If clients ask about OpenStreetMap
I recently had a client ask me if our native Maps options have any involvement with OpenStreetMap data/layout. I had never heard about OSM so I did a quick Wikipedia search and then of course asked Dickson and McGrath for their thoughts. Below is Dickson’s feedback should anyone else have clients that ask the same!
We do not directly use OpenStreetMap in any way. The client may see information such as this: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_in_MapKit, which tells you how to use OSM as basically what we do with Custom Maps. However, we do not support it and will not be adding it.
As far as how Apple uses it, there is a blog post from OSM with a little bit of information: https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2012/10/02/apple-maps/. Basically when Apple built it’s new Maps solution they didn’t create all the data themselves, but rather pulled from various sources and it seems that OSM is one of those sources. As the blog post mentioned OSM was listed in the credits and they think they have spotted places where their data is used. However, as this is proprietary information to Apple’s business it’s unlikely that you will find any place that clearly defines where and how Apple used OSM.
From this I would say that while adding their data to OSM couldn’t hurt, it is very unlikely to propagate to Apple Maps and show up in MapKit.