I feel like mapping for realtime directions for navigation with traffic and a PoI dataset info is a "money sinkhold" infrastructure problem. No one will pay for it especially if its "free" with google/apple.
Its just too difficult to manage _alone_ as an open source or not-for profit project or even a subscription based thing. Though there are nice niche alternatives like alltrails, nothing complete exists IIUC.
A company will have to have a solid adjacent source of income to support such massive projects, analogously to like how rust is paid for by mozilla by money from their other sources(like browser rev sharing). But as a new company, criticially, that rev stream cannot be _easily_ made from people's location data _alone_, not only because of privacy concerns, but because location product market is quite fragmented with 1000's of different products and it would become hard to scale those products to match the revenue stream needed to keep this kind of massive product alive.
I feel that at this point this service is so critical it could be provided as a utility.
Its just too difficult to manage _alone_ as an open source or not-for profit project or even a subscription based thing. Though there are nice niche alternatives like alltrails, nothing complete exists IIUC.
A company will have to have a solid adjacent source of income to support such massive projects, analogously to like how rust is paid for by mozilla by money from their other sources(like browser rev sharing). But as a new company, criticially, that rev stream cannot be _easily_ made from people's location data _alone_, not only because of privacy concerns, but because location product market is quite fragmented with 1000's of different products and it would become hard to scale those products to match the revenue stream needed to keep this kind of massive product alive.
I feel that at this point this service is so critical it could be provided as a utility.