Linux

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

Contributed a very little. Been using it ina Top metro city for .ore than a year. Heavily reliable.

I'll sometimes contribute when I'm travelling to more rural areas which are less likely to be well mapped. The experience in my country has been that cities are very well mapped on OpenStreetMaps with a lot of detail, often having more up to date information than Google Maps. Less populated areas usually don't have as much detail, but the basics, like roads and buildings are usually well mapped.

I've also noticed OpenStreetMaps is awesome for trails and smaller roads used by hikers, usually being much more useful than Google Maps.

I have, using OSMAnd on iOS. Here in Puerto Rico there are quite a good amount of map details already.

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.

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?

Just have faith. We'll get there eventually 🙏

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 have added some nearby forest paths to OSM and added some bicycle paths alongside roads which were already mapped, using OSM mostly for outside of road network since other maps do not show forest paths and the like at all while OSM has decent coverage

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

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

Yes. It is the most up to date map in my area, in point of fact, other maps copy their data from osm for my area.

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.

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.

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