As I was passing through Amsterdam, OSM lied to me several times. I don’t have the tools and means to correct the maps for various complex reasons starting with not having a good Internet connection, but really an Amsterdam local should get involved anyway because I’m not sure of all these problems.
Misinfo:
- Brouwerij Troost (52.36616°N, 4.87318°E) ← shutdown
- Manamana (52.35410°N, 4.89033°E) ← apparently shutdown; someone should verify
- Hecke Electronica (52.35243°N, 4.88725°E) ← shutdown; owner retired. It should be updated to say “/Formerly/ Hecke Electronica” until something replaces it
- Flower Burger (52.37226°N, 4.88566°E) ← replaced with a /cashless/ croissant shop.
- CT Coffee & Coconuts (52.35267°N, 4.89150°E) ← replaced with another similar shop. Not sure if other Coffee & Coconuts locations closed or just this one.
Missing info:
- Bierfabriek Amsterdam (52.37007°N, 4.89375°E) ← cashless¹!
- Brouwerij De Engel (52.37007°N, 4.89375°E) ← building is rightfully unnamed since the brewery was only there a couple years before bankruptcy. It should be updated to say “/Formerly/ Brouwerij De Engel” so people actually know the brewery is no longer there, until something else is established there.
¹ When a cashless merchant sells alcohol, it’s a trap and an injustice. Having records of alcohol consumption stupid and reckless because it denies consumers their GDPR Art.5 right to data minimisation. And it has consquences. E.g. a scandinavian home buyer was denied a loan because the bank discovered he bought alcohol regularly. Anyway, there will always be dumb consumers who pay for alcohol electronically, but in the very least OSM should mark cashless bars as cashless so wise consumers can easily avoid them. I walked out of my way to visit Bierfabriek only to discover they were cashless. Unlike other cashless bars, they were at least diligent about posting it.
Thanks! I was planning to, but I don’t get online often.
OSMand broke old devices by making them dependant on a non-updatable cert authority and forcing TLS. So anyone with AOS older than 7 can no longer update maps using the app (even if they run the latest version of OSMand that works on their device). My workaround has been to manually fetch the map (e.g. `Netherlands_noord-holland_europe_2.obf.zip) from https://osmand.net/list.php. The zip file I unpacked and side-loaded was dated April 16th, 2025. So it’s unclear why the update from months ago did not make it into the maps being distributed at https://osmand.net/list.php.
I wouldn’t blame you for not following the policy, but I must say it’s not a great policy. There are quite often mismatches between what the web (e.g. reviews) say is in a place and what OSM states is there. The discrepency is unresolved for the user if the user cannot see what was there previously in order to work out if OSM is wrong or the other source is wrong.
In principle, the historical map linked by that wiki could be useful in this regard. I’ll have to fiddle with it. But not everyone has the luxery of using obscure or exotic tools from a desktop when trying to navigate an unfamiliar city they are passing through. Users don’t need a deep history; they just need to know what was there previously on any turnover that happened in the past 5 years.
Actually we have a tag for old names like this: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:old_name
But if it only existed for such a short time I'm not sure if it's significant enough to map it after it was closed. If it would have been already mapped while it was open it would make sense, but if no one ever cared about this before?
You can add a note if you think it's important enough, local mappers will have to decide.
I don't know how the osmand snapshot were wrong, though I never used this manual offline download feature.