I would love to have an iPad app to map with. I've actually just come back from a Mapzen POI Collector mapping trip around a town that could have really used an iPad to add some roads and other features. But from CloudMade (or Mapquest's) perspective its tough to justify the cost of developing an iPad app. Mapzen POI Collector only has 7k downloads and a few hundred users each month - so the market size for iPhone apps like this is limited. Sure, make the UX 10x better and there could be thousands of users a month, but its still a limited number of contributos for the effort put in. Compare that to the 2.5M Foursquare users or the 60M Farmville (10% of the total number of Facebook users) users and the number is tiny. Then consider that there are something like 11M iPhones and only 3M iPads in the US with even lower iPad penetration in other places, and the market is even more limited.
A possible answer is HTML5 apps - that's what we're looking into at CloudMade at the moment. An HTML5 POI collector, for example would let users on iPhone, Android and iPad and other tablets join in the party. (There are now 8M android phones in the US) It could even be packaged into an app on app stores to make it discoverable. The apps should be focused on doing one or two things well. Does the world need another fully featured editor? IMO, no. It needs a suite of tools that each make it deadly simple to do a couple of things. So the feature set is going to get even more limited ;-) The next problem though is the terrible conversion rates that we see from download to active mapper (see http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2010-August/052476.html). This is caused partially by some poor design decision on our part at CloudMade, but primarily by the constraints of the current OAuth system as discussed in the thread I referenced. Unless we fix the problems with the OAuth sign-in / sign-up process the number of new mappers and tools like this could attract will be severely limited. Like I said last time - I'm keen to find a solution to this problem :-) -- Nick n...@cloudmade.com On Sat, Aug 21, 2010 at 2:13 PM, Dave F. <dave...@madasafish.com> wrote: > On 21/08/2010 12:51, Martijn van Exel wrote: > > I concur. A huge opportunity for attracting casual mappers if done right. > KISS my OSM or something. Simplicity is the key. Integrated account > creation, oauth, abstraction from the map features complexity. No mobile > JOSM (in spite of its infinite awesomeness - but think fitness for purpose). > I think a chunk of that fresh round of Cloudmade / Mapquest $$$ would be > well spent on a well thought out app. I mean, testing usability with focus > groups and all that, that just takes some concentrated effort. > > Martijn > > Sent from my iPad > > Aren't Android devices out selling iThingys? > > Wouldn't it be better investing into a growing market rather than a stagnant > one? > > Dave F. > > _______________________________________________ > talk mailing list > talk@openstreetmap.org > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk > > -- -- Nick Black twitter.com/nick_b _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
