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.
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).
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.
Same creator's video on advanced features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ctb_S9Fb-8
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.
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).
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.
As with most things in the privacy world, it's a tradeoff. Nearly everything is privacy/freedom vs. convenience.
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.
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!)
Maps for this month just got posted.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.