I believe they have used OSM for a long time yes (over a decade at least), not exactly a secret.

[dead]

It’s incredible just how quickly Google and Apple folded to the will of their country’s king renaming stuff.

Mapquest is reliable for you in CarPlay? I tried it out after the Lake Ontario incident, and it was hanging and crashing left and right.

I tried adopting it but at the time (a month and a half ago) it was too slow with the directions updates.

What no? It's pandering. Pandering of course works, that's why it's done. But just because you're the one being pandered to, doesn't mean it's not pandering.

> The Lake Ontario naming situation pushed me to using them

I hate the name change too but it did go through official channels, so what else is a map provider supposed to do? Should they have also refused to rename Mt. McKinley to Denali? I mean, I'd actually be proud to see an overtly partisan declaration that they won't honor a single name change from this administration, but that's a much different matter than taking it case by case. I suspect the real reason the rename hasn't happened is that MapQuest's software simply isn't capable of doing it gracefully.

Also, hope you have a good adblocker when you use MQ. They are owned by bottom feeders of a sort that makes Bending Spoons look like the FSF.

The full export of OSM is about 2TB but the US is only around 100GB even if you go to insane levels. It's disproportionately large because there are a hell of a lot of OSM-ers in the US ;-)

Anyway what we should do is keep a few clean snapshots of the US as a backup, on hosting safely outside the US - or US-owned companies.

Would you pay for it or how else do you suppose they could make money?

I’d say the majority of their users are probably older. People who started using it based on familiarity from when they first used it a decade ago (or more). I do know my in-laws refuse to use Google/Apple Maps, because it’s “what they know”.

I used their API for several years for a project to get reverse geocoding to turn city names into lat/lon pairs and vice versa.

Like Mapbox, I assume they have a profitable business selling their mapping services to other companies.

Unfortunately, most liberals are addicted to electing center-right Democrats. I'm looking at you San Francisco.

[flagged]

Providing a service your customers want is political pandering now?

You are using Meta glasses and worrying about surveillance? I don’t want to be mean, but if you run around with one of those, I would want to be alerted of _your_ presence..