Android is moving toward another commodity revolution… the sheer number of new phones running Android just keeps increasing. I use one – the hilariously “spatially aware” Samsung Moment. Now, just as an aside, this phone is running Android 1.5 on a CDMA network, which is not a comfortable marriage: if I turn off the GPS and use cell-tower location, it puts me in Lithuania (rather than Toledo, OH).

But the key point is that when using Google Maps for Android (*not* Google Nav, which I presume includes a similar EULA), you must agree to allow Google to track your location. I am quit confident that Google does not particularly care where I am, except to (a) enable their Latitude service and (b) have me automatically verify the correlation between (i) my phone’s GPS, (ii) their vectors, and (iii) their rasters. (b) is by far the most important application.

If they provide service to enough Android units – and they will, for most people, most of the time, except when it really matters – their directions and maps will automatically update given a certain confidence threshold. They will know not only where the centerlines and edges are, the shape of each interchange, but also gain reliable real-time congestion maps and the ability to provide routing in consideration of current conditions.

Android was never as irrelevant as Zune. That’s a very, very low standard. My fear with crowdsourcing is that it is exactly the situations in which you really *need* an external reference – because there’s no one local to directly *ask* – that the crowd/cloud fails. Not too many people go that way? You’re on your own. Good luck… now that you’re used to high-quality real-time spatial info.

Androids I’ve ever seen in person = 0
Zune’s I’ve ever seen in person = 0
iPhones I’ve seen in person = thousands

‘nuf said…

Part of Google’s success is simply its massive brand awareness. Their success with web mapping is not necessarily based on the quality of their products, but on their easy availability and ease of use (which is of course a different but important kind of quality). Either way, everybody’s heard of Google, so they easily remember Google Maps (hey, it’s like, “Google” with “Maps”….), and most of the tools work well enough most of the time for most people’s purposes.

Microsoft’s web mapping tools are arguably better than Google’s, but who even knows about them out in the real world? I never did figure out what they were called before they got Binged (Live Earth? Virtual Earth? Live Search?…). Meanwhile, Google is racing ahead with all its permanent-beta tools and APIs and mobile platforms etc and has that all important “cool” buzz to keep attention focused on its products/services. And a lot of their stuff really is “cool” to some of us nerds…:-)

As for the data quality/openness issue, I dunno. AFAIK, nobody else has found a commercially viable way to make high quality spatial data genuinely free and open, except for governments whose data is paid for by the taxpayer in the first place. So it may be that access to high quality spatial data will continue to be restricted, one way or another, to those who can afford to produce/consume it

Which is pretty much where we were before Google came along, isn’t it?

The convenience of having navigation built right into my phone for free outweighs the face that it may not route me the absolute best way.

I will point out one significant hole in my argument. Remember the family who die a few years ago when they were trapped on a small road in rural Oregon? He was on the old Screen Savers show or TechTV/G4 at the least. They attributed the family being lost due to the route provided by the GPS in their vehicle, which routed them on a road well know in the area for being unsafe for winter travel. At the end of the day you can’t rely on technology to make all your decisions, be it a high zoot Tom Tom with NavTeq data or a free app on an Andriod phone.

I did… and the abstract paints a rosier picture than what was presented. These results were under ideal conditions with high satellite, known hotspot availability, and stationary or walking platforms – A-GPS and Wifi locating get much fuzzier than 600m when you start dropping in incorrect wifi locations, high speeds, or low satellite availability).
600m is an awful long ways to be off when you are doing navigating.

But you’re wrong there.

Few others have the ability to create your zoning information. They can certainly create zoning information and position it as more authoritative than yours (but include legal text absolving them of liability for any decisions made off the zoning data they provide).
So, the question is, what, if anything, do you do when someone else decides to create their own version of your zoning information?

I like the iTune comparison. It’s made me want to see a technical comparison of the iPhone App Store, with Android Marketplace. Android claims to be “open”, and also support multiple apps running at the same time.

Will we need standards that allow Android geo-apps to interoperate with one another (and share the same map)?

The path generated by Google might not be the best for all users. As with Snapper, there are users willing to pay for specialized routing capabilities.

Let’s say I’m a manager responsible for a fleet of delivery trucks. The best route for my truck depends on the size, turning radius, etc. Google isn’t likely going to collect traffic flow data relevant to my fleet. Instead of using Google for routing I would pay for a specialized routing service and use an Android app that requests routes based on warehouses defined in a different layer – and managed by a different app.

Given Googles’ interest in transit, they are likely working on Demand Responsive Transit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_responsive_transport
There might be some overlap with fleet management, but I think the niches it opens up will more than compensate.

I also wonder if Google has plans to leverage android handsets in a wireless mesh network like the one described by Zip car founder Robin Chase: http://www.ted.com/talks/robin_chase_on_zipcar_and_her_next_big_idea.html