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Ask HN: Is building a Google Maps alternative from scratch bad idea?

5•piratesAndSons•15h ago
want to build a Google Maps alternative from scratch. I’ll start with one city, focusing on the downtown area, and then expand from there. I know there are open-source versions available, but I want to build this map for a specific use case.

On a scale of 1 (a stupid idea) to 10 (a great idea), where would this fall?

Comments

stereo•15h ago
What’s your specific use case? I would base it off OpenStreetMap as much as possible - building a whole map and keeping it up to date is a lot of work
roscas•14h ago
I vote for openstreetmap, amazing, you can even update it.

It depends on what he wants to do. Creating something like that from scratch is very hard.

meshugaas•15h ago
If you enjoy building it, 10/10 great idea
DaveZale•12h ago
using GIS?

I looked at getting gis data from my local county. Sent an email and all I got was crickets.

It all depends on where you are at and what's available to tap into, as far as gis is concerned.

I tried to make a tree location map using phone gps meta data a couple of months ago. What a mess, the precision is too low. You can buy precision gps receivers, but they are expensive. It was a great exercise though. Now I know why trail navigation apps fail around closely spaced switchbacks in mountain areas. The gps data is too imprecise.

But maybe you know more than I

piratesAndSons•2h ago
Not only gov data, but also custom map I wrote, have you tried Bluetooth beacons ?

You would be surprised how far you can go if you ignore these expensive APIs and build your custom stuff. People are lazy, if any big corp does something, they immeasurably avoid it and start building their 1000th note taker app.

ahazred8ta•11h ago
There are already dozens. https://gisgeography.com/google-maps-alternatives/ How many millions of dollars do you want to spend on your project before you run out of money?
piratesAndSons•2h ago
Do you think it takes millions to cover one downtown ? I am mot competing with Google maps, my project isn't customer facing product, it is a business to business or gov product, the map will be fine even if we don't cover the world or entire state.
bombcar•9h ago
It’s closer to 1 than to 10 (it took Apple with all their billions something like five years to get their maps usable outside of silly valley).

But if you can use OpenStreetMap as a baseline you may have a chance.

piratesAndSons•2h ago
Remember my map isn't the world or state or even a city, I will start one downtown couple of blocks, and then slowly build outward.

Apple focused the entire world, which is not what I want.

timonoko•7h ago
There is nothing to it. I once made web.py-server that combines maps from two countries. While kayaking. It was too annoying when you had to switch programs to see what is on other side of river. Unfortunately they do follow Google tiles standard anymore.

Originally this program was running on Python For Symbian, which is historic and funny. https://github.com/timonoko/webpy_map_server

Tiles.py seems to be how you decode other systems to the Google-tile system.

piratesAndSons•2h ago
I will use C and C++ only, Python too slow, Rust ( I despise the community), JS is poorly designed bloated mess, Java way too verbose, Swift is for Apple only which is limiting, I wanted to use objC but I heard Apple is gonna dump it soon.

C and C++ is the only viable languages here since this project is all about graphics.

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