Since the #39c3 in December, every first Sunday of the month has been a "Digital Independence Day" for trying out alternatives to dominant/big tech platforms.
If you're looking to explore alternatives to Google or Apple Maps, why not give CoMaps – or any of the other open source map-applications that are based on data from #OpenStreetMap – a try!
You can learn more about the #DIDay here: https://edri.org/our-work/didit-edri-members-spark-movement-for-alternatives-to-big-tech/
#DIDit
That's going to be extremely expensive for them to host a server (probably multiple all over the world), isn't it? Streaming images would probably not be as bad as video but still quite a lot of bandwidth / CPU usage, no?
(Personally I don't understand why you'd want to do that instead of downloading for offline use but I know I'm weird with not having mobile data anyway, so ...)
I don't "want to do that" but I tried to make the point that many users heavily rely on that. I can work with offline maps, but I'm not above admitting it's a tad more work that, for most, is a real deal breaker
Actually it should be fairly trivial to host this in a peer to peer fashion, in the background. Depending on how much you want cached in your device, you could have in local storage all the maps that cover, lets say, 100Km from your position. Satellite would be more data intensive, but the same concept applies. All data would be distributed, and since most have unlimited data plans, hosting and bandwidth would essentially be free.