I mainly chose JOSM for this tutorial because of its filter. As a beginner (just a few weeks ago), I couldn't figure out how to use iD's filter to show JOSM's equivalent of `name=* ((amenity=* "addr:housenumber"=*) | shop=*) -website=* -"contact:website"=*`. For this tutorial I wanted something better than than "click around the map until you find a place without a website." That felt like it'd be a frustrating and inefficient first experience.
I think your tutorial would have more impact if you had a super short intro making a quick mod using the web page. The existing stuff is excellent for those who get a surge of dopamine from updating the map and want more power and control. The web editor is far from ideal but the app has a greater learning curve. Even installing it can be onerous.
I used the web editor recently to add a street and path and to fix some names. It was about as clunky as the Google Maps web editor which I used for the same updates.
"developer" is a slightly weird way of putting it. osm.org is the contributor portal and demo site for OpenStreetMap, and yes it is not and never has been intended as an end user replacement for Google Maps and similar offerings.
The main purpose of the maps on the site is, besides showcasing some topical uses of OSM data, rapid feedback to contributors, which is something that required specific development so that can be provided with vector tiles too.
The 'late to the game' narrative seems to be a bit misplaced in any case given that OSM data has powered essentially all vector tile use outside of Google over more than a decade.
To answer the question: somebody needs to do the initial work and it's a further moving part that needs to be kept running (as the other responses point out such a distribution would likely use PMTiles as a container format). Given the current finances and staffing of the OSMF likely not top priority.
That's really convenient - I zoomed the map to an area in my town, clicked on a place, and even though popup is just raw data, it let me see which fields hold which values (which I could then feed back into pandas search expressions on the parquet files.) Just little things like "locality" is city/town in the US, and "fsq_category_labels is where I'll find Ice Cream Parlor".
> Foursquare and Overture places are like many geolocation-centric datasets: users aren’t supposed to ever see the raw data, either in a list or on the map. You have to filter by a confidence score. Otherwise, you’ll get tons of user-generated junk – pranks, mistakes, etc.. In the past, Foursquare would charge big bucks for the confidence scores as an upsell. If these scores aren’t part of the dataset, then no wonder the company feels comfortable releasing the data.
As Doctor_Fegg has pointed out further down, the OSMF provided raster tile service on openstreetmap.org is primarily intended to provide fast feedback to contributors and not for general purpose use, in particular not as a competitor to google.
The whole point of OSM is that you can take the data and build / design your own things. Yes it would be nice if there were multiple viable google alternatives based on OSM and other open data, but that is likely just a pipe dream, the economics don't really work.
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