Hacker News Reader

Comment by dbrgn | Hacker News Reader

If you need OSM on Android, I can recommend:

- "Organic Maps" (a fork of the old MapsMe codebase) if you want a clean, simple user experience

- "OSMAnd" if you want a very powerful, highly customizable map application, which comes at the cost of a steeper learning curve

Both apps are open source and support navigation, offline maps and POI search.

The things I miss most compared to Google Maps is live traffic information and the powerful search. However, this has a privacy cost, so I generally try to use OSM first, and only fall back to Google Maps (in the browser) if I really need to.

View on HN

Lets not forget StreetComplete is a dead easy app to use to help contribute to OSM. It just asks you a few questions like "is this bench still here" or "is there a bike lane on this road" etc

https://streetcomplete.app/

Can I use this app to suggest issues? In one of my projects I found a bunch of buildings that have either the wrong direction or the wrong coordinates. Think "Random street 1, 2 and 4 are next to each other, but Random street 3 is 500m away". But since it's a city I don't live in I can't go there in person and confirm.

You can report issues by long pressing and tapping "Create a note" which people will eventually review and fix.

I love this app and use it frequently. Great excuse to take little walks around town.

I use OSMand for walking and biking and it's great, much better than Google Maps in my region. Just remember to choose the right kind of traffic in the settings when starting navigation.

It's not as good for driving.

Organic Maps is also significantly more optimized in my experience (or maybe a more fair thing to say would be: is faster because it does less). So it pays to have both because OM is basically the "fast path" for its use case in more ways than just the interface.

I also had some success with HERE maps: https://wego.here.com

Their Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.here.app.m...

Their Apple app: https://apps.apple.com/app/id955837609

The performance is good (especially on a budget Android device, better than the recent versions of Google Maps, even), they're reasonably accurate (I'm in Eastern Europe) and include navigation, traffic information, public transportation, as well as the ability to save regions for offline browsing.

I can't comment on the company behind it, though, but it's a nice alternative nonetheless (and there are simple prompts for choosing whether you want to send them any data, e.g. to enrich traffic information).

Edit: as a criticism, some Android reviews suggest that recent updates have made the app less performant than previous versions, though I didn't notice anything in particular on my current device (2020 budget phone). Some also suggest that navigation needs more work.

One of the best features of HERE maps is the ability to download entire countries' maps and turn off data.

This was a life saver when roaming when data charges were really exorbitant.

Google Maps Android also supports offline maps downloading of selected regions. However the download is only valid for a year.

From where do they get traffic information? The only viable app that I've ever seen for traffic data is Waze, because of the huge install base. I do remember HERE from when they were a Nokia brand, but even with that history I think that they'd be too small to have good traffic information.

HERE is currently owned by a consortium of Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi. So I guess that's where their traffic info is from.

Thank you. Sounds like they'll have a ton of data for LA, not so much data for Detroit ))

I can also recommend this app for driving. My experience is better with this than with goggle and speed limit information is very useful.

Is panning and zooming in OSMAnd not a huge pain for anyone else? The map rendering (of downloaded maps) is extremely sluggish and absolutely useless for me to use. (Even worse than the tile-based rendering of early Maps on iPhone.)

Organic and MagicEarth work fine for me. I really wonder if it is just my setup or if everyone else suffers from this. I am on a Pixel 5 with CalyxOS using the OSMAnd+ from Fdroid (but same with normal OSMAnd from Aurora)

I have the exact opposite experience with OSMAnd on Android.

The map rendering of OSMAnd is faster than Google Maps (using a 3+ year old smart phone with a low-end Realtek SoC). Like really way way faster/snappier.

My setup is a Chinese brand Android 10 with default OS (rooted)and OSMAnd+ from Fdroid.

The only possible cause I could think of is that CalyxOS is somehow missing proper video drivers for your Pixel?

Hmm interesting, thanks for letting me know. I always wondered why people recommend OSMAnd when it performs so poorly. Will look into this.

It may be a bug of Android: Newer Android versions have further locker down sd card access. The implementation is apparently super slow for stuff like what Osmand uses. Dont put the map data onto the sd card or use one of the predefined locations

https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/issues/12046 https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/issues/13254

Edit: If that is not the culprit then check if OpenGL rendering is activated.

You can also deactivate unneeded features from being rendered (buildings, areas, etc). And lastly there are smaller road-only maps (no POI data and no adresses though)

Thanks for letting me know. I don't have a sd card, activated the dev plugin and enabled opengl but did not see any real improvement. I will open an issue with a screen recording on their repo now that I know it is not supposed to be this bad.

It's not just you. This comment claiming better performance than Google Maps is baffling to me. OSMand has been slow on every phone I've owned (OnePlus 2, Pixel 3a and Pixel 6a). Enabling OpenGL and restarting improves panning/zooming framerate, but tiles are generated at the same slow speed (maybe even slightly slower).

What really matters is the amount of data. In my local town I can scroll around no problem, but in a more actively mapped area like Amsterdam it takes at least couple seconds to load.

I'm a OSMand user and OSM contributor. However, sometimes I hate the routing OSMand provides, taking me through narrow streets with awkward turns. Wish they used GraphHopper... A nice feature in OSMand is that even if you get the free version off the Play store, if you log in with OSM and are active, you get free map updates and all the "plus" functions. And on top of that, the full plus version is available off F-Droid.

By the way, OSMand has some support for reporting traffic issues (police, crashes), but it's very very limited due to low adoption way below a critical mass. Also, reporting traffic status would probably require OSMand to run a pretty beefy server and get the current speed/traffic info from all the users - many chose it exactly because they don't want that.

Maybe you know. I've been told twice that OSMand can show the altitude above sea level of a location, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how. Have you any idea?

Thanks!

It's these steps:

- go to pugins section and activate the contour lines plugin

- then go to download maps and load the contour lines data for your region

- go to configure map and check the show contour lines option

I think you need the f-droid Version or the paid pro Playstore version or the subscription. Please note that this will only show marked contour lines and not interpolate/estimate the elevation for any point. So you need to search for the next line and get your own idea what that means for the specific location. Not ideal for very flat areas with sparse contour lines.

For the current position you can show GPS elevation (settings, configure screen, widgets)

Perfect, thank you! In fact most of my apps are from F-droid when possible.

On iOS, I have mine configured to show the altitude in the top right corner of the map view. The settings are admittedly confusing but if you just poke around in the map display settings you should find it!

I have Organic Maps, because I thought it would be nice to have in case of an emergency where I don't have internet, but sadly just a few weeks ago, I had such a case and Organic Maps couldn't find the address and the map itself didn't have all the roads on it (nor satelite or topology map), so I couldn't even use it as a normal map... In the end I had to resort to one archaic ways and ask local humans for directions...

Google maps does offer being able to download for offline use, but if you don't have internet it quite often doesn't want to do navigation, unless you trick it with saved directions.

How does Garmin do it (I'm guessing map licencing issue)?

And how come this isn't already a solved issue?

Both Organic Maps and OsmAnd are available on iOS as well.

I hope the author of OSMAnd makes enough money from the play store to finance continued development, because the application is amazing, it has an interface that is not dumbed down, it does not phone home to the mother ship, it gives you great tracks, in short it is a great tool that respects the end user.

I wish more applications were like it, first thing I install on my phone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com