Every phone using the app can contribute to your map data. If you combine magnetic data plus wifi data plus user behavior data, I expect you'd be able to continue to provide good 3D data to users.
I'd bet the hard part is getting building owners to update things regularly. Who's going to remember to change the map when the grocery store moves the cereal from aisle 2 to aisle 7?
I get a popup/notification once a month or so, when on wifi. It just asks if I want an update. There are settings to automatically update offline maps and one to control the automatic downloading of offline maps.
Seems pretty reasonable to me, after all roads do change over time.
My main motivation is to make nav less bandwidth intensive (I pay per GB with Google FI) and to ensure I have maps even if I don't have a good data connection.
I love OrganicMaps but lacks in certain situations.
When I want to be able to zoom into any and all of my bookmarks, I have to keep the map data of all countries I've ever been visiting. Thats tens and tens of GB of data on a mobile phone.
And everytime there are maps updates I have to redownload all of it. Tens and tens of GB of data.
When you're traveling and forgot to DL everythibg beforehand and have to use some WIFI hotspot you might not be able to get your maps downloaded. Happened to me multiple times.
I am surprised that that don't have an offline version for the maps. The location of the charge station does not change that often, operational status might, but few hours stale data should still be sufficient to navigate.
Map data will certainly be updated constantly, not even requiring an update to the app. Any time there's a road closure or the map changes in some way, it needs to be reflected live. So I wouldn't be surprised if other aspects of the map are updated server-side as well.
Hardly an impossible feature to add to a mapping product tho? We are basically talking downloading the map tiles to the device you want to browse from.
They would probably provide caching, which is what the current map application does. Hopefully they will let you pre-cache areas, such as you can do in Android, but I doubt it. Anyway, no point speculating too much.
Now that is a feature. I'd happily download my home town and run it offline always. Waiting for 3g cell reception to get the map to see where you're to go next is very tedious.
>magnetic data plus wifi data plus user behavior data
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