I inherited a property management system where previous developers used what3words for storing location of homes (since reverse geocoding based on address is not reliable in some countries we support).
However, after an internal review we realised that a lot of our UK properties have locations in Asia or the US... It turned out that typos in what3words often result in a valid location on the other side of the world. The most common mistakes we found were plural words instead of singular ones (e.g. "cats" not "cat") or the other way around.
Of course we could have improved the user interface or added some extra validations, but at this point we realised that what3words is more trouble than it's worth, and decided to migrate to storing lat/long directly. That allowed us to avoid a third-party dependency and simplify the code, since we had to cache lat/long anyway in order to plot properties on a map or calculate distances between them.
However, after an internal review we realised that a lot of our UK properties have locations in Asia or the US... It turned out that typos in what3words often result in a valid location on the other side of the world. The most common mistakes we found were plural words instead of singular ones (e.g. "cats" not "cat") or the other way around.
Of course we could have improved the user interface or added some extra validations, but at this point we realised that what3words is more trouble than it's worth, and decided to migrate to storing lat/long directly. That allowed us to avoid a third-party dependency and simplify the code, since we had to cache lat/long anyway in order to plot properties on a map or calculate distances between them.