commented by Adamant1 (2018-05-18 03:23:34+00:00): I agree with you about Bing. It seems like 99% of the places where I have checked now its either outdated, the quality is to bad to be usable, or the images are just copies of a another source. Especially at the closer zoom levels. In my opinion they could essentially rid of it at this point, at least in America. 
As far as Mapbox goes, it did seem to change a few month ago and get way more pixelated at at more zoomed in levels. Not to mention the offset is just horrible and almost a side angle. There's also some areas north of Sacramento where it isn't the latest imagery anymore either. In a few spots the ESRI images are way more recent but much worse quality. 

I tried to spend some a while back figuring out how old the images in some areas are for the different sources, but it seems to be essentially impossible to figure out with any consistency since the dates seem to change on a per county and city level. At least for the ESRI images. They really should implement a way for us to be able to tell though. Especially with how many sources of images we have now because there is a good chance an editor wont review every set when they are editing to make sure they are using the most up to date images. I've even ran into a few editors that were ID and didn't even know there was other sources available then the default Bing ones.   
There's a shopping center in Sacramento that got majorly altered in the past few months and only one of the image sets is update enough to show it and there's really no way to tell by a passive editor that doesn't do research which configuration is the new one. So it keeps getting changed back to the old building layout by different mappers. I think a big part of the problem is more people use image quality over tile age as a metric for editing. It seems to be a huge problem on Freeway interchanges to. They should do something like combine the sources and just disable access to the older images. Even if it means image quality goes down. At least that way it would be easy tell which configuration of the landscape is the correct one at any given time. 
My gut instinct would say Mapbox would always be the most up to date and best quality because high altitude balloons or planes are way cheaper than getting sat images, but then the consistency would be horrible as a trade off. Who knows though. 

As a side note, I've been really surprised how horrible all the images are still in "third world" countries. I would of thought the quality in a lot of those places would have improved in the last couple of years, especially a place like India and considering that balloons and such are being used more for that kind of thing world wide, but I guess not. They must have some really strict laws over in those areas or something. Otherwise, you would think it would be fairly cheap for Mapbox to pay some guy in Africa to launch some balloons around the villages there to get us some better images. Maybe the cost/benefit ratio would be to low for a company like mapbox to do it, but it still be cool. Or even have the HOT team get out there and do it. Id be willing to map some huts and roads in Africa or the middle east if I could see them better. 

Anyway, ID could at least show the tiles date in the corner with the copyright information. I can't see it being that hard to implement. That information has to be in the individual image files doesn't it?