As evil as they are, it's hearting to see the delivery platforms are embracing OSM when they could probably afford to just pay for Google's Maps API.

It gives hope that Google/ESRI won't always be the dominant mapping platform, however OSM is still missing a lot of local businesses which the delivery platforms don't need as urgently as house numbers so there's less focus there.

> It gives hope that Google/ESRI won't always be the dominant mapping platform

Are they? I get the impression that only consumer-facing stuff is Google, to give people a familiar color scheme¹ as well as allow terribly formatted search queries to still work (if google can do one thing it's search). However, anything using geo data in a back-end fashion seems about evenly split between government base maps, OpenStreetMap, and a collection of misc providers that Google is one of

¹ conversely, I struggle to find my home town on Google Maps. It's all about vague, washed-out shapes, besides the bright shop icons and, nowadays, advertising pins. It's a matter of what you're used to so I can very much understand that the average consumer, who's less familiar with maps than me, is totally lost when getting Carto as a map

Lyft even pays people to contribute to OSM

Many companies do. Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, TomTom, Über, Komoot, VKontakte; I see German, Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish local governments mentioned; Austrian emergency dispatch; USA school bus operator...

Full list: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Organised_Editing/Activi...

It's more surprising at this point that Google isn't getting in on the fun, at least taking the good bits and calling their own data a 'separate layer' so they don't have to contribute anything back. (And of course no Chinese companies, since accurate maps are illegal there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...)

How do I get a job like this? Should I just email the team leads or is it the kind of job that's done in-person in another country?

I'd say government is your best bet unless you live in a low-income country and can get into one of these teams

OSM is actually perfectly sufficient if you just want street and address data. This stuff gets pulled in from official government sources so it's all present and up to date.

Where it's lacking is business info since this has to be entered manually and changes much more often than streets or buildings change.

I'd like to point out that it only "gets pulled in" if the data is actually made available by the government, and there are dedicated volunteers who work on getting the data, massaging it into the right format and importing it into OSM, and that is not the case in many countries.

Not to mention the occasional drift between what's on paper and what's actually been built.

Yeah, that's a whole different kettle of waspnests. :)

The thing lacking even more is a good search engine. Doesn't matter how complete the database is when search keeps missing text appearing verbatim in a label.

This is the problem with using vector search for everything: there is no “verbatim” when the corpus and the search are both converted to a vector, and not necessarily using exactly the same transform.

If you are a delivery company or such paying for mapbox you can build your own solution and get better quality than the open source general purpose apps.