OpenStreetMap's New Vector Tiles

It's been fascinating to watch the open source community build out vector map tile capabilities. I was doing some web GIS work back in roughly 2018, and Google/Apple's streaming vector maps performed like magic and something we would have loved to use if we could afford it. Shortly thereafter the core tech was available in open source, and then there were even free hosted solutions. Now our leaflet maps have great vector layers for free. Thanks open source!

I'm a little surprised it's taken this long for OSM to get there, the basic technical pieces were available over a decade ago. I don't mean to complain about the free map service, it's excellent, and I recognize they focus more on the editing and data ownership. Serving is hard and expensive.

Mostly I wonder how much MapBox's dominance for a few years disrupted other efforts.

The new stack has some unique feature like the vector tiles being minutely updated directly from OSM mapping changes.

There are still issues to fix as it is still only a technical preview.