I also hate it! I dont know why they do it, sometimes i zoom in all the way and there is still no street name. Its just silly, who is making these design decisions?

The problem is, i keep using maps because google has the best POI system/database around, and it will take other apps long yo beat it, even apples POIs cant hold up…

Yes. Google Maps is getting to be just as useless as their search engine. These are just some of the ways in which it fails me nowadays:

* Open the app. Instead of getting a map you get, "What's happening nearby" or somesuch. And how to close this changes with every release. I have NEVER in life life EVEN ONCE opened a mapping program because I was simply bored and wanted some other place to go.

* Search for "$name_of_place_or_business in $specific_city". Instead, it gives you all the locations with a similar name near your current location until you massage the query in some way. (It doesn't do this all the time but more than enough to be annoying.)

* Search for the name of a road or intersection in a city. It will instead give you a list of businesses with similar names, or in some cases, having nothing to do with the name you searched for.

* Search for the name of a particular business. Get results for their competitors instead. (Feels illegal.)

* The traffic overlay changed months back so that only interstate traffic is visible at normal zoom levels. Now you have to zoom in WAY too far for the feature to be actually useful on all other roads. Someone is asleep at the wheel at Google. (Pun intended.)

On a couple recent trips I ran into this when trying to figure out what river I was near / crossing. Multiple times I basically said "lemme get a better tool for this" and flipped to OsmAnd. Google Maps just basically/barely showed there was a channel of water and didn't show the name.

Younger generations are much less likely to navigate by comparing a map to the street names at an intersection. Instead, people navigate by searching for a particular destination and then following the line that the router generates.

When Google Maps is a one-size-fits-all product, you can't blame them for choosing an approach like this. Fortunately, the OSM ecosystem lets you choose (or develop for yourself) whatever approach you prefer.

> Just show the name of every street damnit

I don't know about every street. But if you zoom in all of the way then yes, every street more than slightly in the viewport should be labeled. I have the same problems with all sorts of things like lakes where you need to find the magic zoom level and map position that reveals the name.

Some things are understandably harder, I don't necessarily need the Country, Province and City in every view of the map. But streets and lakes tend to not have much stuff inside of them so it seems obvious that when zoomed far in they should appear.

And zoom the label font size with the map size. I'm an old guy and cannot read the text on the map. Try to zoom in... the map zooms but the text stays the same size. Maddening.

I don't recall offhand whether it's Apple or Google maps that do this. Maybe both.

Or when you zoom in and the names remain tiny and illegible.

> Just show the name of every street damnit.

But why? Google Maps is not a navigation aid. Its purpose is not to help you know the name of the street you are in. It's a tool for paying customers to steer you towards their shops. If all you need to do is follow a path towards a certain shop, they don't need to show you the names of the streets.

It's not that the layout algorithm is different, it's that the algorithm tries to optimize the positions of text labels to get an aesthetically pleasing spacing, while preventing them from overlapping each other.

If you keep the label positions the same, but translate the text, then the layout will have been computed with the wrong bounding boxes, and you will tend to get wrong spacing and unintended overlaps.