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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 rejecte

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).

FrostKiwi 4y ago
> 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.
- seanw444 4y ago
  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.
  - dTal 4y ago
    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.
    - seanw444 4y ago
      The toggleability of it would kill its usefulness. Most people wouldn't opt-in, whether for privacy reasons, or not realizing it's there.
- djaychela 4y ago
  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.

FrostKiwi 4y ago

> 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.

seanw444 4y ago
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.
- dTal 4y ago
  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.
  - seanw444 4y ago
    The toggleability of it would kill its usefulness. Most people wouldn't opt-in, whether for privacy reasons, or not realizing it's there.
djaychela 4y ago
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.