Since the Google Maps price increase it is hideously expensive to use at any large scale.

Company I worked for moved away from gmaps to osm.

The migration was a pretty smooth process.

Honestly happy with it. Dont see the point using gmaps - but maybe the purpose has not tied me that I have to.

osm is pretty sweet, imo. Much, much cheaper as well!

I'm not sure the Maps API gives you access to the raw vector data.

Also, at least the last time I checked, the Google Maps API was exorbitantly expensive. Niantic would likely get a discount, but avoiding this exploit doesn’t override all of the other benefits of OSM.

IIRC many of the original employees were ex-Googlers and the original Ingress game did use Google Maps data so at some level they were able to get what they need. I think there were rumours about them using undocumented abilities too in the early days, but my memory is fuzzy at this point. They moved to OSM later.

I think Niantic was a company within Google originally, then it spun off into its own thing when Google restructured with Alphabet.