Finding a BifL smartphone

@[email protected] · edit-2 1 month ago

Finding a BifL smartphone

@solrize · edit-2 2 months ago

I’m not sure what you mean about “alternative process” for updates. In the chart you posted, the US got 466227 updates in 1 day which is about 14 million per month if that happens every day. If they are 100 bytes each (no idea if that is realistic), that’s 1.4GB a month for the whole US. Right now a new map download is something like 1.1GB for California alone. California is the biggest US state (not in terms of land area but certainly in terms of roads) but the whole US might be 10x or 20x bigger.

I’d say OM is less in need of new features than of getting its existing features working solidly, warts ironed out, etc. The one major feature improvement i could see is getting the voice directions to include street names, but in practice it’s not that important, at least in my usage.

Google Maps has a sometimes useful feature that an offline app like OM can’t possibly get, which is routing and ETA calculations based on realtime road and traffic conditions. I don’t rely on that very often, but on occasion, it really helps. Unfortunately I suspect that much of the traffic data comes from the devices themselves phoning home with their locations, and only Google and Apple have enough devices out there to usefully do that.

@[email protected] · 1 month ago

I’m not sure what you mean about “alternative process” for updates. In the chart you posted, the US got 466227 updates in 1 day which is about 14 million per month if that happens every day. If they are 100 bytes each (no idea if that is realistic), that’s 1.4GB a month for the whole US. Right now a new map download is something like 1.1GB for California alone. California is the biggest US state (not in terms of land area but certainly in terms of roads) but the whole US might be 10x or 20x bigger.

Sorry, I’m not sure what you mean by that.

I’d say OM is less in need of new features than of getting its existing features working solidly, warts ironed out, etc. The one major feature improvement i could see is getting the voice directions to include street names, but in practice it’s not that important, at least in my usage.

Fair enough

Google Maps has a sometimes useful feature that an offline app like OM can’t possibly get, which is routing and ETA calculations based on realtime road and traffic conditions. I don’t rely on that very often, but on occasion, it really helps. Unfortunately I suspect that much of the traffic data comes from the devices themselves phoning home with their locations, and only Google and Apple have enough devices out there to usefully do that.

Yes, that’s exactly how it works. I get tracked enough without adding my location data, so however useful it is, I can live without it.

@solrize · 1 month ago

About the update stuff, I just meant I calculated a possible size of differential updates. I think it would be enough to just have a setting saying which map segments I want to bother updating at all, or anyway to keep the POI’s updated. POI’s in my local area, sure, I’d keep those updated. But I’d like to have large scale maps (all of California, or the whole US) for the purpose of routing long trips, and don’t care much about the POI’s.

I figure my phone is being tracked merely by being on the carrier network. In principle I could leave it in airplane mode but that stops incoming messages and stuff. So I try to use Google Maps sparingly but I so far don’t claim to 100% avoid it.