Ola recently announced that they have fully exited Google Maps and have moved to in-house Ola Maps for which they will not have to pay a penny. After this announcement now the company has announced the free access of Ola Maps to all developers for a whole year. The founder of the company Bhavish Aggarwal wrote on X announcing this “We’ve been using Western apps to map India for too long and they don’t get our unique challenges: street names, urban changes, complex traffic, non-standard roads, etc. Ola Maps tackles these with AI-powered India-specific algorithms, real-time data from millions of vehicles, leveraging and contributing massively to open source (5 million+ edits just last year!)”.
After #ExitAzure, it’s time for 🇮🇳developers to #ExitGoogleMaps! 1 YEAR FREE access to all developers to Ola Maps on @Krutrim, more than ₹100Cr in free credits! https://t.co/K1JHFBlNt1
We’ve been using western apps to map India for too long and they don’t get our unique… pic.twitter.com/18l2GdzCkC
— Bhavish Aggarwal (@bhash) July 8, 2024
Ola says in a blog post that “Ola is built to utilize the most diverse set of data and send updates in the real-time to ensure the most accurate mapping data as possible”. It will utilize the “real-time data from millions of vehicles using Ola Maps, a fleet of Ola S1’s equipped with 360 cameras, open-source government data repositories, OpenStreetMap, partnerships and proprietary sources to build essential map features such as roads, points of interest, street furniture, building geometry, and traffic signals”.
As per the blog post, the Ola Maps will be intelligent enough to generate context-based results, based on the behavior patterns, and contextual cues that fine-tune the result for the user. Though it’s free for a year but will soon be available on a paid basis for developers thus allowing them to integrate the Ola Maps API in their Android and iOS apps and services via Krutrim Cloud.
