OpenStreetMap's New Vector Tiles

> Imagery should appear much sharper and switching the language of the labels should become possible.

I expect that to work sub-optimally. Label dimensions are far from guaranteed to stay the same if you change language, and label dimensions interact with map layout, even influencing what to show.

If your labels grow larger, they may end up covering too much of the map or even overlapping. If they grow smaller, users may wonder why a city that was omitted before because of space constraints doesn’t show in the empty space created.

I hate it when city and street names disappear on Google Maps as you zoom in and out. Sometimes a street or business name only appears at one particular zoom level and not higher or lower. Just show the name of every street damnit. I don't care about crowding. Standing at an intersection staring at an unlabelled map is a useless map.

Younger generations are much less likely to navigate by comparing a map to the street names at an intersection. Instead, people navigate by searching for a particular destination and then following the line that the router generates.

When Google Maps is a one-size-fits-all product, you can't blame them for choosing an approach like this. Fortunately, the OSM ecosystem lets you choose (or develop for yourself) whatever approach you prefer.

That method just doesn't work in Manhattan, where due to buildings, you're lucky if your GPS is working, much less the compass to tell you which direction to face.

The vast majority of Google Maps users are capable of using A-GPS data, they are not reliant on a clear GPS satellite signal alone. And Google’s A-GPS data for Manhattan is extremely detailed. Again, this makes sense for a one-size-fits-all product like Google Maps.

That's not good enough, AGPS doesn't work near skyscrapers. The issue isn't that the signal isn't "clear", it's that it reflects off the buildings and the GPS receiver will get a clear but wrong signal.

To correct this you need something like QZSS or accurate models of the buildings to compensate for it.

The correction which Apple and Google are taking is anonymous UWB location in a mesh network via Time of Flight (ToF), Angle of Arrival (AoA) and Device-to-Device communication.

That is how locations are transmitted for Find My Phone/Device, and how relative close-by positioning works for AirTags and similar, but it's not used to determine absolute locations as far as I know. It would certainly be cool if it did that though.

You might be thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_GPS.