OsmAnd 4.3 for Android devices | Hacker News Reader

OsmAnd 4.3 for Android devices

osmand.net

350 pointsraybb138 comments

I've ridden my bicycle on 4 continents clocking up over 35,000 km. OsmAnd was my primary navigation app except for the 6,000 km in China where I used Baidu maps.

So I'm really excited about the app being more responsive on my next tour.

I recorded my tours with OsmAnd and then (after some post processing) created maps like this: http://kundi.ge/summary-of-cycling-in-eastern-europe/

https://www.cycleblaze.com/journals/5000years/summary-of-chi...

https://www.cycleblaze.com/journals/roads2rome/summary/

I see you went long distances along the Danube, how was it in terms of cycling infrastructure?

Pretty good. Some countries like Slovakia built cycle ways on the levies.

The EU also pours money into bicycle touring: They design and promote the Euro Velo routes (signposts). I believe they run a few campsites.

But there are other reasons why the Danube is the most popular bicycle touring route in the world: It's flat and it passes through many cities of great historical significance.

I also like to stop and chat to other cyclists when I see them and that occurs frequently on the Danube route.

Between Passau (Germany-Austria border) and Vienna, you have asphalt for most of it, with some unpaved/compacted parts (it may have improved since 2015). You need to cross the river by small boats (for a fee) a few times. For bicycle touring, checking the type of surface on OpenStreetMap beforehand can be quite useful. Travelling on unpaved paths is not at all as fast as on asphalt is you have an hybrid bike (my case).

I would add that even farther East than that, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary have decent infrastructure for cycling long distances.

you can stick to these routes if you wanna cris-cross Europe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EuroVelo

Did you use brouter or the normal routing?

I've never used brouter.

My work flow is: 1. Talk to other cyclists to find nice long distance routes. Google the country I'm in for interesting places. Google cgoab. From that I find waypoints that I want to visit.

2. Use https://cycle.travel to generate route suggestions. Compare with Google maps (pedestrian) routing.

3. Compare with OsmAnd "balanced" routing. Sometimes with "elevation" enabled.

4. Start cycling.

Where OsmAnd excel is modifying the route. Adding additional waypoints: "first intermediate destination", "subsequent destination" etc.

Or I would compare the route with the one I downloaded from cycle.travel while I'm riding.

OsmAnd can highlight Euro Velo and other cycle networks and sometimes I will follow that instead of the route generated by the software.

PS: I rarely wild camp. I often look for cheap accommodation on booking.Com, Google maps or Warm Showers. That complicates the above process even further.

Thanks!

Every so often I try to use OsmAnd again for navigation. It's... sufficient for most things. But I can't understand why it still fails at a basic address search. Why can't I just copy-paste an address into the search bar? I'm not going to individually search the state and then the city and then try to figure out what's the base road and then estimate where on the road whatever number it is. That should all happen automatically

I've had the same frustration. I don't know too much about OSM so I might be completely off but I think it has something to do with address ranges being specified but individual addresses not being assigned shapes.

I'm not an expert either, but my understanding is that it's actually the opposite. From what I've seen, geocoders can find an address great when there's an exact match whether it's a point or area/shape. But they struggle to extrapolate or interpolate to find a spot along a road. ("Range")

Agreed. I added all the house numbers in my neighborhood into OSM. Now OSM and apps using OSM will take me to my home address. Before it would only find my street and take me to the midpoint.

I've had the exact same experience with Ranges.

It’s a mismatch between OSM’s address format and the normal address format.

Osmand does basic string matching for search so it only finds exact matches. You search for 108 1st st Portland, OSM has 108 1st street Portland, Osmand finds nothing.

Geocoding is a non-trivial problem, and OSM's engine,Nominatim [1] isn't great.

[1] https://nominatim.org/

There is not "an" engine used by OSM -- Nominatim is used by the application at OpenStreetMap.org, but I'm fairly sure OsmAnd does not use it.

OsmAnd used to integrate nominatim as an option (it was called "Online Search"). It worked okay. Unfortunately, that option has been removed.

Do you know a reson?

The search works well, but only if you follow a specific input structure of typing in the first letter of each, clicking Country->City->Street->House number and fails with anything beyond that. Anything else, like searching for businesses fails miserably, even though it is indexed properly in OSM and shows up in OsmAnd.

There used to be an app using Google's API to search addresses and output coordinates to OsmAnd, but support stopped after API changes IIRC. Quite a sad statement, that that app had to be made in the first place.

It really is the achilles heel on an otherwise great app. With plugins, it even surpasses Google Maps in terms of extensibility.

Seems like a fuzzy search would yield decent results if you already have the database

Are there any guides for getting started with OsmAnd?

I think this video is a pretty good guide to get started (only 1 year old) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzY1qROPLV0

Same creator's video on advanced features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ctb_S9Fb-8

That ... Doesn't work reliably for me. Heck I type "United" and "United States of America" isn't anywhere in the list.

Then it also Geocodes poorly. The place where I grew up has a dearth of incorporated towns and cities due to the legal structures in place. However, each address has a well defined item that goes in the "City" portion of the mailing address. OsmAnd gets it right about 1% of the time. Plus, it lacks most house numbers for the area, so I end up just looking for the nearest intersection.

I personally am alright with that annoying thing given that the alternative is Google tracking my location in real-time.

While not ideal, I've found a usable solution.

This GitHub repo [1] has map files generated using OpenAddresses.

Load the appropriate one for your area and you can search using addresses in the normal format. They currently provide maps for North America, and are regenerated roughly monthly.

(Thank you pnoll1!)

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

Also have maps for au, ca and mx.

Maps for this month just got posted.

Same experience, and I'd love it if it were fixed, but I've already adjusted my behavior to compensate. What I do is create my own waypoints before I get in the car. I can compare against Google's mapdata from the comfort of my home, drop a pin on OsmAnd, and then it routes me without fail.

Google abuses Maps users when they are not signed into the app on Android. It will not remember more than a handful of previously-visited or searched addresses. At the bottom of the meager seven-item list, there's a dark pattern which points out how tired the user must be of retyping addresses, and promises to make things better if they would only just sign in.

This makes me extremely, irrationally angry to think about. To me this is a bigger usability crisis than OsmAnd's funny search. I know the phone has enough resources to save nearly infinite addresses, but Google has purposefully broken this functionality.

Programming software which abuses the user by explicitly refusing to cache local-first search results is unethical and should be illegal, and the persons responsible for taking Google Maps in this direction should be dragged into court and prosecuted.

This seems like using incognito mode and complaining that it doesn't remember anything about you. The point of not signing in is to preserve your privacy and remembering your search history is the opposite of that.

Maybe, if you have already been conditioned to use Chrome while logged into your Google account and you see that as normal. That ship sailed a few years ago I suppose.

The point of not signing in is that I'm not signed in, and so either your software still works, or it's worse than useless. Guess which one Google picked.

Also doesn't explain why Maps keeps a handful of search results around, right beside the dark pattern they employ to try and get people to log in.

That seems too binary. Maps is still quite useful if you’re not logged in. They didn’t have to allow it at all. Why is limited functionality “worse than useless?”

I guess I am speaking just about the software that does their search. The rest of Maps is ok and still useful in spite of the search software being purposefully hamstrung. I still use it often for its search which is first-class is most other ways.

There are other avenues to this too like driving in a car can be stressful and Maps' refusal to cache search queries can contribute to stress for people on the road (likely at some meaningful level if the sample size is large enough) which strikes me as unethical. Personally I'm super dependent on GPS so having a tool which doesn't try to stab me in the back while I operate heavy machinery is a huge relief. OsmAnd can save searchable waypoints, color-coded, with icons, in folders, supports import/export, all local-first.

How is "storing my search history on my local encrypted device" the opposite of preserving my privacy?

Is storing my phone contact list on a local SSD the opposite of having privacy? Is storing my credit card in my wallet in my pocket the opposite of privacy for the card number? What?

Keeping a complete search history on your device and making it available to every future version of Google Maps software to do whatever it wants seems kinda bad if you don't trust Google?

Then again, you upload any address you use to Google anyway, where it could in theory be recorded server side, so I guess we're trusting that Google won't break some of their promises regardless.

I had the same issue years ago, but there was a button where you could switch to a more reasonable search. Now I cant reproduce that behavior, cause I get a good search right away, maybe try updating.

I'm in the UK, and have found it really difficult to use osmand purely because of poor postcode search. A correctly formatted and valid postcode will be rejected by osmand, and this is not an "out in the sticks" postcode, but ones in a decent sized city (Bournemouth).

Its a real pity as this combined with a lack of real-time traffic makes it hard to use osmand, despite me being mostly Google free (and I'd love to not use maps at all).

> real-time traffic

That is just beyond FOSS I fear. Live traffic would entail centralized data collection, which goes against the F in FOSS. Make it opt-in and you will never have the user count needed for real time traffic tracking. A P2P real time traffic exchange would be out of scope magic smoke.

OsmAnd Live is as close as we will get to that. I was suprised by OsmAnd live actually properly reporting road construction within 3 days, but beyond that best case, this is something OsmAnd won't become I think.

I was thinking about this the other day while giving it a spin after the renderer update. To me, the privacy benefits of having community-sourced maps downloaded and routes calculated locally, would be eliminated by adding in what is essentially a GPS data botnet. I would rather lose out on that data.

As with most things in the privacy world, it's a tradeoff. Nearly everything is privacy/freedom vs. convenience.

First order, yes.

Second order, people may avoid OsMand entirely if it doesn't provide the functionality they want, in favor of Google Maps. That's a privacy loss.

Perhaps it should be a togglable option? The perfect is the enemy of the good.

The toggleability of it would kill its usefulness. Most people wouldn't opt-in, whether for privacy reasons, or not realizing it's there.

I'm not thinking necessarily that sort of traffic service, but more some way of converting the kind of radio broadcast of traffic (that my 2008 Renault Trafic's navigation makes use of) and then using that sort of thing - particularly as osmand isn't going to have enough market share to generate meaningful traffic data. No idea on the licensing front of if that's allowed, but there must be a solution that either isn't crowd-sourced, or does so in an ethical way. After all, you don't HAVE to sell users' data on if you collect it, it just seems to be what everyone does without actually thinking about it.

This is most likely because geocoding (converting an address to lat/long coordinates) is a non-trivial thing to implement, and any 3rd party service that might offer an integration point to provide this directly in OsmAnd probably wants money, wouldn't be compliant with FOSS licenses, and could easily introduce privacy concerns.

I typically use an online geocoder website (there are several out there) to convert an address to lat/long and then enter those coordinates into OSMand. It's a less-than-ideal workflow but it works.

Maybe optional integrations to enable or log in with credentials to those services through OsmAnd. It already has plugin support. It would be nice to at least have the option to streamline that process.

OsmAnd used to integrate nominatim (a free online geocoder) and it just worked (but it was nearly impossible to figure out how to use the online search instead of the broken local search). Unfortunately, that disappeared a few updates back.

Organic Maps has a search function that works for addresses (and it is FOSS).

Pure Maps has search function that works for addresses (and it is FOSS).

Yeah this is a crippling problem. That previous suggestion for address data on GitHub seems worth it and I might try it.

That said I currently use an app called GPS Coordinates. I input the address there, it spits out lat/long coordinates, and I paste those into OSMAnd. It's not elegant but it gets the job done. It's a hassle trying to go back and review an address though.

I cancelled my OsmAnd subscription because the navigation is mediocre, the interface is awful in direct sunlight, and the developers respond to requests with "I don't understand why you want that".

Riding back roads, I'd regularly get a navigation prompt telling me to continue straight on the road I'm already on, with no other options. I had better navigation instructions on the software I developed for PocketPC back in the early 2000s.

If you try to create a custom route by tapping a spot on a road, it will often actually select a spot on some tiny, invisible offshoot. It will then relentlessly try to navigate to said offshoot, requiring you to pull over and futz around with the interface to delete the waypoint.

All of this is made even worse by the low-contrast UI with tiny buttons. It works great when you're planning your route at home. Not so much when you're on the side of the road on a motorcycle on a blazingly hot summer day.

Finally, now that I'm going farsighted, I need certain UI elements to be larger. There are plenty of requests for resizable widgets and the developers seem baffled as to why anyone would want that. Instead of giving customers what they want, they just ignore it.

Don't even get me started on trying to search for locations. OsmAnd is virtually useless for anything other than poring over a map and manually setting waypoints. Even that is hampered by the first issue I mentioned.

Edit: https://imgur.com/a/u23H479 oof

This is some pretty constructive and compelling feedback for the product, kudos. All of these issues would drive me absolutely insane (the motorcycle comment especially hits home). I hope their support team or devs are watching this thread.

> Riding back roads, I'd regularly get a navigation prompt telling me to continue straight on the road I'm already on, with no other options. I had better navigation instructions on the software I developed for PocketPC back in the early 2000s.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this, but it sounds like a bug in the underlying OpenStreetMap data, where one road has accidentally been modeled as two roads with an intersection between them. That you can fairly easily fix on your own.

The rest of your feedback I agree with (though I may disagree with your priorities, but that's fine -- we have different priorities.)

where one road has accidentally been modeled as two roads with an intersection between them.

That shouldn't matter. They should be processing whatever data they're getting from the mapping/navigation engine and removing things like that. Any 'intersection' with no actual intersection and no change in road name should be ignored.

That's what I meant about the software I wrote in the early 2000s doing a better job at navigation prompts.

It's also possible that OSMAnd was configured to repeat the instruction every 15 minutes or so. I don't recall if that's on by default, but I always turn it on so I get occasional reminders of how far it is to my next turn.

It happens randomly and sometimes repeatedly within a short period of time. I'm sure it's due to errors in the map data, but it still should be scrubbed from the prompt queue by OsmAnd.

The worst part of this kind of navigation bug (which I've experienced on other platforms as well) is that it obscures the next actual turn. I'll see there's some navigation event in 20 miles, but when I actually get there its just a "stay on this road for another 50 miles", which at that point its once again "stay on this road for another x miles..." I don't care about all of these stay on the road kind of events, I just want to know when my next exit might be even if that's in 300 miles.

I canceled my subscription of OsmAnd. My main complaints

  * UX very bad
  * routing engine crashes on longer stretches (iPhone 13)
  * sends bicycles on dangerous roads when alternatives exists

I switched to guru maps, with subscription it does the routing online and very fast. Has better selection of bicycle routes IMHO. Guru maps is better for bicycling than Google maps despite that their pronunciation is similar sometimes causing confusion.

OsmAnd is excellent when you're on mountain-trails or such. Google Maps isn't even any comparison there. People often say OsmAnd is bloated but I'm usually delighted when I want to do some very specific thing and after some searching find it.

The discoverability of places could be improved. I imagine this is more difficult when you dont collect data on people though...

One must be careful when hiking with OpenStreetMap (and OsmAnd) as reference. Several times I could barely find the path (maybe it was added by someone but not really official and maintained) and I had to follow the positioning to try to follow the virtual path in the high grass. (but I still rely a lot on OsmAnd).

In Norway that can easily be a problem with the official (https://www.norgeskart.no) maps as well. In some areas, unused paths will quickly deteriorate and I don't think all (if any) map-providers have good procedures to detect this. Decent foot paths in the wild is not always easily visible on satellite imagery, so relying on that alone wouldn't work.

It would be nice if openstreetmap-based apps had an easy way to mark a path or section of a path as low visibility[1]

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:trail_visibility

If anyone is looking for easy ways to contribute to OSM I highly recommend StreetComplete (which is a gamified quests to answer questions about your local area) and Every Door (which makes it very easy to add/update info about shops or other points of interest (POI) near you.

https://every-door.app/

https://streetcomplete.app/

I did this for a while, but it began to eventually creep me out that the app was asking me to input all kinds of irrelevant details about people's houses, like how many stories the house had and what style/shape of roof it had.

I get that they're trying to slurp up just some of the data a company like google gets from streetview surveillance vans, but I just don't see why any of that data has a legitimate need. I continued using the app a little while longer to fill in other details, like one-way streets in my area, but those sort of queries eventually dried up within the area I usually go for walks in.

Personally, I don't think that the details about houses (like how many stories and shape of roof) are very useful (compared to the other data it asks for like opening hours) so I turned off those quests in the settings. It would be nice if they weren't on be default.

One use of that data is creating 3d renders, like this site: https://osmbuildings.org/

I get it, I just don't think there is a need for that.

It's a map. Buildings are landmarks. Remember it's not just for routing your car journeys, it's meant to have everything on it. You look at the map, you see a square building. Is it a warehouse, a skyscraper, a radio antenna? Will you be able to see it from a mile away, and if so what will it look like? That's very relevant info. It might seem odd to be collecting data on people's homes, but it can't even guess that it might be somebody's home without asking you such questions. And the info it asks for is public anyway, it's not like you can't find it all out on Street View.

Last time I checked (last summer IIRC), you could choose not to display specific quests.

I've been using Vespucci for adding POIs and such, but it looks like Every Door has good sensible defaults that make things easy for a newbie like me. Thank you for mentioning it.

I wanted to give OsmAnd a try, to replace my dependency on Google services. I could not for the life of me find a setting to correclty transliterate Japanese names to my native language. I only found three states: 1) Display original Japanese characters 2) Transliterate. Here the problem was, that oftentimes, it used the chinese pronounciation of the characters instead of Japanese. 3) use translated names, where a lot are missing, and then it falls back to the original characters.

openstreetmap.de (my local variant) correctly transliterates even the smallest region names in Japan.

In the end, I used Google Maps to navigate during my vacation, and everything just worked.

Did you file bugs explaining these problems? That's the first step for someone to look at them.

Second step is, of course, if you can even fix them yourself.

> Second step is, of course, if you can even fix them yourself.

It is very likely GP could fix them themself. OpenStreetMap allows for tagging the same map item with different language labels for exactly this reason. OsmAnd is likely simply picking the GP's preferred language, and when that label does not exist, using the language that /is/ available for display.

GP could insert the translations into OpenStreetMap (within the proper language tag) at which point they will be available to everyone using the data, including OsmAnd.

That sounds like a lot of extra effort that should not be necessary, given that per GP,

> openstreetmap.de (my local variant) correctly transliterates even the smallest region names in Japan.

Nice, that they keep improving the app. However, Osmand gives mixed feelings.

Examples:

1) Going from Munich main train station south (Hauptbahnhof Süd) to Berlin main train station (Berlin, S+U Hauptbahnhof). Osmand tells me to download Czechia Northwest map. Doesn't make sense, the route doesn't even go through Czechia. Ok, I think. I download the missing map, app crashes. Restart the app, do the same search again. From one major German city to another. Pretty straight, it would be just one highway (A9) basically. Takes 4-5 minutes to calculate with a Samsung S22. That's just meh.

2) Do the same search again but this time set avoid highways. After 15 minutes still no result, I gave up.

3) The search function is contra-intuitive.

4) Even with a Samsung S22 the map is kind of slow if you just move the map around. For driving it seems ok though. The new engine might have speed up things but it still a far way to being smooth.

I don't complain, but I wish they would address especially the route planning and search.

Tip: if you download OsmAnd from F-Droid, you have the premium version for free

I've had f-droid OSMand for a long long time, recently I started getting a warning for google's "play protect" when I go to update it though. Very strange.

> Very strange.

Not at all. The google mothership wants to keep you within the play store's walled garden.

Fdroid allows you to escape the walls, so naturally google complains about that.

I have an F-Droid question.

The only way to download F-Droid (as far as I know) is to download the apk directly from their site: https://f-droid.org/. This means having to side-load the app. Of course doing that means I would want to do my due diligence and verify the download using the PGP Signature they provide. My question is how do I verify a PGP signature completely on my phone?

I do know how to verify it on my laptop, and then I could send it to myself or install it using adb. But I'm hoping there's a way to do this without having to involve a laptop.

OpenKeychain is an Android app for doing some basic GPG related work. It can verify signatures (hidden in the "encrypt/decrypt" menu)

Also it integrates i.e. with K-9 mail to sign and verify.

https://github.com/open-keychain/open-keychain

oh this looks promising, thank you! I'll try this out

If someone replaces the APK on their website with a compromised one, what prevents them from replacing the PGP signature with a signature created by the attacker?

You're not the only one. There are instructions using termux at the end of the thread.

https://forum.f-droid.org/t/help-needed-to-verify-the-f-droi...

"Warning: This app may track your GPS position" or similar. Not totally unexpected of a maps app.

Imagine Google showed warnings for all the pre-installed Google apps on every phone.

Warning: Google Background Services can read your SMSes, sideload apps without your knowledge or consent, request your location, and basically anything else your device is capable of doing (see the control panel in your Google account for what you, and Google, can make this do).

Warning: on some devices, Google Maps will nag you to upload WiFi access points every time you open the app. It's opt-in so technically legal!

Warning: every website you type in this browser's address bar will be sent to Google.

Warning: text you type on this keyboard may be sent to Google for improving text suggestions for everyone.

It would be a heck of a lot of pop ups on first boot and the best marketing Apple could ever wish for. Apple is not necessarily better, but they're not being hypocritical by adding warning labels for third party noncommercial open source alternatives (OsmAnd isn't the first one where Google does this, FairEmail has a similar story).

It seems out of date though, and doesn't include this new rendering engine.

Update your repos. The current version on fdroid is 4.3.8, released yesterday.

A new version was released today/yesterday in F-Droid. I've just upgraded and the first thing it says is "What's new in 4.3.5. New, faster Version 2 (OpenGL) map rendering engine, with 2.5D view"

Edit: Also, thanks to the replies here, I see that 4.3.5 was actually released in F-Droid on the 1st January, and 4.3.8 is also available since yesterday so I upgraded twice today already.

Nope, version 4.3.5 was posted to F-Droid right around the New Year.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.osmand.plus/

I got the update an hour ago, try refreshing repositories.

F-Droid does not always install the very latest versions by default unless you turn on Settings > Expert mode and then tick Unstable updates.

"Suggested" version on F-Droid is an older one, but you can choose to update to a newer one way at the bottom under Versions.

Edit: I updated my repositories (pull down on main screen) and now 4.3.5 is the Suggested version.

But now OsmAnd is putting new features behind their new subscription feature OsmAnd Pro.

https://osmand.net/docs/user/purchases/android

Which ones are you missing? Most of them seem available in the f-droid version.

It seems like they're putting features that need server support behind the subscription, which to be honest is fair enough?

Like elevation widget and route line color?

That said, it doesn't support android auto in the f-droid release, but that's more because of the way google does things than f-droid or osmand

Oh thank God. I've literally switched to Organic Maps because OsmAnd was so slow on my older Android smartphone.

This new version is much faster, although still not quite as buttery smooth as OM.

I really like OsmAnd for recording trails. It's a little nonobvious to enable; you have to go into "Plugins" (under the hamburger) and find/enable "Trip Recording". From there the UI is straightforward.

Why it is better than WikiLoc or similar tools?

It's good to see that OsmAnd is still being worked on. It's been a bit clunky and missing features for a long time, even though it's monetized. At the moment there's 2445 open issues on their Github, so it's understandable that pretty much every one gets marked as "nice to have" and then never revisited.

There's still poor/no kml/kmz-support (probably the gold standard to distribute routes, POIs, overlays, etc as a collection), it's difficult to use for newcomers, there's no split screen map and bike data like real bike computers, there's no integration with external services like Strava or Komoot for routes and trip uploads, it uses a lot of battery when navigating, etc. Even so, it's still the app I use for trips when I want to use offline maps, preplanned routes, and log where I've been.

The complaint I hear more often is that it has too many features, not missing features, making the UI nearly impossible to keep simple.

What's a split map?

I think they mean where half the screen shows a map and the other half shows Important Motivational Bike Stats (distance completed, speed, gradient, heart rate?)...

For the stats that OsmAnd can handle (e.g. speed, speed limit, elevation, ETA, you can configure what's in the pile of overlay boxes on the top right of the screen. I don't know if there's a plugin that could render the display as half-map, half-stats

It's not pitched as a bike computer. The cycle navigation mode just enables use of paths that may not be available to cars or pedestrians.

I have two use cases for maps. Navigation and POI discovery.

OsmAnd is complete fail for the second part. Maps.Me has some reviews but it's meager compared to Google Maps ofc.

I have over a hundred reviews on Google maps that I wrote. I can grab them using Google Takeout and since they're my IP (I'm in Germany) I would happily import them as reviews for the resp. POIs in OsmAnd (or Maps.Me). I.e. use them to contribute to OSM.

But how? This should be dead simple.

Open Street Maps doesn't aggregate review data, only business info. That said, OSM doesn't really encourage automated changes for understandable reasons (vandalism, interest in human validation, etc). It's a tradeoff that makes OSM a lot better in my rural area, but maybe not in an urban area with a lot of business turnover

Yeah, talk about a chicken-egg problem.

If you want people to use OSM-based apps in place of Google/Apple maps you need to provide a way to access/add/edit (and better also import) POI reviews.

W/o them average users will not switch because offline navigation via OSM is simply not good enough a reason. Particuarly if you have commercial (but free) stuff like HERE WeGo which does offline navigation better than any OSM-based app I've seen.

Agree, would be great with some kind of open POI service synced to OSM, and with reviews tacked on

FYI: You may want to check out Organic Maps, that is developed by the original Maps.me founders: https://organicmaps.app

There is Open Place Reviews: https://openplacereviews.org/. Also available as a plugin in OsmAnd: https://osmand.net/docs/user/plugins/openplacereviews

I saw 'Blockchain' on the top of that page and I closed the tab immediately.

Why does a review aggregator need a blockchain?

Also there is no way to import a review.json exported from Google Map via Takeout unless I'm blind.

Non-blockchain open review aggregator:https://mangrove.reviews/ still no import though.

I'll try not to rant, but a useful and complete open map system in my mind is one of the biggest things holding up a ton of innovation around mobile devices, search engines and even automotive by being able to divorce from apple/google/microsoft. I try to degoogle my life every so often and generally end up back on google after I try to type in an address for quick directions, orient myself in a foreign city or find an open restaurant near me.

Great news and I hope there's more and more work in this area.

I would love to see a federated way for local business to list themselves to be listed on open maps/search engines/etc instead of being listed on google business.

I agree, I think a related part of this is reviews. I often pick which coffee shop to go to based on reviews that say how the wifi is, if it's loud, what food people like there, etc. There is an effort to do this that's integrated with mapcomplete but as far as I know it's not too actively used. It's called mangrove reviews. https://mangrove.reviews/

What's preventing OpenStreetMap from being the system you envision, except for a lack of users?

> I would love to see a federated way for local business to list themselves to be listed on open maps/search engines/etc instead of being listed on google business.

What does federated mean in this case? Could OpenStreetMap be that Federation protocol?

I was imagining a system where you can essentially host your own file with your business metadata and different systems can use it for their own maps. In this case OSM could be aggregating businesses into their map to display local tire shops, etc. I the real power would be a third party aggregator for businesses that can use OSM to power the map itself where they manage the businesses/reviews/etc

I love OsmAnd for all outdoors related activities. The trails are well defined, navigation is good and gives a good estimate, maps are configurable with all you need, recording works well and spits out a gpx.

There are some quirks, and elevation in both tracking and planning is often off (I think it might try to use a too fine granularity).

But usability wise I didn't find anything that compares, even Gaia - which I still use when I need precise terrain (their 3d mode is just incredible) or some much more obscure trail that's not in OsmAnd

OsmAnd is my killer app on Android. And it did very nearly kill me when I droped my phone halfway through a multiday bushwacking hike and lost it as my only map XD

This was the one thing that was holding me back from maining OsmAnd. Been using it for the last couple weeks, and holy cow it's night and day when trying to scroll around the map. It wasn't an issue while I was already driving and it was navigating, but when I was trying to manually pan around, it was abysmal.

I just downloaded the app to try it just now. Sad to report that it feels like an alpha product. It thinks I live in Kansas and wanted me to download maps for that state. I live in the US, but over a thousand miles away from Kansas. It finally asked to use my location, which I approved, and even then it didn't ask if I wanted to download maps for my area. The map is completely blank on my screen. Some thought into basic UX flow would improve usability so much. I don't feel like trying to find out how to cajole this app into doing fundamental things that pretty much every other map app does easily.

Same here, Kansas is like three states away from me. It also didn't prompt me for location access, so I doubt it was even attempting to use location services whatsoever.

I used a few years OsmAnd+ on a pair of Samsung Galaxy S3 phones while touring across Europe; the first phone crashed from overheating, the second one died too (screen died), but OsmAnd was running fine on these antique phones, except the route calculation that was extremely slow. Having a faster rendering engine sounds nice, but it was never a problem for me. On a more modern phone I expect a good performance even with the old engine.

These days I don't use OsmAnd anymore; in my country Waze is more useful for me, outside it depends on the roaming charges. The only big advantage of OsmAnd is that in the past I could edit some maps and see the changes in the application a lost faster than Google Maps, but now Waze is fast too.

Do people here recommend OsmAnd over Organic Maps?

Organic Maps is lightweight and has a simple interface, sufficient for point to point navigation and browsing a map.

Osmand is incredibly powerful, customisable, and has many advanced features.

I've liked Organic Maps for anchoring while sailing. Drop anchor, set a marker in OM, and have it as a backup source if I can't see the shore anymore during a storm (I've got other instruments).

Just been checking out OSMAnd+ from FDroid for one reason: depth contours for the Great Lakes. Seems reasonable from a quick check of some of my anchorages. Again, I have a back-up source for these as well: https://activecaptain.garmin.com/en-US/Map as well as paper & chartplotter. I'd love to see this depth layer in Organic Maps.

OsmAnd is one of the very few software I am thankful for every day.

I want to love OsmAnd. I've tried it many times over the years, but the only functionality that it does better than other apps is bookmarks/favourites (it actually allows you to organise them into folders, if you can imagine such a thing!). In literally every other (functional) respect, Waze beats the pants off of it.

OsmAnd worked great with multitouch on my old ms surface (fedora+waydroid) but now it crashes after a few seconds. I hope to get it up and running, it is amazing for offline maps on such a big screen.

Oh wow, it seems to have very nice rendering for MTB tracks. I need to try that out. I had a go at adding lots of local MTB tracks as routes in OSM, so I have lots to try it out on!

Worth trying mapy.cz too https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.seznam.mapy

Cool bean.

They even fixed that pesky version popup with inaccessible "dismiss" button right away on my JVC stereo.

Great app for my driving needs in Eastern US starboard.

Useful with Apple CarPlay.

Beware that this has an option to send a UUID when downloading maps and this option has been enabled by default.

Wow, their pricing is super high. I can't imagine who the target demographic for this is when google maps / etc are free.

The target demographic for OsmAnd is people who prefer to pay for services with money instead of their privacy. Google Maps is only free if you consider your personal information and privacy to be valueless.

If you can live with your maps only being updated once a month, it's a one-time payment of 25€ for the entire world. I don't think that's too expensive? You can save some euros by waiting for a sale (there's one right now in fact), or by buying just the Europe maps for example, but... I really didn't think it's too much.

On the other hand I can agree that the subscription feels more pricey, but if people make use of the hourly map updates it's probably quite justified, given the bandwidth costs.

Only on Play store, seems like a good "market segmentation" spot to me.

I paid a small once off amount and it's for life.

Feels the same for me. Still laggy and bad UI, but cool.

can anyone compare it to mapy.cz, is it better finally?

Just downloaded it and tried it. Still miles off being as good as mapy.cz. Even OrganicMaps is smoother than OsmAnd and navigation still takes far too long.

I just tried it, Mapy.cz is still considerably faster on my Samsung S10.

> 2.5D projection

Awesome, this feature was really missing.

How do I upgrade?

It looks like they have it out on the google store, but not F-droid yet. There are links at the bottom of the post.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com