alt Hacker News> The sillyness & waste of this is obvious
Until you realise that there is not one true way to show a map, and that different apps may actually have different needs. Suddenly it becomes obvious that not all apps can use the same shared offline data.
Replies
There's no fundamental reason that underlying map data used by a good % of mapping apps, couldn't be stored 1x on-device, in some standard format and shared across apps.
Users could pick & choose what subset(s) of map data they want to store locally. Different apps could pick & choose what features to offer, how to use available data & how to render it.
Sad to see that such a conceptually simple problem hasn't been addressed yet. We're talking a good # of apps here, many millions of users, and enormous amounts of storage & bandwidth wasted.
Edit: I'm assuming that last bit is a problem for the app developers themselves, too.
To further back this up, just because OSM might be a map's data source, it doesn't mean they use the same rendered vectors or images for the tiles.
I make changes to OSM so they can be propagated to a cycling-specific mapping tool I use (it's a commercial tool with their own custom map layers) - it takes about 3-4 weeks from when a change is made on OSM for it to be incorporated into their data set.
So yeah, it's not as simple as "we all use OSM so we'll just share all our rendered mapping values".