It's obvioulsy expensive in terms of ops + dev, but also just to host.

It can't scale with only 0,0001 % of users donating to the app.

Fortunately, NLNet's there to fund work, but it's still nonethless only a tenth of what would be needed.

Plus map applications and general search engines don't talk to each other... I don't know why, but it is so. Maybe because all the well-known search engines are closed-source ?

Local search will always be slow and bad.

But server search doesn't need that much. It's just that OS initiatives are severely understaffed. OS apps that have a Photon instance are already rare to find. Let's not talk about having an Overpass instance...

What is very hard to reproduce is Google's place review data.

It's golden to enable good search.

We've not seen anything from their side. We don't really understand why they wouldn't want a proper Web version.

It's even worse in the non-open source world : Kagi's maps are bad. Qwant dropped their cool map project, too expensive. Ecosia has none, redirects to Google, its main competitor.

They could "just" clone cartes.app and run `bun i && bun start` and `ansible-playbook` to launch their instance of cartes.app, but we can't reach them. Or fund the project.

What's important though is that we collaborate on the tools we all use. OSM, MapLibre, Photon, Pelias, Protomaps, Motis, Brouter, etc. are all tools that we somehow share, each end-user app having their own combination of them.

We also thought like you do when outside of this world. But now, its a human problem. How to reach people and how to gain the time that it would take to collaborate ? We don't have the keys.

I'm not saying ego problems don't exist of course. But taking Osmand and making a simple general public app out of this is a huge effort (human and tech), probably more than building a side app.

Past similar HN submission got no attention, whereas the UK's top page. Interesting !

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45249351

Maps are so often done as native apps that to my knowledge no one tried to just use the PWA capabilities to cache tiles on the Web. Of course what's hard is cache invalidation. Does the user want to update the tiles ? Never ? Daily, weekly ? Only some regions ? Or manually ?

Here's an issue about that : https://codeberg.org/cartes/web/issues/1078

It's in French, unfortunately Codeberg has no auto-translate capabilities yet.

We're this on https://cartes.app, trying to push the Web further (even on mobile devices) so that you don't even need an app for most use cases.

I'm working on https://cartes.app and we're well aware that search is not on par, far from it. But we have hundreds of other features and bugs to fix. https://codeberg.org/cartes/web

The mobile sheet maybe ? This one is hard : there is no good Web mobile sheet available yet...

Far less difficult as coding for an old OS obviously, but still a challenge !

The Web has plenty of potential, but constraints too, mostly because of dominant actors, such as Apple that hid the PWA install button... Or Firefox not having any install banner, whereas chrome does.

Can't post it yet as a proper subject, it can't handle top page load.