Issue with OpenStreetMap Tiles Not Loading in Our Published App

Hello OSM Community,

We’ve been using OpenStreetMap tiles with Leaflet in our mobile app for the past 6-8 months, and everything was working fine until recently. However, we’ve now started facing an issue where tiles do not load in the app. The same tile URLs work fine when accessed directly in a browser, so we suspect there might be a rate limit or some other restriction affecting our app.

Our Setup:

We use Leaflet.js to display maps in our React Native WebView, with the following tile setup:

L.tileLayer(‘https://tile.openstreetmap.org/{z}/{x}/{y}.png’, { maxZoom: 19 }).addTo(map);

We have around 300 daily active users across India. Each user:

Loads the map twice per session (for marking in & out).

Uses the map during location tracking (fetching lat/long from a database to UI).

On average, each user loads tiles 4-6 times per day.

Issue:

Maps were working fine for months but suddenly stopped loading.

No API keys or external tile services are used, just the default OpenStreetMap tiles.

The same tile URL works fine in a browser but not inside the app.

No error messages in the console except that the tiles fail to load.

Switching to another tile provider (tile.openstreetmap.fr) works, so this might be an OSM-specific issue.

We’d like to confirm:

  1. Are we being rate-limited? (Given our user base, we don’t think we’re exceeding fair usage.)

  2. Is there a better way to use OSM tiles in a published app to avoid such issues?

  3. Would setting up a tile proxy or self-hosted tiles be a recommended solution?

Any guidance on this issue would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

1 Like

You are likely not adhering to Tile Usage Policy

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