- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
You must log in or register to comment.
Surely it’s only “Gulf of America” from the southern tip of Florida across to the Mexican border?
Time for a repeat comment: Organic Maps does everything Google Maps does (except traffic conditions), and is FOSS. Please encourage places to contribute business information to Open Street Maps.
“Except traffic” is not a little thing. It’s like putting up an ad for a house with all the features you’d expect, except a roof.
With my daily commute, there are a dozen routes I can take and traffic conditions make it so that from day to day, there can be an hour difference between different routes. It’s literally the only reason I use navigation apps over a cheap GPS unit with no live online connection requirement to navigate.
Traffic condition can only be provided if you track millions of phones. I don’t want that, so I opt out. I don’t want Google to manage traffic for me.
Or you can do it like News stations do and just use a fucking camera feed and police acanner to have someone say “hey - there’s a lot of cars at Interstate 99 and Main” or “There’s reports of a wreck at 300 Elm street”.
Traffic reporting doesn’t require device-level tracking.
to have someone
In order to do this at scale, that’s a lot of someones who all need to be paid. You’d need several people, per city, to manually review traffic cameras and manually issue reports.
Unless you want to pay $200/mo for traffic updates, you can’t do this using humans.
Growing up, we had 5 TV stations and 20 radio stations that managed to do it just off of cereal advertisements. I’d gladly pay 5 bucks a month for it, and with millions of people in the metro area just having 1% of people use a $5/month service you’d be looking at 6 figures a month, which is plenty to pay for the service.
The only way to know if it would work would be to roll the dice and make a startup. You’ll need enough cash to cover a year or two of projected operations, the capital to develop the application and infrastructure in addition to the money required to advertise the service.
At the same time you have to realize that your proposition for potential customers is ‘You can pay us $5 to get the service that Google gives you for free and it only works in this one metro area.’ De-googling is a popular topic on nerd social media but the average person would gladly trade all of their privacy to pay less money.
If we could magic wand a company into existence and capture all of the privacy focused customer base in a large metro area then yeah, the company could pay the operating expenses. But going from ‘This is a cool idea’ to ‘We have a successful service that has a positive cash flow’ is a hard, capital intensive, process.
I think this is important. That said, traffic info is the whole ballgame for many people. People who live, work, and drive in metro areas frequently use map applications even when driving everyday routes to avoid traffic.
I don’t see Google/Waze/Apple maps getting any less popular unless there is a FOSS alternative that includes live traffic, which does not seem possible while remaining free. People will choose free every time, especially since Google maps works so well.
Personally, I would pay some amount for a privacy-minded alternative, something like OrganicMaps with live traffic. But I doubt it could ever attain the user base it would need to provide accurate traffic info.
Yea, I really wish I had more spare time. Algorithms like this are an area of expertise for me, and I’d love to build an anonymized service that works with Organic Maps. It’s annoying when I know it is something I could make that would support high volume, but just don’t have time for (mainly because of all the ongoing optimization it would require).
Talking about FOSS; I prefer OsmAnd because its licence is GPLv3, as opposed to the Apache 2 licence from Organic Maps.
Yup, big OsmAnd fan, too. We use it for backpacking and biking, but have found OM to be more driver friendly, which is why I recommended it here.
Organic Maps:
Organic Maps is really cool :-)
Yeah, it’s even better than GMaps for me, because GMaps doesn’t have bike navigation (where I live) while Organic Maps has all the bike lanes marked and navigatable.
Yeah it’s way better for biking and walking. I also find the map a lot more coherent, with GMaps I often had to resort to the satellite view to see what’s going on.
Organic maps updates its dataset once a month or so. It will eventually be updated to the gulf of America, as it is now, technically named the gullf of America in America. See discussion here: https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/gulf-of-america-gulf-of-mexico/124571
In Taiwan it says:
Gulf of Mexico(Gulf of America)
Same for me in Australia
Same here in Canada, though I get the American version with an American VPN.
Same for me in the US!
Yes, Tim Apple bent the knee, but the company seems to be holding steadfast.
this is only effective in the US btw, this doesn’t apply outside of the US, why google has done this? Probably the appease trump, and honestly, anything that keeps trump busy that isn’t overthrowing the US government is good in my books.
I just need to use Gemini until this semester is over, then I’ll be degoogling completely. I just wish I could deapple too, but nope. Nearly every OS for mobile is built on android, browsers that are for “security” are run on chromium, safari is good for security but you have to pay for iCloud plus or whatever they call it to get the private relay option, it is infuriating that we just can’t get freedom from this garbage. Things are purposefully made to be so expensive that only huge companies can afford to run it, openAI and meta literally pirated books, articles, journals, etc and although WE don’t like it, the government doesn’t care because OpenAI and meta are big companies who can do those things; neither Trump nor Biden gave a shit about it. We need
Even in the UK they have put Gulf of America.
The UK Government doesn’t recognize that name and have officially stated they wont
Lmfao, as if Keith would dare stand up to a mega corporation, or a fascist for that matter… I give it a week, at absolute most.
I live in the US and I won’t recognize the name either.
…what name?..
Trump signed an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. Executive orders aren’t laws, they’re just memos stating what the federal government will do. Google decided to bend the knee for the new king.
For U.S. Google Map users only, the body of water formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico will now appear as the Gulf of America when using the navigational service.
The change comes just several weeks after President Donald Trump signed an executive order for the gulf to be renamed and on Sunday declared February 9 was officially Gulf of America Day.
Following the order, Google stated that it has a longstanding practice of implementing name changes when done by official government sources.
UK should sue them…
It’s the same in every language, or at least in russian and french.
Everyone should report it as bug.
Australia google maps user here:
🙃
Look at this, even Australia is laughing at us from the other side of the globe!
This move makes zero sense to me. Why, change it? It’s not it’s official name or international recognized name so wtf
Then you must not be paying much attention, or have an understanding of how capitalism functions (nor of how and why it inevitably decays in to fascism).
Curry favor with the trump admin
And it will undoubtedly pay off for them. This is the first brazenly tech oligarchy-driven administration.
Remember who was at Trump’s inauguration? Musk, obviously, but also:
- Tim Cook, CEO of Apple
- Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon
- Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta
- Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet
.
Trump, a populist president, is flanked by tech billionaires at his inaugurationTim Apple isn’t your friend, either. No oligarch is.
I was hoping Apple wouldn’t be there considering Tim is openly gay
He donated to Trump right from his pockets. He’s a traitor.
And clarence thomas is black.
Openly gay, but secretly a billionaire.
To be clear, they’ve changed names in line with official government policy before, not just for Trump’s admin.
Yeah but that makes too much sense for emotional & reactional people that don’t rely on logic
They are a private organization with the right to say “lol that’s nice”, and leave it as the gulf of mexico. Executive orders direct government policy.
I get what you’re saying, but the renaming itself is entirely an act of emotion and reaction, with no trace of logic, too. It’s pretty much all we should expect to see from anyone for a while.
If something as ridiculous currys favor and infkuence with Trump the USA is truly coming to an end.
I’ll remind you of freedom fries.
It’s not coming to an end as in no longer existing, but it absolutely is as a world power. Maybe it will be for the better in the long run.
Distraction from:
- closing down the Consumer Protection Agency, USAID, and the Education Agency
- cutting off funding to the universities
- stealing our student, treasury and health records while taking over the purse
- not following federal judge’s orders
- building an unregulated concentration camp in Cuba
- etc.
Edit: That’s why trump did it. All tech companies are in his hands now.
No, there are no smokescreens. Trump is literally this stupid. Don’t attribute to maliciousness what can be attributed to narcissism.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to post this somewhere else:
“The opposition party is the media,” Steve Bannon, who helped run Trump’s 2016 campaign, told PBS Frontline five years ago. “And the media can only — because they’re dumb and they’re lazy — they can only focus on one thing at a time.”
So the solution, per Bannon? Overwhelm them.
“All we have to do is flood the zone,” he said. “Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/07/nx-s1-5289315/trump-week-in-review
I think I heard that Trump did it because he thinks it gets him around some Biden era rule that he can’t reverse that bans oil drilling in parts of the “Gulf of Mexico.” It’s really stupid. Exxon and Chevron have both “acknowledged” the name change.
Oh that makes sense. Like when muskrat tried to get out of Twitter suis because the name changed.
pleasing the power, so they remove any law that protect our privacy against google prying eye
The USA is now part of a list of “sensitive countries” with authoritarian states with their own version of reality. When users in one of the countries on this list visit Google sites, they see that government’s version of reality. This is nothing new. Google does it all the time with disputed territories. It’s only news because it’s the first time the US has an authoritarian government.
Here’s how it looks when visiting from a Mexican device with the language set to Australian English while located in Hungary.
Edit: undoxxed myself lol
…looks pretty much the same on bing maps, except they’re so committed that they named it twice…
In Google maps set to Polish while in the UK, it shows
Zatoka Meksykańska (Zatoka Amerykańska)
Which translates to
Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)
Google maps set to Danish in Denmark is the exact same 🤦♂️
Should look up what they want to rename Greenland
SMH… Red, White and Blue-land…
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1161
It could be simply because they can do it, peasant
Thayana good point. I need to remember my place in this world 🤣
Using the website from outside of the US shows it with its proper name, but then the asshat version in parentheses.
Same in the US when you zoom out.
Might be caching though, those tiles are probably cached.
I have no use for a map service that isn’t sure about the names of places.
Yeah, same here in Australia.
No better time than the present to switch to OpenStreetMap
For Android, I use OsmAnd~ which uses OpenStreetMap data and allows you to download maps to calculate routes offline, something Google Maps couldn’t do for routes by foot and by bike last time I tried.
It also has better coverage for some small paths in natural areas like forests. Give it a try!
The OsmAnd~ app, from fdroid, is the premium (and paid) version og OsmAnd, also known as OsmAnd+.
If you use the fdroid version, and enjoy the app, consider donating to the developers through other means.
In OSM ″Gulf of America″ is added under official_name:en-US tag so if any app uses this tag to display names, it will show up.
Here is the link to OSM object for Gulf of Mexico. And here is a thread that discusses naming.
Any country/language can call any object as they want. This change of course was dumb and petty and doubt it will be adopted by other regions, but this is nothing new or special. Google Maps currently show ″Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)″ for me. When checking in another language it shows same naming standard.
OsmAnd is a nightmare in terms of user experience! I dropped it 8 years ago because it was a horror. I gave it a try again last month because, you know, maybe people have done something about the useless navigation, the totally overpacked UI, the sluggish behaviour etc. Guess what? It’s the same terrible (!) app it was 8 years ago!
FCK Google, but if that’s all that there is as an alternative, well…
I use Magic Earth. It’s not Open Source afaik but they claim they dont collect data (…🤔). I don’t believe this so use these apps as little as possible.
Greetings, an open source enthousiast
Agree with you, OsmAnd is practically unusable for me due to the ancient UI. I hated it every time I used it.
I found Organic Maps to be a decent modern alternative. It’s open source and uses data from openstreetmaps as well, but it’s a million times less cluttered.
Is using alternative maps even worth it if you have google’s Android and location has to go through google play services anyways?
It won’t prevent Google from tracking your location, but it might help support these alternative maps by increasing their popularity on the PlayStore and whatnot.
You’re all welcome in [email protected] to discuss antying OSM-related.
The namechange of the Gulf has been discussed on our forum; how to deal with this has been decided in consensus.
And, obligated self-promo: if you want to start contributing to OSM, you can try https://mapcomplete.org/ (which is someting else then the StreetComplete app, but that one is nice too!)
👍 💯 💯 OsmAnd FTW
I’ve been using it and evangelizing it for some time now. I don’t have a data plan and it works. My data, location, preferences or anything is not sold to anyone.
It can be a little overwhelming at first. It can be difficult to use at times (the search isn’t great), but in using it, I feel like I’m a part of something good and I can rest better knowing that.
This is pathetic and reeks of insecurity big time. Hope that this debacle improves your QoL, Americans.
American here. It’s freaking embarrassing. Not as much as all the other shit, and certainly not as sad and tragic. Our neighbors elected a cartoon villain and his best buddy, another cartoon villain.
What’s funny is the rest of the world gets “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)” which ups the insecurity I expect.
Eh I’m on the opposite side, despite being a massive lefty. Why would an american company not follow an American dictate just for America? (It’s still called the Gulf of Mexico on Google in every other country) It sets a wild precedent where private businesses refuse to follow the fairly inconsequential requests of their government.
“I’m such a massive lefty, I see no issue with a mega corporation bending the knee to a fascist regime and helping them virtually take over territory that isn’t theirs” 🙄
(also no, it isn’t only showing in the states, and this being an expected part of capitalism doesn’t make it any less of a problem to be taken seriously)
Seems like all the high-visibility, internet-focused corporations are rushing forward to bend the knee.
I guess it would be pretty interesting to see one of them do the opposite. As in, how easily and quickly would the exec and other branches be able to attack them, maybe even to destroy them?
reeks of insecurity big time.
No, it’s literally the opposite, it’s a display of power and support for an openly fascist regime they KNOW will benefit them financially.
It’s the epitome of capitalism, and precisely why said capitalism will always decay in to fascism.
ecosia all the way
