That’s the dumb thing. I’m always willing to concede that you need to make things as smooth and seamless for your users as possible, but let’s get away from this culture of no stakes investment. Let’s work together to buy in.

Sure, but one can argue that data is being exchanged for ads.

Regardless, CoMaps is still a solid offline app that is being worked on. I wish we had a better version of Google or Apple maps without the bloat

It was forked off if Organic Maps because if a difference of philosophy. Organic Maps wanted to add more proprietary components to their app.

I could totally see this happen.

Not in a direct manner, but something about "OSM not living up to Apple's high standards of privacy" or similar strategy.

why would they do that when Google Maps and Waze are already bigger competitors?

If it's missing data (such as locations) that is the issue, then you can update the map yourself and help others migrate at the same time. Every little bit helps, even if you don't plan on fully moving over. I've done over a thousand changes to my local area and it's actually more accurate than Google Maps in a lot of the commercial areas. You don't have to do a thousand things though, like I said, every little bit helps.

Of course, it doesn't help for outside of your area if you only do changes locally, but if enough people were willing to update the map, things could change.

Google does it so much I’ve had trouble finding favorite places because they’d rather show an ad that overlaps it.

I'm still using Google for looking up places but I stopped using it for car navigation because holy shit it sucks ass. Using waze now and it's so much better. No idea of they're FOSS tho

Tried to, but they block some vpn IPs and ne some mail domains, notably mail aliases

Plus they basically stopped replying to me. Are mail aliases really used as spam? I believe it’s a made up thing

And anyways, when contacting them manually, it should be enough to understand that it’s not automated. It would be so easy to spam register using non flagged IPs and non flagged domains but they’re still rigid about these rules. I hate when services do that.

support open data initiatives like OpenStreetMaps

Yes!, continue supporting OpenStreetMaps so Apple, Mapbox, Microsoft, Uber and Lyft can continue turning your free work into millions of dollars.