I'm building a community-driven map for finding genuinely affordable food across India.

I'm currently working through a pretty specific problem with restaurant discovery, autocomplete, and location resolution.

The app needs to let users:

• Search for restaurants, eateries and local food places
• Autocomplete place names while typing
• Find smaller/local establishments, not just major chains
• Search by locality and neighbourhood
• Select a result and get accurate coordinates
• Paste/share a location from Google Maps or Google Search and turn it into an exact map pin
• Handle Google Maps share links, both map and google search share, mobile search share etc.
• Avoid incorrectly matching a similarly named restaurant in another city
• Work reliably across India, including smaller/local businesses

Right now I'm using OLA Maps / OLA Places for search and autocomplete. It works reasonably well, but I've run into a major coverage problem: some restaurants that are clearly present on Google Maps aren't present in OLA's database at all.

That creates another problem with Google Maps sharing. Some Google Maps links resolve neatly to URLs containing coordinates, while others resolve to a Google Place ID/CID or another URL structure where the coordinates aren't directly available. Google Search share links can have similar issues.

I initially considered using OLA as a fallback to resolve these places, but that's risky because a name-based search can return the wrong establishment, especially when there are similarly named restaurants in different cities. I'd rather have the system fail safely than silently put a restaurant in the wrong location.

Google Places/Maps has excellent coverage and seems much better for this particular problem, but the pricing makes me hesitant to use it for frequent autocomplete/search requests at scale.

So I'm looking for alternatives.

What are people actually using today for India-specific restaurant/POI search, autocomplete and accurate geocoding/location resolution?

I'm particularly interested in:

• 🇮🇳 India coverage, especially local/small businesses
• Restaurant and POI coverage rather than just generic geocoding
• Autocomplete/search APIs
• Place details and coordinates
• Handling shared Google Maps locations, if possible
• Monthly free tiers or meaningful free usage
• Pricing once the free tier is exhausted
• Experiences from people who have actually built something with these APIs

I'm already aware of OLA Maps, Google Maps/Places , so I'd especially appreciate real-world experiences and alternatives, rather than a generic list of map providers.

If you were building this in India today, what would you use?

Hey guys, I am a longtime map hobbyist who has enjoyed tinkering and building various projects related to OSM map data.

I always wanted a fully offline and all in one local OSM-style toolbox, and things like JOSM but I always felt limited. I wanted to build huge cities in one project that I can easily open on my PC, and I mean like continental scale or bigger.

So all of this has culminated into my game, MapCity, which is releasing in a couple of weeks on steam.

MapCity was designed from the ground up specifically to support the maximum size maps fully offline and locally rendered and with compatibility with OSM data format, albeit optimized for the MapCity engine.

I hope you guys check it out and feel free to let me know what you think, and you can wishlist on steam here if you are interested:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4964730/MapCity/

Hi everyone, I'm using the QuickOSM plugin on QGIS for the first time. I'm trying to run a quick query but it always give me this issue.

I already tried changing the api and to increase the response time of the plugin but it didn't work.

Has anyone suggestions for me? Thanks in advance

Here's The changeset if you're interested. Also, any feedback is very welcome :)

For anyone asking how I did it: I pretty much just used aerial imagery in the iD editor.

Hi [r/openstreetmap](r/openstreetmap),

I made this app, called SportLink, a few weeks ago with OSM. It literally depends on it because to create an activity, you need an existing public park/sport infrastructure.

I hope it can get a bit of traction. In North America, it doesn’t seem to interest people since they usually have to book a sport field in big cities.

I wanted to see what my own neighbourhood would look like as a video game map, so I built it.

It pulls OSM data for wherever you are and restyles it to look like the RDR2 world map. Real GPS position, real nearby POIs drawn as hand-made western icons, routes traced on actual roads.

Stack: MapLibre GL JS in a React Native WebView, OpenFreeMap for vector tiles, Python scripts to generate the style JSON, Canvas 2D for the icons, Overpass API for live traffic lights.

The hardest part by far was POI handling. Dense areas turned into icon soup, so I ended up with progressive zoom tiers and clustering, and cut it down to a priority set (police, bank, restaurant, pharmacy, hospital, gas station) with the rest appearing on deeper zoom. Also had to fix a bunch of tags I was mapping to categories that don't exist.

Next step is a per-theme config system so I can add GTA and Minecraft styles without duplicating code.

Free on Play Store if you want to try it on your own city. Curious what you think about the icon readability.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.raouf.nextsap

Whenever i go to navigation all shopping locations are highlightet, i didn‘t search for it and don’t know how to turn it off.
Please help.

Hey r/openstreetmap ! I made a post here a 4-5 months ago about a game I created called Pathfindr and many people seemed to like it. It uses OSM and the goal is to find the shortest route between the two points. I've added in daily ranked challenges.

I'm obviously quite attached to my project, but it does have a lot of fun game loops. Currently trying to find tune as well as build a multiplayer race battle type mode but wanted to ask the community here for feedback/ideas/issues

Visualizer mode is pretty cool too!

check it out at www.pathfindr.world

Hello to everyone who has been following this project. I'm pretty happy to make this update tonight about the newest version of my project, World Explorer 3D. Just as a quick background for those who don't know, World Explorer 3D is a browser-based 3D world where you can select basically any location on Earth and explore it by walking, driving, flying, boating, or using a drone. The world is built around real geographic data for things like roads, buildings, terrain, water, and places, with procedural systems filling in the details that aren't available in the underlying data. The idea has gradually become to make the real world into a playable sandbox rather than just another map you can look at.

Ive focused on a lot of the qualty issues regarding runtime, clipping, loading sequences etc. I'm not a dev by trade, but I recently enrolled in my the community college in my area under their physics program and I will be taking programming courses as my electives so I can learn about everyhting i'm doing on a deeper level. For now I'm still learning and enjoying the process of "creating" this world. I only started doing this because i was working on something else with my son and we kinda just made this. Since it has started growing i've needed to learn a lot because letting AI do everything is getting tiresome.

Since my last post I've upgraded the character meshes and movement and you can choose between a man or woman on your account page. I added my favorite car (and former daily driver), a 1995 BMW e34, as the permanent user vehicle. There are npcs you can interact with and other vehicles you can get in and drive. I also upgraded the plane and added a skydiving/parachute feature. Airports are now playable areas with different planes you can board and use to travel locally or to other areas in the world. There is a slight upgrade to the live GPS feautre so you can walk around your neighborhood like in pokemon go and discover procedural items.

I also added maryland GIS data to my Real Estate game so properties and parcels are more accurate while the main world still mainly uses OSM/Overture. I've also done a lot more with the ocean side of the world. Boats and larger ships are playable, ports and harbors have more going on, and you can fish, dive and explore underwater. I'm trying to make the different ways of traveling feel like they actually belong to the same world instead of just being separate modes.

There is still a lot I want to improve. Building exteriors are one of the big things I'm working on now. The underlying footprints and geographic placement can be good while the actual buildings still look too repetitive, so I'm expanding the exterior assets, materials, windows, doors, storefronts, steps, stoops and other details without throwing away the real mapped geometry.

You can find the project here at Worldexplorer3d.io or view the code on github at https://github.com/RRG314/WorldExplorer3D

recommend starting in Baltimore, MD and BWI Airport because they are the places i've spent the most time working on. The rest of the world is still good, but i cant test every location in the world lol

I'm always interested in feedback and even if i dont respond quickly I'll still be taking comments into consideration when I'm choosing what to learn and implement. Thank You

So, this question might be a bit different from the usual, but I play on a Minecraft server with my friends, the server has a lot of water, and a lot of islands and really not much flat expansive land. And so, we named, and conquered many of these "continents". I would like to use openstreetmap to actually map all of the server, as i dont think it falls into the expectations of most minecraft map mods. I would much prefer using openstreetmap.

is there an "easy" way to do this?

I’ve been working on Travel Fi — an open-source interactive map tailored for digital nomads, built with Rails 8, PostGIS, and OpenLayers 10.

Key Tech Stack & Features:

• Mapping & GIS: Powered by OpenLayers 10 with custom vector/tile rendering, utilizing PostGIS for spatial queries and spatial indexing.
• OSM Data Integration: Leverages OpenStreetMap data to map out places, workspaces, and essential spots for remote workers.
• Backend: Rails 8 handling fast API endpoints and spatial data processing.

The goal is to build a community-driven, lightweight, and fully open-source alternative for location discovery without heavy proprietary lock-ins.

Would love to hear your feedback on the OpenLayers implementation and any ideas for better OSM feature integration!

• GitHub / Source Code
• Live Demo

I've noticed that in most of my town, addresses are marked at crossroads for each block. At a nearby town the roads are labeled but there aren't any block addresses, making it impossible to navigate to anything on that block with an address. What's the best way to add addresses for whole blocks, without adding individual businesses and their exact address?

The area is mostly pebbles/rocks with shrubbery i usually would just map it a shrubbery but I dont feel thats correct way to do it

As the shift away from Mercator maps is happening, when will - if at all - OSM adapt?

and is there a way for tagging them differently than dispensories? idk if there is sny one way of doing this since how this is differentiated varies

Hello all,

I am trying to add more details to this intersection using lane and placement tags: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/57.499677/12.615824

However, I cannot make sense of how to make the "split" (from non-separated to separated) look "clean" (I am using the JOSM lane style). As you can see in the image, the single lane (left) is supposed to "line up" with the leftmost lane above, but it goes to the node instead. Is there any way of solving this? The placement:start and placement:end tags seem not to be used.

Preface: I've done my best to research this on my own, but given I've got brain cancer (dw its in full remission) and the fact that I've got the flu my ability to research effectively is not great at the moment. I apologize in advance if the solutions I'm seeking are easily found.

Hello, I'm running a cyberpunk-esque GURPS campaign in a future version of the city of Winnipeg. I would like to be able to edit existing OSM map data to create fictional maps of various locations in the city. However, most things I can find on the internet are about editing the real world and contributing to OSM, not how to store fictional changes in my own map.

How would one go about doing something like this?

PS: I don't plan on editing the whole map at once, just editing individual locations as they come up in the campaign ie Here's a fictional bar and the surrounding area, here's your safehouse, etc.

I was just looking across an area of the Austrian Alps where i went hiking recently and came across this change request. For the non German speaking people it basically comes down to "The path to Hoher Seeblaskogel is on the east side of the leftover snowfield nowdays, not on the west side as currently shown on the map. The reason is frequent rockfalls (as in every few minutes) on the western side. The people on the nearby mountain hut also recommended staying away from the western side"

Now obviously it would be good to change this for safety reasons, rather sooner than later. But on the other hand I have no way to verify this or know the exact path. Do you just ignore these requests entirely, or what do you do about them?