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I'm constructing a Geo Location mobile app and I'm now at the crossroads of which API to integrate it with. I guess the two biggies are Google Maps and Open Street Maps. I hear Google will start charging for their API in the fall and I'm not sure my app will be profitable by then, so I've decided to go with Open Street Maps.

The only thing I'm wondering is if Open Street Maps is reliable enough for prime time. I've tried some queries, and to be honest it couldn't find a couple of locations here in Georgia. I've never had a problem with Google Maps. Has anybody that has been using Open Street Maps had any problem with it's reliability? I'm building an IOS app and as you know, IOS doesn't have a geocoder that can tell you latitude and longitude by address, so that's why I have to look at other alternatives. My backend will be PHP making calls to mapquest's nominatim implementation (no query limits) via CURL if it's any consolation.

John Bowlinger
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  • If you are not tied to iOS 4.x, iOS 5.0 introduced a new API for geocoding. Now it supports both forward and reverse geocoding – Francesco Jun 05 '12 at 07:56
  • After a week of trying to wrangle Google Maps and OpenStreet Maps into my IOS code, I don't know whether to scream at my computer monitor or say thank you. So I'm doing both. Thank you. – John Bowlinger Jun 05 '12 at 21:07

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There is a conceptual difference between Google Maps and Open Street Maps. The former is a commercial product (even if at the moment is free) that provides you access to its features with clean, mature APIs (geocoding, map tiles, even client-side APIs). However you can not do with it everything you might need, for example you can not change map colors, or have only restaurants drawn, etc.

Open Street Maps is not a product, better a huge, open geographic database. You can query all information from it as you like in the forms of polygons, points, areas. But then you will have to draw the map yourself. You can do this on client side (if you have enough CPU) or at server side and download only the map tiles as images. Exactly this is what MapQuest does for you: it renders the map from the Open Street Maps DB and gives you access to the tiles. Subsidiary services like geolocation is also available around Open Street Maps but it is not strictly connected to it and you can use some other more specific services (for example there is a very good database that contains all mountain peaks of the Earth).

As of my experience, Open Street Maps DB contains quantitatively more and more refined information then Google Maps and it might be up to you how many and which kind of information would you draw on your map tiles (if you don't use rendering services). Anyway, you have much more flexibility for the price of more work.

MrTJ
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