Ordnance Survey launches its first maps app for iOS

&#62; It’s rather surprising that it’s taken this long for the OS to put its work on iOS, but the agency has at last come up with an official app.<p>Not so surprising if you consider that the Ordnance Survey focuses on other stuff, rather than the newest tech gadgets. Having maps on the phone is really nice for "casual" uses and navigation in towns, but this is covered quite well by the existing solutions. If I go trekking I much prefer a paper map which is larger and more robust to essentially all mishaps.

Worth nothing the OS maps for the UK are currently available through Bing Maps.<p>The OS also supports one of my all time favourite sites: <a href="http://www.geograph.org.uk/" rel="nofollow">http://www.geograph.org.uk/</a> this project "aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometre of Great Britain and Ireland".

I've been navigating using OS maps on my iPhone for over a year now using ViewRanger. To "download" an OS map you still have to pay - ViewRanger license the data from the Ordnance Survey. They charge you so that they can pay OS for the maps.<p>But it's all quite seamless and convenient - you "download" pack of a tokens from the App store, and then "use" them to download map tiles as and when you need them.<p>I'm not sure what an iPhone map written by OS themselves would give me that ViewRanger does not do already.<p>I wonder what their motive is? i.e. why isn't the current model of "licensing" the map data to third party app writers sufficient?

the extraordinary quality of Ordinance Survey maps suggests this was far from trivial, even if an iOS map app was a priority for OS, which i doubt.<p>Anyone from the UK already knows this but for those who plan to travel in the UK, these are the finest maps i have ever seen or used, and indeed have used them a lot. The 1:50,000 sheets for N Wales (Snowdonia), Isle of Skye, and Applecross, among many others, are treasures.<p>taking a casual walk with the family (e.g., around Langdale in the Lake District) with a OS 1:25,000 OS map is an interactive history less every step of the way--"oh look, says here there's a Celtic burial chamber just up ahead on your left"

I've been using the UKMap app for OS maps for a couple of years. It'll be interesting to see what (if anything) this offers over and above that one.

Do they really need the giant copyright on all of the maps?

At first I thought it took Apple 232 years to approve it.