Maps/Navigation Service

Thoughts on Purism offering a mapping/navigation service as part of their Librem One offering?

It seems like the only major SaaS offering where there simply is no adequate replacement for Big Tech. Between OpenStreetMaps, Mapbox and Graph Hopper it seems like almost all of the necessary building blocks are in place to make this achievable for a company of Purisms size without needing to build from scratch.

Efforts like PureMaps, Gnome Maps and Qwant maps already attempt to do this to some extent but none of them have navigation “solved” to anywhere near the same extent as Google maps (investment here through a subscription fee would likely be a big value add). Most importantly none of those run cross platform, by which I mean at minimum a consistent UI/interface that is accessible on the Web, as a Linux desktop & mobile App and (ideally) as an Android app.

As far as I know no open source/privacy friendly service meets that criteria. I’d happily pay a Librem One subscription fee for such a service.

You mean purism to include smth like OSM ScoutServer into librem1 package? I think it would make more sense to run it right on the phone (no privacy leak)

That might be the way to go. Running it directly on the phone is probably the best option but I think having a hosted version available online would be pretty essential to get any kind of user traction.

The big thing I’d be hoping for is for this to become a serious competitor to Google Maps. It’s the only big tech SaaS I honestly can’t recommend an alternative for, for the average user yet.