sp8962

It's actually OK compared to your typical GIS desktop app, but naturally not the thing to recommend a beginner.

Oh dear.

Using JOSM for your 1st edit is definitely not recommended.

Doing the same with iD (the editor embedded in the OSM website) is faster and there's even a tutorial that will explain a bit about how things work.

Thanks for the blatantly marketing Overture on a Thread about downloading OSM data.

"developer" is a slightly weird way of putting it. osm.org is the contributor portal and demo site for OpenStreetMap, and yes it is not and never has been intended as an end user replacement for Google Maps and similar offerings.

The main purpose of the maps on the site is, besides showcasing some topical uses of OSM data, rapid feedback to contributors, which is something that required specific development so that can be provided with vector tiles too.

The 'late to the game' narrative seems to be a bit misplaced in any case given that OSM data has powered essentially all vector tile use outside of Google over more than a decade.

To answer the question: somebody needs to do the initial work and it's a further moving part that needs to be kept running (as the other responses point out such a distribution would likely use PMTiles as a container format). Given the current finances and staffing of the OSMF likely not top priority.

As Doctor_Fegg has pointed out further down, the OSMF provided raster tile service on openstreetmap.org is primarily intended to provide fast feedback to contributors and not for general purpose use, in particular not as a competitor to google.

The whole point of OSM is that you can take the data and build / design your own things. Yes it would be nice if there were multiple viable google alternatives based on OSM and other open data, but that is likely just a pipe dream, the economics don't really work.

No it doesn't.

Sure you could .... but to find something you would need to have the tile in question so you would need to calculate the tile to retrieve, and then find the object at the location (which is roughly equivalent to rendering the tile).

Doesn't seem to make sense when you can just run a nominatim or photon instance locally. Not to mention that currently you would typically have to add additional address data to the mix to get the quality of commercial geocoding services which makes the doing it via tiles even less attractive.

> It contains the OSM data (obviously) ...

Not really. You need to build geometries from raw OSM data (aka the stuff that you edit) then transform those geometries into MVT format adding appropriate attributes from the original data. In general you actually will want to normalize the data and throw out anything that is not included in the vector tile schema you are using. The net result is quite far from raw OSM data in any case.

PS: I maintain a project that stores actual OSM data in MBTiles format for offline editing, and yes proper editing apps have to do the above on the fly and it is the main reason they are not lightning fast.

Different use case.

Tippecanoe takes geojson and splits it up into tiles, we are talking about doing that with OSM data here. Typically you will want to apply some normalisation of the input data, then you need instantiate the geometry of the OSM objects, then split things up according to the vector tile schema in use and then write the tiles.

Well nobody claimed things are going to get simpler.

It is difficult to beat raster tiles in that respect. vector tiles split up responsibility for what you get visually over multiple moving pieces with different provenance and operators.

The whole point of vector tiles is that the rendering is local and controlled by a style configuration (except for the tile schema) that can be changed. So the brokenness you are seeing is either in the style or the library that is rendering the contents locally.