Very cool; I don't work with OSM in my "day job" but took an interest early last spring.

It's amazing how far things have progressed in the mapping space. I think back to my first "serial-port attached" Magellin GPS device that only worked plugged into a laptop and stored seriously outdated maps on a CD-ROM. Taking just the advances since the first time I saw a "Google Earth-like Product" (called Microsoft TerraServer[1]) to Earth, Maps, and OpenStreetMap and it really is mind-blowing how far the geo-* space has come.

I was (inappropriately) disappointed when I saw that it was a mobile app. Of course it is. It's a mapping app. I'd still want a laptop version, but then I dug into what they were trying to solve and the details of how their app works and, I'm genuinely impressed. It appears you identified a real problem: lack of current, complete metadata on OSM[2] and gave me a way to update it semi-passively, or at least with the "thing I have available to me right now" while standing "near the thing I'm trying to capture information about". Since map data is relied upon for anything from leisure to outright safety, accuracy is really important, and the design[3] seems to nail ensuring that accuracy can be easily accomplished.

My interest stems from my purchasing of a OneWheel. I put more miles on that than I did my car last year and I noticed that neither OSM, nor Google do very good with sidewalks. They'll get the ones that showed up well in the last satellite pass, provided there's a road next to them, and they'll get a lot of trails. They miss a few really helpful things. Where I live, most elementary/middle schools are located within a cluster of subdivisions (often 1-2 miles from a main road). In my neighborhood, the school is on the far side, and our subdivision borders two other neighborhoods, a large apartment complex and a trailer park. To get from my home to a home in one of the three bordering subdivisions -- by car -- I will drive at least one mile and have to make a couple of ugly turns onto main roads -- our subdivision does not connect to the trailer park, apartment complex or the other bordering subdivision.

On foot, because of the elementary school, there are paved, fenced side-walks, meaning I can roll 1/4 mile and reach any home in the other subdivisions. Similarly, our neighborhood does not have a road leading out to one of the main streets that it borders because the residents feared it would be used as a bypass during high-traffic times to get from one popular main road to another ridiculously busy main road. To solve this, they brought the road all the way to the parking lot of a McDonald's and then built a large, brick, wall covering that whole side of the neighborhood. McDonald's takes the same amount of time to get to by car as it does by onewheel because at the end of that street, if you look really closely, there's a second fence, and the home-owner bordering it put pavers down and knocked part of the wall out, so you ride right through to the parking lot, avoiding lights/busy roads/anything else -- and that main road has many retail businesses.

This pattern exists in almost every subdivision in my township, and the schools as side-walk nexus points connecting neighborhoods is state-wide (it allows for more students to walk, less busing [mandatory through most of my state]), but I've had to add each one to OSM, myself -- and I'm happy to do it, except that the online map editor, as amazing as it is, lands in on the "intimidating" side, resource-heavy [expected] and just generally not as pleasant as I wish it were. I run Linux and last I looked, that was the best options of the choices I could get working (easily, anyway) with my current configuration.

Does anyone have any non-Android OSM map editor recommendations? Or even any mobile versions that are particularly pleasant for adding the kinds of paths I've described? And hey, if you know of any good source data for discovering those paths? For instance, I have a link bookmarked around here that takes me to a heatmap produced using the phones of people who have a particular biking app installed and have enabled public logging. It was super-useful in finding trails that are seasonal/hidden/otherwise not well mapped.

[0] I've done a mess of things with Google Maps API a while back, but even in those cases it was really simplistic sorts of things.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraserver.com

[2] Not a knock to OSM; to clarify, considering their largest alternative is ... Gooble ... it's pretty amazing that even on the metadata side, OSM is more complete in many categories than Guh'Maps.

[3] I'm going on screen shots, I will be installing this in the afternoon but have not installed it, yet so if some of the things I like (or dislike) aren't actually the way I think they are "in the app", my apologies.