Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

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I fully agree, Osmand is so close to being great. It's clear that a ton of work has been put into it, but has a few major flaws that make it nearly useless. It's the first open source project I've considered contributing to, and I might do it soon.

* The jank you mention - it was one of the first things I noticed as well.

* Search just doesn't work. They have addresses and POI in their database, but for whatever reason, search strings don't match, and addresses don't work at all either. It's completely broken.

* Really needs the ability to toggle direction mode, i.e. always pointing north, or pointing in the direction of travel or the device's compass.

I also would like to add a couple improvements that are not really flaws with the app:

* Ability to record GPS path

* Ability to share recordings/trails - would allow me to get rid of AllTrails

Regarding the issues with search, this tool[0] uses OpenAddresses to facilitate more natural search.

This largely rectified the address search in OSMAnd for me, though it does not update automatically and so requires occasional reapplication.

Hope that helps!

[0] https://github.com/pnoll1/osmand_map_creation

I will try it, thanks!

Another contributing factor with the jank is the "snapping" to discrete zoom levels. One of the primary benefits of rendering vector tiles is continuous zoom!

Also, the direction mode toggle you mention does exist, and works quite well. The flipside of Osmand's awesome configurability is that it takes me 5 minutes of digging to figure out how to enable things like this.

> * Really needs the ability to toggle direction mode, i.e. always pointing north, or pointing in the direction of travel or the device's compass.

It does this.

> * Ability to record GPS path

It does this.

Excellent, I will look again.

There is trip recording, but it's disabled by default (check the plugins menu), probably to avoid cluttering the main screen too much. You get a gpx file that you can view and export.

There is also an option for "pointing north", "pointing in the direction on the compass", "pointing in the direction of movement". It's not intuitive though: double-tap the compass icon.

For trip recording, in OsmAnd~'s sidebar check out the "Plugins" menu item and enable Trip Recording.

Not sure why this comment was dead - there is indeed a trip recording plugin. Would be nice if it were enabled by default.

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