And improving OSM _feels_ great in my experience. It's actually and primarily helping the open-source community.
Google really incentivizes users to fix map data (like business info) and, after doing so, shows you popups like "Your change was seen by 10,000 people!". Really good UX. Yet, I was only doing free work for a mega corp which doesn't feel as satisfying (and I stopped doing so).
My feelings exactly. I first got drawn to editing OSM instead of Waze because of local Waze volunteers acting like mini dictators (locking the map for people under a certain level, leading to inaccuracies like wrongly labelled construction in my own street which I could see with my own eyes but could not edit), not being an unpaid worker for Alphabet was a nice bonus and the reason I stayed in the long run.
Yeah, sadly that's a bit of a chicken-egg problem. OSM isn't popular enough to crowdsource that information as well as Google can.
Though in the spirit of "be the change you want to see", it's pretty easy to add opening hours any business you notice is missing them. Every Door and Street Complete are good, user-friendly editors on mobile.
The reason why OSM doesn't have it and Google does isn't because Google crowdsources it. It is because Google is straightforward to work with for the companies who provide that data, and OSM is impossible.
Yes, there are companies whose job it is to get opening hours to various sites. Someone like Walmart will write a contract, and send a regular spreadsheet. The company then processes the spreadsheet, and pushes data out to Google, Facebook, Apple, and so on.
I know this because I was the lead developer at one of those companies for a while. Everyone except OSM is happy to accept an address, maybe a suite number, and then information about phone numbers, opening hours, holiday hours, and so on. OSM insists on detailed geolocation data. If you don't have it, then they won't take your data. Period.
You have the name and address of the mall, and a suite number? Facebook will just report that. Google will take your data and separately figure out how to map out where it is in the mall if it is important. OSM refuses to take the data.
You have data from Walmart with every Walmart address, and every department's phone number, opening hours, holiday hours, and so on? Apple, Yelp, and so on will love you for it. OSM tells you that they need the store layout.
We asked OSM about it. Their answer? I kid you not. "Send someone to the store and map it out then." They really have no clue about how much sending someone to the store costs, and how little these intermediary companies get paid to provide the data. What they demand. Will. Not. Happen.
What OSM should do is provide a way to accept that data in a feed, then let any volunteer tie the feed to the geomapped location. That way between a local volunteer and the companies that supply everyone else, they'd get the standard data that everyone else has.
They don't. After looking at the economics, we had to go hat in hand to Walmart and apologize. "We know that you wanted to be on OSM, but this is what it will take to do it. We can't do that, and we're going to have to take the penalty in the contract."
Yeah, you heard that right. Walmart wanted to cooperate with OSM. But because OSM put roadblocks in place for us, it didn't happen. Not due to lack of popularity to crowdsource information. But because OSM developers have their heads firmly up their asses when it comes to figuring out how to deal with businesses who actively want to deal with them.
