There are a few fundamental reasons: 1. at least iOs app privacy/sandboxing model makes sharing any data files pretty difficult, if impossible. I suspect Android has similar issue. 2. there is no such thing as "just map data" - every app has to do opinionated decision what they need in their maps data (e.g. aerials, elevation, choice of POIs, languages etc), how it gets styled (it makes requirements to actual data). And this is for just simple base map data, you have also routing, address search databases etc on top. So there is not much to share really, and not easy to share. Not even talking about huge challenge to standardize it.
(I'm founder of Nutiteq, we also did FOSS SDKs for offline maps)
Author notes. Motivation and target: country detection can be certainly solved with standard tools eg PostGIS, with 3 prerequisites: 1) you know the stack (right formats, resolutions, CRSs, have operational database or certain suitable library properly setup), 2) you have good vector data 3) enough compute for potentially non-trivial task. With this domain-specific solution none of the three is needed - you just import a library (Python and JS provided) and call one method. It is compact (sub-MB datasets for minimal use in eg web browser, for much better accuracy optional ~10MB download) and order(s) of magnitude faster than generic point-in-polygon SQL queries (benchmarks are provided): ~1M lookups per second. No online, no DB servers needed etc.
Is there a browser plugin enabling to swap out any parts of a website/app with own ones? With prompt/vibe-based input, so any user can customize websites in any imaginable way. Maybe it should.
What developers and fellow Product Managers think of the attempt to redefine Scrum to be (even) better fit for the AI-empowered teams? And how these teams would be different?
Semi-academic attempt to build semantic-level standard system for data type classification. Useful for metadata semantics data lakes / warehouses beyond basic physical level like text/number, with assumption that it may be useful for AI-targeted metadata, your text to sql cases. https://github.com/jaakla/semantic-field-types
Reactor h2o itself does not carry radiation, but any extra molecules in tend to do it, thats the reason why the water is as clean you can get, over-distilled. This by itself means that it is not potable (btw for disposal to environment it gets re-salinated), so they told the story of professor drinking it must be an urban myth. It is bad even for skin expose (swimming in it), but hopefully that worker got just a few seconds expose and is well.
Source: training trip in a nuclear center.
I hate it. I used it to have carefully curated metadata (sources etc) to my collection of tens of tables, and someone else took backup/restore of the database and all this was lost.
If anything can reduce/limit now the climate catastrophe then it is total transformation to clean electric energy which is produced with minimal emissions: housing, transport, industry, everything must go electric. Producing does not need to be renewables, it can be even fossils, it just has to be without GHG emissions. Nothing else matters. These theoretical risks, long-term waste storage etc are at best secondary questions which are totally irrelevant in current situation where we have almost lost that battle. Considering that full electrification requires automatically 3-4 times hike of energy demand any clean enough tech has to be considered and where possible deployed right away. It is simple like that.
I'm not sure that "desktop Linux machine" is really a thing. I hate to feel that Linux has won servers and IoT, maybe mobile, but clearly lost desktop. Desktop is a dying thing by itself, so not bad after all.
One golden rule of businesses (or any investments) is that you should not put your eggs to single basket. With development of mobile apps you just do it, you are totally in mercy of a couple of gatekeepers, like it or not. I would rather focus on recognising and mitigating these risks, and make sure that you do have alternatives. Do not buy into some corporation's promises of not to be evil. They all are. Sorry you had to learn it in hard way, but better late than never.