Other Osmdroid vs. Google Maps

Hi udg,
I started develop some apps with both osmdroid & google maps-mainly self guided tour apps, so both have advantages and disadvanteges. I'll try to give a short summery of my experiences - without claiming to be complete and may be they are a result of not knowing all possibilties of the libs. so comments and hints are appreciated

osmdroid:
+ osm is great, free and growing
+ different mapstyles (Renderings) available (CycleMap, Mapnik, OSMPublicTransport) or use your own styles
+ possibility to give local tilesets to the app, so it will run without internet
+ possibilty to give your own tiled maps to the app, like historical maps
+ a lot of possibilities to interact with the api (thanks a lot to Martin), so it easy to integrate it in your app
- the standard tiles (Mapnik) are designed for webapplications, so OSM-labels are on high resolution devices nearly not readable
- geolocation and routing is just starting and there are only some possibilties at the moment (mapquest, which is also limited)

googlemaps
+ the leves of details are very good in my opinion
+ you easy switch between Satellite, street, hybrid and terrain
- interaction between your app and the map is not so easy. for example you can not give the marker a tag (to hold the id), you have to work with secondary structures like a map which hald the marker and the key, which is strange
- google is commercial and the requests are limited, also for routing and geolocation api, you don't know what the future will bring (I am optimistic)

even though the advantages of the osmdroid seems to be more, at the moment I prefere google for my self guiding tour apps.

stefan

Hi Stefan,

thank you very much for sharing your comments.

Today I installed OSM and in much less than 1 hour I had my first app running!
I easily integrated Martin's example code in my project, modified the POIs file from his demo and started experimenting with more features. All that in minutes from OSM downloading. I am really impressed.
Surely it will get more complicated the more I'll exlore it and soon I'll meet the cons you cited, but, as for tonight, let me be really happy.

@warwound : Martin, if you will ever read this: THANK YOU!