What street am I on?

Where the street name comes from

Your phone knows coordinates, not street names. To turn them into a street, we send your position to a mapping service built on OpenStreetMap, and it returns the nearest street and building it has on record. The card above is that answer, along with how far it can be trusted.

Why the house number is sometimes missing

A street is easy to get right. If your position is good to a couple of hundred metres, the nearest street is almost always the one you are on, or the one your building faces.

A house number is harder, and two things have to hold before we print one. Your position has to be accurate to within sixty metres, and the building the map matched has to be within twenty-five metres of you. If either check fails, you get the street on its own. Printing the number anyway would mean showing you a neighbour's address with full confidence, and that is the mistake this app was built to avoid.

When the answer is a neighbourhood, not a street

Indoors, underground, or on a phone that only has a Wi-Fi or mobile network estimate, your position can be off by a kilometre or more. Then the card says "neighbourhood only" and names the area instead of a street. Step outside or near a window for a few seconds and the reading usually sharpens on its own.

Reading it out to someone

Use the share button to send the street, the house number when it is known, and a map pin in one message. The person you send it to sees the same accuracy figure you do, so they know whether to look for a door or for a block.

If you want the full reasoning behind leaving things out rather than guessing, we wrote it down.