't seem to exist and 'topographical' and 'GPS data points' are not mentioned in this article. For now, individual maps can be obtained via USGS, but they're not stiched together:
TomTom say «go through the roundabout, second exit”. Or “left” or “right”. Which is infinitely better than Google’s “take the second exit”, which in 95% of the situations means “go straight ahead”, but since they don’t bother to say that, you need to count every frikkin’ time. That alone is reason good enough to use TomTom.
ViziCities was such a fun adventure and something that I'd like to pick up again at some point, or at least some sort of successor. The ecosystem for spatial visualisation on the Web has changed dramatically since I created ViziCities so I'd love to see what's possible using today's technology.
>Continuously updated and detailed maps, location data, POI information, routing algorithms, estimated times of arrival (ETAs) and positioning systems are being combined to create powerful apps that are changing the way we (and our stuff) move and how we make sense of the world around us.
Ahh, TomTom. I quit using mine in the late 00s and kept a local map for when I did pizza delivery, because there were false streets all over the TomTom map that the TomTom wanted me to take, including false exits off a freeway.
Tom-Tom is worse than Google map for direction, and also dash unit is always not up to date, no traffic... But I really like open streetmap, and in my area it is better than google map. I hope they will be able to innovate against google.
> The world lacks a truly open and collaborative mapping ecosystem, one that doesn’t follow a one-size-fits-all model but is flexible so that businesses can build according to their needs
What does that even mean?
I’ll tell you what it means: no, our API pricing for whatever this service is will not be public, not be self serve and not be for small time developers to play with.
Ah wait, I get it!
> With its new map, TomTom is using AI and machine-learning techniques to speed up the process and make a much greater volume of changes in a much smaller period of time. With the masses of data used, the quality of the new map will be a step above what’s currently available on the market
I see! You’re going to compete with google maps and others but you’re going to pour The AI Machine Learning on your offering to make it better than the others.
…well, I guess we’ll see how it goes.
That approach (same as everyone but we have AI!!!??!?…?) is really a bad business model.
The problem is that everyone is doing it; and only a very small number of people are doing it at a level that makes any meaningful difference, and for those companies it’s a core competency, not a value add.
I don't understand the 'everything was better when it wasn't google' mentality that is so often found in these threads. My dad used to work at TomTom right here in the Netherlands. They used to be a fun and innovative company to work for. When it became apparent they entered a multibillion dollar business it was all about the money.
As someone who used TomTom before other options became available I can honestly say that it was an absolute nightmare. The small handheld devices took ages before loading up, had bad GPS reception and could only live on battery for 1.5 hours or so. Maps needed to be updated quarterly and would often not fit on the SD CARD. TomTom charged something in the order of 75 euro per map update.
When Google Maps became a viable alternative TomTom continued with the same business model, same paid map updates, same shitty bloatware necessary for map updates etc.. I don't understand the HN sentiment. Things were no better 15 years ago. Google Maps works. It works always. It accurate and uptodate. Dont like Google? There are plenty of OSM apps in store.
Google Maps has been a really garbage experience for me lately, so much so that I've been actively looking for alternatives. Sadly, there aren't many.
Some of problems I've had with Google Maps recently:
- Routing gives me weird bypasses that aren't necessary and often actually add time to the trip. I've started to not trust the routing.
- The UX when searching for places is extremely difficult to navigate, especially when trying to use map view instead of list view
- planning a route _without_ asking for directions is near impossible because many street and landmark names are not displayed
- Landmarks are drowned out by the overwhelming clutter of business names (paid ads)
- Maps are sometimes wrong in my area and I have no idea how to get them fixed.
I've started using OsmAnd for most of my mapping needs lately, and it's better in almost every way _as a map_. The only major thing it's lacking for me is traffic-aware navigation.
Google Maps has a few quirks. Here in Germany it always prefers to send you through 30km/h residential zones. Which might be somewhat faster than taking congested main roads but those 30km/h zones are terrible to drive through. There's always cars parked at one side of the street so you have to wait for oncoming traffic. The streets usually are very narrow. So the stress level to the driver is way higher.
I also noticed a quirk where it would send me 2km down a road just to turn back and drive the 2km back to where I came from. First few times I thought I must have added a waypoint but nope - sometimes it just makes you waste time.
Apple Maps might be better but I can't use it as it has a quirk with "Environmental Zones" in Germany. There are 3 kinds of zones: Red, Yellow and Green. Your car has a badge with a color (depends on how environmentaly friendly it is). So a green badge can enter every zone, a yellow badge only yellow and red zones, and a red badge only red zones.
Now whenever Apple Maps encounters such a zone in the route the navigation switches to a waaaay zoomed out view (tends to display the whole route on a map). So you can't really see the next turn, etc.
To get rid of that view Apple Maps expects you to click on OK. Which really sucks while driving.
What's infuriating is that you can't turn off the env zone checking or even just tell Maps that "my car has a green badge so PLEAS FOR F SAKES STOP PESTERING ME EVERY TIME YOU ENCOUNTER A ZONE". (Those zones are very common - every bigger town is a green zone. So Apple Maps becomes _really_ unusable on longer trips).
Electric cars are all green, gas cars are green if they meet EURO 1, and diesel cars are green if they meet EURO 4 (or EURO 3 + retrofitted particulate filter)[1]. This is pretty loose for passenger cars: any made in the last fifteen years should all qualify [2].
They are in most European cities anyway. I'm in a - for the US small, for Europe mid sized city with a pop of roughly 400k. City center is banned to cars. You're supposed to park on the outskirts or take public transport into the center. (Or bicycle).
The result is that almost no one goes there anymore. All the inner city shops are closing down - while the mall style shopping centers on the outskirts are flourishing.
Walkable cities sound great in theory. Until you realize that shopping groceries _really_ sucks when you have to carry full bags for 3 kilometers or have to use over-filled public transport.
> - planning a route _without_ asking for directions is near impossible because many street and landmark names are not displayed
This drives me absolutely batty. No matter how much I zoom in, I cannot see exit number labels. Sometimes they show up, at random places along the exit ramp, but I haven't figured out the rhyme or reason how.
Real maps clearly label exit numbers of every exit. I don't understand why this is so hard for Google Maps.
OsmAnd+ is my go-to maps app as well lately. It's fantastic. The only problem I have with it is the rendering for the actual map is super unoptimized, and leads to it having a very low refresh rate. Which, for someone who got a phone with 120 Hz as soon as I possibly could because the smoothness matters so much to me, it's a tad frustrating. Especially when I'm trying to scroll around the map manually. When I leave it in navigation mode while driving, the refresh rate doesn't really matter.
According to the GitHub Issues/Dicussions, this isn't an issue with the iOS implementation. Just the Android one. Hopefully something they can fix.
It drives me INSANE that I carefully align the map UI with the area I want to search, enter my search term, and then bam Google Maps automatically expands to the entire region.
This is NOT what I want ever.
Another thing that bothers me, when using the my phone as the map display I can search for places along my route and go back to normal navigation mode. Then as I drive whatever I am searching for will pop up along the route when we get close to it (say restaurants or gas stations). You can't do this in Android Auto, you have to always select the location or clear the results entirely.
>The only major thing it's lacking for me is traffic-aware navigation."
This. I use mostly OsmAnd, I especially like it when on bike or pedestrian mode. But yes sometime traffic info is a must so I use GM few times per year for this.
I always thought this, but recently I used Mapbox for the first time. I specifically was looking to build a geo-data analysis application, and was running into performance issues with gmaps. Mapbox absolutely knocks it out of the park when it comes to that kind of thing, I was very impressed.
> Google maps is fantastic. It beats literally everything else I can think of.
At least for walking and cycling, OSM has data leagues better than Gmaps. Also for driving actually, but navigation is indeed not as good. Lack of traffic info...
In my experience, Apple Maps is on par with Google Maps (at least in the U.S.), esp with latest improvements in non-car routes (i.e., cycling, though I use Komoot for that anyway). However Google tends to have more POI (they're further ahead in the ad biz).
With so many iPhones and Apple Maps being an smoother experience (Siri/OS integration), it definitely competes heavily with Google (at least in US).
I’ve been using it in the new electric car I got with CarPlay this year, and it’s fantastic. It’s integration with the battery charging is pretty much everything I want: it automatically chooses a charging point for a trip that will need a charge, based on my battery’s current charge level. It even tells me the number of minutes the charging will likely take, since it knows the speed of the chargers it recommends.
Last night I tried thr single button “Share ETA” from CarPlay, too.
Agree Apple Maps is great now.
Except the multi-stop support only works for driving... but other than that it works very well.
It'd been awhile since I'd actually driven until a couple of weeks ago and I was pleasantly surprised how good the turn-by-turn directions were, announcing things like "go past the next light then turn left".
Second this. I would guess the number of iPhones with Google Maps installed is less than 20% just thinking through people I know. Of course some of those older relatives also don't use online maps so this number might be misleading.
I agree that GMaps still reigns supreme, but Apple Maps is now definitely better in some regards, including the actual maps and transit directions for my city.
Probably due to all the OSM data they include, in fairness.
Apples Maps just is not very available globally. It is heavily U.S. oriented, while Google seems to offer similar features everywhere. Maybe some day Apple catches a bit.
Also, not everyone has and Apple device, so it's not really a competitor to Google which is available on almost any device apart from sanctioned Chinese ones and any web browser.
Apple Maps is also working well for me in Delhi NCR, India. Apple seems to have partnered with local mapping company called MapMyIndia. The traffic information and navigations are also quite useable and the ETAs also seem accurate.
I always check both Apple and Google Maps, but use Apple maps on my iphone because its way more battery efficient.
It has a well hidden web version. The easiest way to access the web version is via duckduckgo - just do a search for anything and click the map tab. the actual map tiles and data all come from apples servers.
> I want a competitor that offers at least roughly similar quality
How will that happen realistically? The truth is it's impossible to compete with ad-funded tech giants in the current state of affairs.
For that to change two things are needed:
1 . government intervention to break up Google ads from their maps and other businesses, leveling the playing field for their competitors who aren't making money via ads (not really gonna happen in the US, but maybe ... wink wink EU)
2. consumers now being OK with having to pay market prices for subscriptions to essential services like maps, email, etc. that they got used to getting for free through their personal data monetization (also not really gonna happen because people don't like paying for stuff they used to get for free and also many people can't afford to pay)
What warrants this adversarial tone? This is one person’s justification of the “everything was better when everything wasn’t google” sentiment. Are you trying to talk somebody out of how they feel because you feel that an alternative is not realistic, for the very reason that they find it scary in the first place? We all know why Google is unstoppable until the ad money runs dry.
Why doesn’t the open source community organize around projects that are just as far? Chrome and Safari were based on open source projects like Konqueror, Webkit, Chromium and Blink. They do 90% of the heavy lifting.
The quality of Google Map is better than others because it has more users, and thus better input data. And that's the real problem - competitors cannot improve improve their product without better data, and so users find it inferior and avoid their product / service and turn back to Google Maps (which allows Google to improve their product further and take a lead). Note though that Google has another edge over its competitors - (1) Android OS has been collecting geo-location data even if you don't use Google Maps and (2) Google also gets their competitors data if a user uses a competing map app on Android OS.
Google search is also in a similar position - the vast amount of users means its competitors just cannot improve their product because users become disappointed with the quality and stop using it, thus denying them a chance to improve their product.
The old solution to prevent anti-competitive behaviour and foster healthy capitalism was to break them up. But for more modern problems like this, I think a different approach is also needed - we need to force such monopolies to also share their data with the competitors, till the competitors become large enough to compete with them on their own.
(For those seeking a decent alternatives to Google Maps, I recommend Here - https://wego.here.com/ - it was owned by Nokia before they sold it to a consortium of European automobile manufacturers and is quite good).
I must agree. I do not remember a very pleasant experience using the GPS dash units. I would move often with the Navy and would use the GPS unit for a couple weeks but challenge myself as soon as possible to learn to get around without it. Now when I am going somewhere over 30 minutes away I throw it into GMaps even if I know how to get there, as there could be a number of events that could've caused a reroute since the last time I took that route.
My commute to work is very predictable, but the commute home is not. I always use Google maps driving home, even though it is only 27 miles, because Gmaps will direct me to alternate routes if there is a traffic tie up on my usual route home. This has saved me literally days of time over my years of commuting.
In my experience, here in the UK, openstreetmap.org is more accurate and more up-to-date than Google Maps, though I still use Google Maps as a way to access Google Earth or Google Street View, which tend to at least be accurate. (I wonder if they've thought about using an AI to guess what the countryside and streets might look like. Could be cheaper than using real photos? :-)
there is a better option, public data from guvernamental entities, data available to open street map, google maps or tom tom, that could be able to enrich it as they wish, but the base should be open.
Here in the Czech Republic, plenty of government geodata is open (not all for now), but merging datasets is hard, so OSM contributors only do occasional manual imports. It serves as a valuable base and could be used as an OSM alternative on its own, but when you've already got OSM, which is generally more detailed and sometimes even more up-to-date, why bother?
This works for the consumer who wants to get from a to b. And doesn't mind being advertised to or tracked via Google.
But companies, uber, lyft, carmakers, location intelligence firms etc need commercial mapping and location tech. What TomTom offers exists more for these people than the end consumer these days.
We use maps extensively in our products and Mapbox has been a belessing eversince we started using it. I would argue Mapbox is far better suited for development and product integration than Google Maps is. It is developer and user friendly, offers a wide range of mapping and layering products. It easy to use and affordable small and medium sized businesses.
Given how very little the TomTom announcement actually says, I've read it as a (desperate?) attempt to pivot into the mapbox market. In any case, nice to see OSM eating the mapping world.
>In other cases, the world is changing in ways that place growing demands on maps and location data. Nowadays, all social media has a location component so we can geotag our digital lives, and fitness and exercise apps, like Strava, augment how we interact with the world with virtual leaderboards based on GPS trace data.
When I was at TomTom, they ran a contest for employees to come up with fun ways to gamify their internet-connected GPS Personal Navigation Devices.
Some wise guy came up with the brilliant idea of maintaining a real-time "Top 10 Speeders" leaderboard for every single road on the entire map. Kinda like Foursquare for speeding on local roads. No matter where you were driving in the world, you could instantly see the top ten speeds of other TomTom users who drove down that same stretch of road, and put the pedal to the metal to claim or defend your own spot on the leaderboard!
That one went over like a lead balloon with the legal department.
The only thing worse would be a chat app for texting while driving above the speed limit with other Leaderboard members along the same stretch of road.
They also didn't appreciate my proposal for TomTomagotchi: a simulated personality on your PND that relentlessly begs you to drive it all around town to various interesting places it wants to visit, to improve its mood and satisfy its cravings. (Kind of like having virtual kids!) I'm sure there's a revenue model having drive through Burger Kings and car washes pay for placements.
Google Maps works for certain, pretty common, use cases. That doesn't mean it works for everyone or for every business. Monopolies are bad, near monopolies slightly less bad. And especially when it comes to a platform that significantly influences how millions of people perceive the world around them.
(Source: making web maps is my career. I don't touch Google Maps professionally but use it a lot personally.)
Can you describe a monopoly that isn't "natural"? I see what you mean but struggle to think of a traditional monopolistic company that doesn't have a "we started with the industry" defense.
The ISP in your area could be an unnatural monopoly. In my experience these companies have lobbied out local providers and bought all the competition to make them the only offerers in some areas. It happens more in rural US. The issue also crops up with gas stations in towns and then again with dollar stores as well, in this case they are replacing grocery stores.
Traditionally the federal government would crack down on unnatural monopolies so that's why you don't typically see them, but look at the regional level and you can spot them.
Balance of probability, maybe rephrase as "anti-consumer behavior is bad" or "noticing how monopolies are inherently self serving is a lot like a frog noticing the water around it is getting a bit hot"
The power of an app to route people down an old farm road rather than taking the pike to me, is enough. I feel bad for those who live there because its about 30 seconds faster to on the highway
Yes, there really should be some regulation around this. Apps sending traffic down quiet residential roads because the main road is overcrowded is a terrible practice.
If it's a farm road, there's always the option my neighbour used to do: he took his sweet time when he let the cattle cross the road. It's always fun when impatient idiots have to wait a few minutes because 50 cows are walking to their meadows across the road :)
This kind of thing happened in the days before app maps/directions, but it is arguably worse now.
My friends' street is the slightest bit of a shortcut. Like, it might save 30 seconds or a minute but it avoids a really annoying stoplight-controlled intersection. It is also a quiet, purely residential street. For 20+ years, people who live on that street park way out from the curb on both sides so that the street is nearly impassable for most of the day unless you drive quite slowly (like at a crawling pace). People still use it as a shortcut, but at least speeding down that low-speed-limit road where lots of kids play in the neighborhood is not so common anymore.
The best solution to a situation like that would be to block the road on one side (or in the middle) so you can't drive through it. Minor inconvenience for people who live there, but also a major quality of live improvement if you have no through traffic at all.
But thats not whats happening. Google Maps, Waze, Apple Maps etc all prefer certain paths over others. I can take a shortcut home which saved me about 5 minutes and potential traffic jams, and Google Maps will never suggest it, unless I deliberately drive down that road.
In my place (Geneva, Switzerland), Google Maps stubbornly keeps suggesting for years the fastest route form my side of the town to the other through one of few bridges that is actually absolute no-go for public traffic, with tons of warning signs (sometimes some of them are obscured by buses but still hard to miss).
Needless to say, there is often some sucker going through there, and I have to admit I ended up there once too exactly because of Google Maps. No effort to correct it over the years, in one of the wealthiest and most important power/finance centers globally.
What you and parent describe happened to me too, maps are absolute blessing compared to what was there before but they are sometimes not that great ie in cities with a lot of traffic. Its easy to get used to something just working and start demanding perfection, when we are maybe 96% there.
The problem is not only, that things are Google. The problem is, that more and more stuff being Google means fewer alternatives, which in turn means more and more websites and other things start relying on Google, which in turn causes the users to be at Google's mercy.
I don't want Google to know all websites I visit. I don't want it to know all websites I visit, which have a map widget on them. I don't want Google to have knowledge about where I am going and when I am going anywhere. Websites for example using Google maps will indirectly enable Google to actually know these things. For example if I want to book a hotel and I want to know, how I get there from the next public transport station (or if I had a car, how I drive there). If it is a Google maps widget, data about what location I am viewing will be available to Google. Google being Google, I have no doubt, that they will try to use that for profiling people.
Relying on a becoming a monopoly does not help with freedom. The fact, that uninformed developers introduce dependencies to Google products without a second thought, makes them uninformed indirect helpers of a spying company, whose profit is based on profiling people and tracking people online, to show them pesky ads. It exposes us to the whims of a capitalistically motivated tech giant, which does not have our best interest at heart. That is, why we need alternatives. That is why at least initially any alternative based on non-Google things, is a good thing. The fewer people make use of Google (dis)services the better for all of us, because they wont have the same power over our lives.
So the whole "before Google it was better" thing, is actually a "before evil tech giant monopoly" thing.
I have a TomTom PND and I swear by it. It's much better than the navigation systems built into cars (unless they're TomTom, several brands have them built-in).
Also, I refuse to use Google Maps as I am loath to let Google know my travel history. I am, however, somewhat concerned that TomTom uploads my travel history to their servers, since my device has LTE/3G capability. This was used to fetch congestion information and to offer a smarter / faster route, but since I don't have a subscription the service stopped after a free trial period.
If I google "why is it bad for google to track you", I can find a hundred articles breathlessly telling you all the ways google is tracking you, and a hundred more on how to stop it - but none answering the question.
Can someone explain to me why it's a problem? (I make the assumption that even if google doesn't do it, your carrier does, so it doesn't add anything additional to "government's ability to repress/harass".)
It's never problem if it's just about small number of people.
When they track half of humanity, they can see all kinds of patterns that they, and other people can exploit.
Let's turn your question around. If all this information is that useless and harmless why are all corporations and governments spending tens of billions of dollars acquiring and keeping?
Your carrier can not track you nearly as detailed as google can. Your carrier doesn't know which sites you visit (only the IPs) and they especially don't know how long you look at what, what you're buying, etc. Their location tracking is only exact to a few hundred meters whereas google can locate you with very high accuracy.
Personally, I have two reasons to avoid Google and other tech monopolies:
1. I don't want the government to be able to subpoena my data
2. I don't want to be cut off from my digital life just because some employee clicks a button. That means I'm self hosting as much as possible.
Tracking isn’t bad per se. The bad part is that all the information acquired from tracking is used to build an oversimplified profile of each user, that in turn distorts the information that Google searches return for that user.
This often reflects and amplifies societal biases. For example, users that Google identifies as female are less likely to be shown ads for high paying jobs [0]. This creates a feedback loop: if a certain user demographic is less likely to be shown a given result, they are less likely to view it, which in turn makes them even less likely to be shown it in the first place.
If you don't have any problem with your daily itenary beinf tracked, then no explanation will be good enough for you.
Just respect the fact that people don't want their daily activities available to 3rd parties
It is not only you. The more people are OK with this, the higher the danger for other people, who are not OK with this, because data adds up and usually becomes more information than the sum of its parts. Tracking and spying are a danger to people, whose work requires them to not be tracked and found. People like journalists in oppressive regimes. While people run around merily sacrificing their privacy for the reason, that they are uninformed about these issues, they indirectly play into the hands of those, who want to make journalists shut up and disappear.
Privacy is vital for a functioning society. If not for you personally, then for others. By adding yourself to the mass of people, who do not care, you are helping in creating an environment, where privacy is not valued. Seen as something "only a few radicals want". Quickly abolished by governments in the name of "but think of the children!" or "but think of the terrorists!" and similar nonsense.
For me, it's simple. Google is using this data to cement it's monopoly, to extort businesses and to pressure governments.
From your comment, it seems like your main concern is that governments can access your data. But what if beyond&above those governments, there is a single entity that's far more powerful? Would you be willingly hand the data to them? Because that is what Google is. Or is becoming. Or, if you're very sceptical: can easily become.
If Google's tracking data became available to the right people, you can imagine why that would be bad for you if the married FAA official in charge of approving the 737 MAX was tracked to his mistress' apartment.
I wasn't suggesting we'd all be using Google Maps. The point I was making is that TomTom had a large role to play in their own demise. They went for the quick buck, employing dark patterns, necessary device upgrades etc. And yes car manufacturers are guilty of much the same.
A classic monopolist move is to use monopoly power from one business unit (such as rented computers) and offer an unrelated service at well below market rates in another market (perhaps online retail).
The incumbents don't have the crutch of the other business unit and can't price match, and go out of business.
Then the monopolist raises prices and there's no competition and no alternative.
It's fine, though google maps has gotten pretty bad; I'll just switch back to Waze.
This mirrors my experience directly. Before smart phones, I found TomTom to be more user friendly than competitors, but they were slow to boot up, the battery was only useful for providing clean power vs the car electrical system. I tried using my TomTom for walking Navigation. The battery lasted long enough to reach my destination, but luckily I remembered my way back to the parking lot after, because the battery did not make it.
Google Maps on my phone works fine, and on my current Pixel 5A, I can navigate off battery for a three or four hours. Plenty of walking time to hit multiple points in a day of walking.
Maybe some day the TomTom app will be competitive with Google maps, but for now, Google maps is the reference by which all other mapping will be judged.
How do you compete against someone who has a diversified portfolio of products and can let you use one for "free"
How do you compete against "free" from companies that are able to build monopolies with the help of institutions?
It's easy to say "it was shit before google", when innovations weren't available
> When Google Maps became a viable alternative TomTom continued with the same business model, same paid map updates, same shitty bloatware necessary for map updates etc..
Google maps used to work much better, IMHO, in speed and directions. Their insertion of POI and advertisements into the applications and the website slowed down the chrome a lot.
I use TomTom’s API services in conjunction with google maps API because it is way more cost effective.
I use google maps sdk on mobile because generally the data is much better quality for POI than Apple Maps, but doing geocoding is a lot more expensive so that’s where I use TomTom. Seems to work fine for me so far.
The "bad GPS reception" part doesn't reflect my experience. I have had a lot more "GPS signal lost" messages in Google Maps on various Android phones than I ever remember having with dedicated GPS units. I suspect the GPS antennas are bigger in dedicated units as well.
My last TomTom device was from a few years ago and it wasn't that great. Slow, low resolution display and updates took hours to apply.
I now use the TomTom Android app and it's better than any other app or device I have used. Good maps, with clear instructions and great traffic information.
maybe for the consumer google maps could be better, but for a business, using google maps is shooting yourself on the feet. Just take a look to the mapsplatform pricing and start searching for an alternative.
Last year I shelled out 700 Euros for a Garmin Overlander off road navigation unit. I wish I didn't. The hardware is very nice - essentially a rugged Android tablet with a well thought out mounting mechanism.
But the software side ... oh boy. The "Garmin Explore" service this device is intended to work with looks like something from 2004. I mean not a finished product from 2004. But a proof of concept or minimal viable product from 2004. Usability is terrible. Planing trips/routes on the device is torture. Using the web interface isn't much better. (I'd link a screenshot but the service seems to be down ... again lol).
Sync breaks all the time. It's triggered by "bad" filenames for the .gpx files. Some special chars seem to break syncing so bad that the device won't sync at all until you delete the offending file in the cloud - but there's no error message. One day you just wonder why your recent route you planned in the browser isn't on the device. So you go to the sync tab and there's a message like "Last sync: 3_weeks_ago". Have fun fixing this as a normal person. (This bug also comes up when a route has a wrong count of waypoints ... it's not too many waypoints, it seems to be a number between too few and too many). I only figured this out by accident. Garmin support told me to reset the device and make a new account. (Which meant I lost all my tracks).
Now if Garmin did work on the software and provided updates I wouldn't be so salty. But there has been 0 improvements to the software side of things since the device was released like 3 years ago. ZERO. All you get is map updates which are for the street navigation side of things. The "overlanding" part? Forget it. There has been 0 bug fixes, 0 new features, nothing.
I guess you're supposed to buy the new (more expensive) Garmin device that recently came out. As if I would give Garmin one more Euro.
It's not even incompetence. It's maliciousness. They have a line up of wireless cameras (which you mount to your vehicle's bumper, etc). The cams connect via WiFi to the navigation device. Recently Garmin released a new camera - one which I'de find rather useful as it's small and works completely via battery and you can clip to the license plate. So you don't have to wire anything and can take it easily off when you don't need it.
But guess what - not compatible with my 700 Euro Android Tablet that could be made totally compatible via a software update if Garmin just wanted to. If you want to use the new cam: Buy the new 1200 Euro navi model. Oh, btw. some of the the older cameras won't work with the new device ... so you better buy a new set of new cameras.
I hope Garmin goes bankrupt. Sincerely.
/edit: I switched to the Gaia GPS app running on an iPad mini. Waaaay better experience.
You seem to be completely ignoring that TomTom has been available as a mobile app (like Google Maps) for years now which excludes most of your bad experiences? It supports CarPlay / Android Auto integration so it's a seamless replacement for G/Apple Maps in cars if that's what people want to use.
And it works. It works always (even more than GMaps because it's offline first). It's also accurate. And up to date.
I will never forgive TomTom's bait and switch: I bought a lifetime subscription of their app for my iPhone for about $50. After a few years they stopped the service claiming that "lifetime" meant the lifetime of the device.
Me too. They swapped it into a miles based subscription, which I wasn't interested in, saying that the old app couldn't be supported any more, as if they were forced into writing a new app and changing business model. This was on Android, and I did try the new app, which was not good. Been using Google maps ever since, despite it not being anywhere near as good in terms of giving directions at junctions, etc.
Can't speak for the parent but for me it's not the traffic data but the in-car UI. Different apps give different experiences. The HERE maps bundled with my car for example tell me the best lane to be in ahead of time. Not just on the highway but also in the city, which makes it much easier to be in the right lane at the right time.
For as long as the service exists, that's the entire point of a lifetime subscription. Companies need to stop lying about their software services. Don't call it "unlimited" if it's not unlimited or "lifetime" if they pre-programmed it to cut you off after a couple of years
There is also Every Door which i find less annoying. Street complete puts lots of noise on the map. I don't know the answer to my selected questions all the time. Every door lets you fill in whatever you can.
While that is nice, it’s a lot more cluttered. That may be useful when you specifically go out to do mapping, but Street Complete is far easier to do on the side while going somewhere for different reasons.
If you have a problem with specific quest types, you can disable them in the settings.
If you feel like the question / answer should be improved, check the StreetComplete issue tracker for existing issues / discussions and if there isn't any matching, create a new one.
My kids loved using this on long walks in the neighborhood. Until we'd heavily trodden some paths and the only questions were about road surfaces and streetlamps :)
Street lighting is useful though! My partner wanted to go running but when it gets dark early it would be after dark, and there wasn't a good map of which roads are lit. I since filled in the data and OsmAnd can display it (map settings -> details -> street lighting), but it took a while to get stuff filled in and my partner has since stopped running x). It may help other people plan such trips, or tell people where they can feel more safe while walking after nightfall.
The data is virtually nonexistent in most places, at least until StreetComplete started asking for it, but I imagine that many will find it a useful addition if it starts being rendered or used in route calculations now that it's available here and there. (Which then leads to more people seeing the use and contributing that data, which again makes it more useful.) Finding your way in an unfamiliar place in pitch blackness is a lot harder regardless of safety.
I edited something, one month later someone reverted it back without any explanation.
And the UX for discussion is even worse than on Wikipedia, which is saying something. So I have no idea why it was reverted, no idea how to contact the guy and no mood to investigate.
So my street has a wrong name and I am too lazy to change it
Every item on OSM (node, way, relation) is versioned and has a history.
If you can link us to your changes I’m happy to try to help find out why your change was reverted.
Usually that’s only the case for blatant errors, copying from proprietary maps (ehm, Google Maps) or vandalism.
We’re trying to be a friendly bunch, and I’d like to get you back as an editor.
One option you have is to find the changeset that undid your edit and start a discussion with the user in question.
To find the changeset, navigate to the location on openstreetmap.org, right-click, query features, and select the feature in question. The web page should then look like this: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/93668654/
In the left pane click "View history" to see all the changesets affecting that feature. Find the one you want, then click the link next to "Changeset #". The web page should then look like this: https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/104465654
The comment on the changeset might already contain enough information to answer why it undid your edit. If not, the left pane now has a text box for you to add a comment to the discussion. The user in question should receive a notification/email when you comment, and will hopefully engage in the discussion.
If they don't, or are otherwise uncivil, you can contact the local mapper community. Often you can find them on this Discourse forum: https://community.openstreetmap.org/
The local (mostly national) community can often explain why an edit was reverted (if the mapper who did it won't), or mediate with that mapper if they are in the wrong. Just keep in mind that we are all volunteers.
I remember quite a few years ago when I once went into OSM and fixed some streets in Las Vegas by "unbraiding" the intersections, in other words converting intersections with ways that joined at one point to ways that joined in a tic-tac-toe pattern. I believe this was considered best practice at the time in OSM. Well, a few days later, I got a very angry private message from some guy complaining that I edited "his" nicely braided roads and demanding that I revert the edit. I was kind of a newbie at the time so I did what he said and stopped editing for a while.
I've since gotten back into editing here and there, but the initial experience likely prevented me from really getting into OSM and becoming some kind of editing master.
I'd say it's even more important than Wikipedia. Static articles on various subjects may require a bit of effort, but dynamic zoomable maps are not something you can get another way (except for commercial offerings).
That's the Web interface, the real value is in its database. Many applications can make use of that data for maps or for geolocation information or to get all of the railway stations in a city.
TomTom like Here and Garmin are fighting to try to stay relevant in a market that has been seized by Android Auto and CarPlay.
The issue is the car vendors do not want to surrender their navigation and entertainment to Google and Apple as navigation system options at >$1500 and ongoing updates are precious margin and recurring revenue that they all desire.
With Android Auto or CarPlay they give that all up.
They are both dead men walking but like to do a full court press like this every few years to remind us all they still have the lights on.
I don’t think you have read the article. TomTom is changing from navigation device maker, to map maker. They already did that, Apple Maps uses TomTom data for example. There is however a new market that will grow: autonomous driving vehicles. These need more data, and more or less real time if available.
Press releases are always written in a way that makes it as easy as possible for journalists to just, well, basically copy the text and just use it without modifications.
That’s a press release writing best practice. Your goal is to match the journalistic writing style as closely as possible, all the while still transporting all the messages you want to transport. Make it easy for the journalist to be lazy. It has been this way since basically forever because PR writers know that journalists are under a lot of time pressure and often don’t even have the resources to write everything from scratch. So you offer them something that’s hard to resist …
I guess the web has sort of muddied the waters there (with companies being able to publish press releases on their own websites) but the intended target audience of press releases are actually journalists. In the past companies usually had no way of publishing and distributing news about themselves on their own. (And, to be honest, press releases on their own website still aren’t the best publishing platform.)
A lot of "stories" that are released under reporter bylines, are actually verbatim from the corporation or government agency. I wouldn't be surprised if the original text is copyrighted, so people can't play with it too much.
> It‘s about making things as convenient as possible for journalists
I'm not so sure about that being the principal motive. I think it's actually a way to exert control. I remember discussions with our marketing folks. Pretty eye-opening.
"Communication," in corporations, is really about controlling and shaping the message, and building the brand.
You see these coordinated campaigns, all the time. Usually, they are efforts to control the vocabulary (for example, instead of calling camera flashes "flashes," we try to always refer to them as "speedlights," and get everyone else to use the same language).
Also, you have things like entertainers starting to behave badly, just as their albums and movies are coming out, etc. I'll bet that publicists ask entertainers to time things like divorce announcements, with significant market events.
I mean, sure, controlling the message is how you can call it, but that doesn’t mean the legal threats (or threats of any kind) are doing the actual controlling.
When I say “it‘s about making things as convenient as possible for journalists” what I mean by that (and what I thought I had made pretty clear) is not that convenience for the journalist is the ultimate goal.
The ultimate goal is to get the messages about your announcement you want to have published published. The convenience is a stepping stone towards that destination. That way you exert control without force or threats. It’s the carrot.
Which is not to say that threats are absent from corporate communication. Just not as part of press release writing and publishing.
But I wonder if, let's say, a media organization were to publish a "hit piece," based on the text, if you could send a DMCA notice to their hosting provider.
If you want a PR nightmare for yourself, then that’s how you create one.
There is probably more than a century of tradition and expectations around how journalists can work with press releases. Whether companies could sue them for releasing press releases (it‘s in the name!) is in that light mostly theoretical. Because no one would sue.
> These super sources include open-source data (such as OpenStreetMap), probe data, sensor derived observations (SDO) and data from a pool of important partners, which include some of the biggest names in the tech industry.
Great, so they'll suck open street map data, but won't contribute back.
IMO if someone wants to compete against Google Maps, then the Chromium open source strategy ought to work well against them. Many players building on an open source map. Not just roads, but full 3D meshes, building annotations, internal maps of public buildings e.g airports e.t.c
Cruise has started rolling our driverless cars in SF at night. Their strategy is mapping all of SF at centimeter accuracy and having every car have a fresh map as it drives around.
For me, that feels like the future of mapping. A fresh map of the world at centimeter accuracy, then hierarchical layers of abstraction with lesser details.
> The world lacks a truly open and collaborative mapping ecosystem, one that doesn’t follow a one-size-fits-all model but is flexible so that businesses can build according to their needs. One that fosters collaboration, data sharing and open innovation
Damn, somebody should tell them about OpenStreetMap
I guess that product is a prime example for becoming irrelevant by society progressing. I actually still use an old TomTom in my old car that doesn't have a screen (well, it does, but didn't come with a GPS built in - adding it after the fact would have been around 1000£), since I don't have a smart phone. But it has been years since I updated the maps, probably wouldn't even be supported any more?!