I think mbtiles are being phased out for pmtiles because no DB required and can be served from static storage like R2/S3 (with a worker but hopefully the worker part goes away and they support byte offset requests soon)

The worker isn’t required, having a z/x/y tile scheme just makes caching the tiles server side super easy.

Look at the network tab on https://pmtiles.io/#url=https%3A%2F%2Fdemo-bucket.protomaps....

You don't need a database to serve mbtiles. If you're deploying PMTiles somewhere that doesn't support byte offset requests, then they don't really have much advantage over mbtiles.

That depends what you mean by needing a database. MBtiles files are SQLite database files, so you need a SQLite process running somewhere to extract the requested tiles.

An mbtiles file is just an SQLite db which can store image or vector tiles which can be very useful.

It's great for exploring tiles but it essentially doesn't support range queries/requests, which pmtiles does.

To answer the question: somebody needs to do the initial work and it's a further moving part that needs to be kept running (as the other responses point out such a distribution would likely use PMTiles as a container format). Given the current finances and staffing of the OSMF likely not top priority.

But they've done the work and are serving them now, just wondering why they don't just dump a copy on AWS. Thanks for answering!

Protomaps does this already. They do a planet build each day and offer a download for free:

https://docs.protomaps.com/basemaps/downloads

This is excellent. Thank you.