Skobbler GmbH
 | https://www.skobbler.com/ now just says that the service has been terminated. |
skobbler GmbH is a German company making products and services based on OpenStreetMap, among them various apps for both iPhone and Android devices. In January 2014, Skobbler was bought by Telenav.
Routing issues
Note that at least in public demo Skobbler routing ignores oneway=yes tags making it useless. See https://maps.skobbler.com/@51.094204,16.9803143,18/route/edit-no/by-car,fast,off,off,off/51.0938907,16.9808185//51.0943219,16.9799495
Contributing back to the community
OpenStreetMap's free and open License does not require data consumers to contribute anything back to the project directly, but so far skobbler has contributed in various ways:
- As currently one of the largest "data consumers" of OSM, and running popular apps Skobbler navigation, and ForeverMap, they create publicity and awareness of OpenStreetMap and thus help grow the community. It also gets more people to use OSM data and prove that it is useful for routing and worth helping out for people who are not yet familiar with OSM.
- skobbler has sponsored the development of a turn restriction plugin for JOSM. They have also sponsored a quality assurance tool for Europe, highlighting unconnected, adjacent ways that are often bugs preventing correct routing.
- MapDust (mapdust.com), a bug reporting tool where users can highlight errors in the map data, or directly fix them themselves. MapDust is also fed by the skobbler turn-by-turn navigation with routing relevant errors.
- AddressHunter - A mobile game to improve OSM address data coverage.
Critisism
Skobbler is collecting user data to improve the data used for its navigation [1] [2]. For example the users GPS data is used to determine how fast people can drive on a certain road or whether it is a one way road [3]. According to OpenStreetMaps ODbL this adapted database must be offered under the ODbL too [4]. Nevertheless Skobbler does not publish the data used for its navigation.