I live in an area that was next to perfect when I first learned about OSM, so I had no real reason to contribute. I have seen their maps used by our public transport to show the way to/from stops (or even inside them on the particularly large ones).

This just reminded me that I can in fact contribute and I will check out the iOS options for doing so.

There used to be a mobile game that would have you go around and complete tasks to fill out the map (still might be idk). That's pretty much what google did with ingress

I've used their map layers for a public data website. Worked great.

I do a lot, we also use the OpenStreetMap data for my work. I enjoy it but it's definitely lacking in some areas, and there's no app that really comes close to being a Google Maps replacement sadly.

I think I used to wardrive around and add open wifi hotspots to that system when I was like 18/19. I had Linux on a laptop and had gotten a crazy wifi antenna and a USB GPS module (along with some less than legal software to crack WEP encryption) and would drive around in my van looking for routers I could hop onto and map which ones worked and had internet.

I'm not sure what map software I was using though. It was some open source thing, and the name sounds really familiar.

I’ve contributed a lot of places around the country–though mostly missing cafés & restaurants because that’s what I’m interested in.

Omg great idea! Probably a stupid question but how did you contribute - through an app or from desktop, through the website?

Awesome, thanks for the post! I've been aware of OSM for a long time, but haven't thought about it in a while. After a couple of good app recommendations from the comments, I am surprised how far it's come. Definitely going to start using/contributing as much as I can.

I love the idea of OSM, been trying to use MagicEarth on iPhone which leverages OSM, but I run into similar issues that your describe. I’ll be honest tho, I never even thought of trying to contribute, may look into it as a little hobby in my free time.

It's a cool project, but I've used it, and man is it not going to be a replacement for Google Maps anytime soon, as much as I'd like to get to a FOSS alternative. I can't use it to navigate to a building down the street lol

It's not dumb to contribute though because it's already okay, so it can only get better than okay, and the way that happens is contributions

We update it a lot. We also have a product (for walkers in the British Isles) called WayMaps (used by a variety of walking web sites in the UK and also our own demo site https://waymaps.the-hug.net/) which uses the geodata from OSM and other Open Data to produce our own map tiles. We love OSM.

I'm honestly very confused by OSM. I always wanted to use it as an alternative to Google Maps, but it's so hard to use.

Anyone got some tips or good ressources to share?

I've not contributed to the main one, but I have for the humanitarian osm team, you get recently disaster stricken areas and copy roads and buildings and the like

Just have faith. We'll get there eventually 🙏

Contribute! The info will bubble up into there other products as they all supplement and enrich their data from OSM if applicable.

I rarely use any maps, but OpenStreetMap is used by Rate Your Music to show where artists you've rated at least once came from.