Comment by Frost1x
9 days ago
Having just visited South Korea last year, one thing that sort of caught me off guard was the lack of Google Maps or other major direction system. I wasn’t aware but turns out anything considered “detailed mapping” infrastructure has to be ran stored and on South Korean soil, probably lots of other requirements. So you’re stuck with some shotty local mapping systems that are just bad.
There may be a point in time it made sense but high resolution detailed satellite imagery is plenty accessible and someone could put a road and basically planning structure atop it, especially a foreign nation wishing to invade or whatever they’re protecting against.
Some argument may be made that it would be a heavy lift for North Korea but I don’t buy it, incredibly inconvenient for tourists for no obvious reason.
Several other countries have similar requirements with regards to storing and serving maps locally.
If you take a moment to think about it, what's weird is that so many countries have simply resorted to relying on Google Maps for everyday mapping and navigation needs. This has become such a necessity nowadays that relying on a foreign private corporation for it sounds like a liability.
OSM is competitive with google maps in most places. Even if a person uses google maps, its inaccurate to say they "rely" on it when they could fail over to osm if google maps went down.
Local mapping efforts and allowing Google Maps to operate aren't mutually exclusive though. I don't see how it's weird that people can choose which map app they use.
Agreed, I would expect a government to provide their own mapping system, independent of any private entity. It’s so critical for a governments operation and general security needs.
What’s odd (to me) is trying to regulate other groups from generating maps of your nation when you have no jurisdiction over them. That’s akin to the US telling all South Korean governments they can’t create maps of the US unless they operate under heavy supervision or something of that nature.
It’s impractical, largely unenforceable, and any nation probably has independent mapping of foreign nations, especially their adversaries, should they need them for conflicts, regardless of what some nation wants to oppose over them in terms of restrictions. I guarantee the US government has highly detailed maps of Korea.
So who exactly are these regulations protecting? In this case they’re just protecting private mapping groups that reside in their country against competition.
Why didn't you use Kakao Maps or Naver Maps? They're not shotty and work just fine, even if you don't read Korean, you can quickly guess the UI based on the icons.
I tried both and the lack of an English UI made a lot of it non-unintuitive, especially when it came to search and finding local businesses walking around. There were some other annoyances, like when I travel for leisure I enjoy researching an area ahead of time bookmarking places to overlay on a map, and being able to organically explore the area as I move around. I found that very difficult on Naver (I don’t recall the details but I know being able to search for types of businesses in English was part of the issue).
I believe performance wise it was also pretty sluggish from what I remember. I’m by no means saying it was unusable, it got me through somewhat functionally but with a lot of extra effort on my behalf. I also had an international data plan and wasn’t able to see if I could precache the map set vs streaming it as needed over wireless.
I often like to look at restaurants, menus, prices, reviews as well to scope out a place quickly before going there. That process was also tedious (to be fair it could be that I’m not familiar with the UI).
The question is why did I have to use Naver or Kakao in the first place. I’d rather just use the system I already enjoy and am quite proficient with using it, not be forced to play with some new app that I need useful information from for some unclear reason.
Agree, Naver maps for navigating public transit in Seoul is excellent. Easier to figure out than public transit in any American city I've been to and I don't read or speak Korean. iirc it even tells the fastest routes/best carriage to be on to optimize transferring between lines.
>So you’re stuck with some shotty local mapping systems that are just bad.
What made you think of them as bad? Could you be more specific? I use them almost daily and I find them very good.
I was there few months ago and I found them to be quite good too, both in coverage (shops, bus/metro networks) and accuracy. Obviously, not the apps I'm used to so & the language but otherwise, it was okay.
They lack a lot of polish. Functionally they're mostly usable, but some interactions are janky and I found the search to be super hit or miss.
> I found the search to be super hit or miss.
I heard similar complaints from friends that came to visit. But they were using the English version of the apps, which, when I tested, were indeed harder to use, but never a miss for me when I helped them. OTOH, I always find my destinations within the first three options when I search in Korean. So maybe it's subpar internationlization.
> They lack a lot of polish. [...] some interactions are janky
I see. I guess I wouldn't know. It's not janky for me, and I think that I am so used to it that when I need to use Google Maps, or any other, I feel a bit frustrated by the unfamiliar interface that I start wishing I could be using Kakao or Naver Maps instead.
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In my experience Open Street Maps was very good there.