How to report map issues?

[GeoMagik]

PocketEarth uses map data from the community driven, open mapping project known as OpenStreetMap (OSM). You can think of this project much like Wikipedia, where hundreds of thousands of people like yourself are actively contributing to make the maps better for everyone!  OSM has excellent coverage in many places, while some other places may be lacking detail.

If you find mistakes on the maps, the first thing to do is to check the OSM website to see if it is the same or not.

If the map looks correct on their website, but incorrect in PocketEarth, please report it to us by email at info@geomagik.com  Please explain the problem and specific location. Attaching a screenshot illustrating the issue is very helpful but not necessary. To make a screenshot on your device, just press the Power button and Home button at the same time, and a screen shot will be saved to your Camera Roll.

If it is also incorrect on the OSM website, you can make the correction yourself by tapping the Edit button above the maps (You will need to create free account the first time). There are also much more powerful tools you can use to edit and correct the maps such as JOSM.  Please read the Beginners’ Guide to get started on making bigger changes.

If you don’t want to make the corrections yourself, you can simply report it and someone else will correct it:  http://openstreetbugs.org

Note that changes made to OSM data can take up to 1 month to be available in PocketEarth. We update our data every 3 or 4 weeks from the latest OSM Planet Dump. You can check for the latest available data in PocketEarth by going to Settings > Data Cache > Check Now or set it to perform more frequent automatic update checks.

[NateR]

Good day,

Many many weeks ago I uploaded to OSM some bicycle paths in my town of Moab, Utah. The bicycle route apps I have have reflected the change but PE has not. How often is PE really refreshing data from OSM?

Nate Rudman

[GeoMagik]

We completed the publishing of the latest OSM maps data yesterday, 5 weeks after the previous data update. In this case, we were delayed a week by the emergency hot-fixes we had to make to 10 of our apps due to the new iOS 7 and iPhone 5s, both of which caused serious issues in our apps. 

The next major update of PocketEarth will show the OSM maps date on the Data Cache screen so you can see exactly how old they are. We are also working to fully automate the process, so that the map updates will be more consistently delivered on-schedule.

[ragnakore]

Last Feb 2013 I went to Xiamen China and neighboring cities. Pocket Earth has street maps of them. Lately, I realized the current OSM maps DO NOT have streets on these cities anymore.

Secondly, I once reported before that PE somehow does not report the correct GPS coordinates on Chinese maps. The app’s gps coordinate is offset about 135degrees by 400 meters.

[Busybee46]

Hi I have just started downloading some maps of Morocco for a trip in January but see that the street names in many cases are in reversed text. It’s not like that on the OSM site. Look at boulevard Mohammed VI for instance!

[GeoMagik]

@Busybee46

Thanks for reporting this, it is a bug in PE that we only recently became aware of. This only happens when the street text contains both LTR and RTL language scripts (example: both Arabic and English are used in the street name).   We will try to correct this in the next update.

@ragnakore

The OSM database license changed some months ago, and a small amount of data was removed causing some loss of map detail in some specific places. This is most likely what you are seeing. In most places where this happened the OSM community has been very active in recovering the data by re-mapping the areas.

This issue with GPS coordinates not matching those of the data on the map is beyond our control at the most basic level.  This occurs in most map apps and devices but only in China. There is a lot of discussion online about this without anything conclusive, but its apparent that GPS devices sold in China are correct (or corrected) to show an accurate GPS coordinate on the map, while devices sold outside of China general have this issue.  At least one other app we have seen offers adjustment controls to allow the user to manually align the two to correct this issue, and we may take this approach in the future.

[ragnakore]

From what I can think of, there are only 2 possible causes to this problem:
1. Maps covering china are wrong;
2. Some GPS Satellites are giving out wrong timing.

What is the official Term/Name used for this GPS problem in China so I can read up some about it?

[GeoMagik]

@ragnakore:

For more info check this google search or this blog.

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