7 ms·
OsmAnd’s Faster Offline Navigation (2025)
- tencentshill 8mo agoDid they add any form of functional nautical navigation? It always jumps to the nearest road on LAND. The feature should be removed if it doesn't work.
- wtallis 8mo agoI've had the nautical navigation work fine when canoeing on rivers and streams where you're following linear features on the map. What it lacks is the ability to plot a sensible course across a polygon of open water.
- RunningDroid 8mo agoRumor has it that routers have the same issue with highway areas so best practice is to add a "spine" to them https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:area:highway#Routers https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:area:highway#Routers https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposal:Area_highway/mapping_guidelines https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposal:Area_highway/ma...
- wtallis 8mo agoThe presence of such spines in open bodies of water just makes nautical routes come out particularly stupid, where the route presented calls for you to immediately go to that spine and travel along it, unnecessarily lengthening the route.
- namibj 8mo agoSame problem for pedestrian plaza structures btw. Though there it's arguably worse as it has a good chance of affecting routing choice not just user presentation.
- pwg 8mo agoAny chance the profile you were using had the "snap to nearest road" option turned on? If that option was on for the profile then that would be why it jumped to the nearest road.
- teddyh 8mo ago(2025)
- XorNot 8mo agoAt this point I prefer OsmAnd navigation over Google maps. Maps reliably does stupid things like route through winding residential streets because it thinks that's faster and can obviously be done at the full posted speed limit. OsmAnd on the other hand builds routes I would build: get on the main road and get close, then get to the destination.
- greenavocado 8mo agoIf you lower max speed for your chosen transportation method osmand will alter your routing very significantly
- XorNot 8mo agoI mean, sure? But I don't do that. For city driving OsmAnd makes a sensible route which sticks to main roads whereas Google Maps was getting so bad me and my wife stopped using it because it's choices were bafflingly weird, and would do things like "make 8 turns down residential streets, then obviously make a turn across the busy 4 lane main road you could've already been driving on". Google Maps for whatever reason routes like a residential street and turn can be negotiated at exactly the speed limit the whole way through.
- macintux 8mo agoNot only annoying for the driver, but also for the residents.
- brendyn 8mo agoI use osmand for privacy but I think it just emphasises main roads. In Melbourne it always suggests turning off cemetery road west because it doesn't know it's congested and will get me stuck for 20 minutes. And there are some missing slip roads. And navigation constantly fails to start. I wonder, how difficult is it to make minor edits to the map data?
- evertheylen 8mo ago
- pavon 8mo agoA while back I was using OsmAnd on a ~700 mile route, and it was taking over 10 minutes despite most of the route ending up being on a single highway. I tried that same route just now and it took 7 seconds. Such a great improvement!
- lejalv 8mo agoFor those of you using OSMAnd - do you think there is any chance that they will offer public transport routing? I would at once get the 15-year XV plan if they got this, but perhaps it's at odds with their motto “Offline Maps and Navigation”? (even if I personally could live with schedule-based routing, i.e. not real-time routing, at least for a while).
- yorwba 8mo agoYou can enable the "public transport" profile in OsmAnd, today. It might not support your local area, though.
- schaum 8mo agoAnd there are no realtime updates,for example bus won't even go on a Sunday but it would still route you like it would ..
- netsharc 8mo agoThe "But Google" rebuttal: I was in a city when they had a public transport strike. The buses/trams would run at irregular times, but as far as Google knew (maybe the public transport company told them so), no buses would run at all. So trying to get anywhere, Google Maps would say "Walk 20 minutes to the nearest train station, take the train, walk 15 minutes to your final destination.". I had to trick it and say I want to depart 6 months in the future so it would show which tram/bus-lines I actually need, where I can go to the stop and take a chance that one would show up..
- yorwba 8mo agoIf the bus never goes on a Sunday, it should be possible to record that in the opening_hours according to the Public Transport v2 scheme: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Public_transport https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Public_transport Still not real-time, but better than nothing.
- 2Gkashmiri 8mo agoyears ago i added a bunch of bus stops in my city. the app never picked that up. busses don;t work.
- szewachvice 8mo agoI don't know how everyone is getting these faster speeds. I set my navigation to HH x C++ and it still takes several minutes to calculate routes of just a couple km. I love Osmand, but bugs like these are par for the course with the app. Going back to online Graphhopper routing.
- Aachen 8mo agoSeveral minutes for a few km of car driving¹ is not normal. Even the old A* method didn't take that long on my first Android phone from like 2012 If you want this obvious bug solved, you'll have to provide more info, such as - what hardware is this on, - what software version, - what map version(s), - an example route where you can reproduce it (even if that's "every route" for you, it might still be specific to your region of the world), - which profile you have selected, assuming you haven't modified it (otherwise, export the profile so we can try it)... I don't know how you're expecting HN to narrow down the issue from a mere "it's slow for me". You'll also have more luck in an OsmAnd community such as on https://telegram.me/OsmAndMaps https://telegram.me/OsmAndMaps or elsewhere. If you think it'll be reproducible, then the bug tracker would be the right place https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/issues https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/issues ¹ maybe walking has to visit every alley and be slower if your profile modifications can't use the HH optimisation. You'll have to share details if you don't want people to have to make assumptions like this
- n4r9 8mo agoSome of those objections to Contraction Hierarchies are possibly a little out of date. Modern variants of the technique allow for rapid live traffic customisation, see e.g. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.10519 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.10519 . I suspect that the "nested dissection" approach also allows for regional maps. It's been a while since I looked at OSRM's implementation, but I don't think they've been keeping up with the cutting edge here.
- DennisL123 8mo agoWho knows .. ;)
- n4r9 8mo agoThere is an issue on their GitHub relating to customisable contraction hierarchies, but it doesn't seem to have gotten much interest. https://github.com/Project-OSRM/osrm-backend/issues/6574 https://github.com/Project-OSRM/osrm-backend/issues/6574
- DennisL123 8mo agoYes, the idea was to transition to a variant of MLD that lends itself to the offline use case and would use an updated modeling to be more space efficient while preserving performance. There exists an incomplete (and private) PoC written in Rust.
- elric 8mo agoI love osmand. But every new update seems slower. Navigation speed is mostly ok, I use it for walking and cycling which means routes tend to be short. But panning and zooming the map is just annoyingly slow. It sort of works when I disable most map features, but the map features are the reason I use osmand...
- nicman23 8mo agoeh the reason that gmaps is not slow is due to the streaming of pre-baked maps with these features and you can check that if you go to its offline mode
- MeanEYE 8mo agoI get where you are coming from, but it's still the best map application ever. Whenever I travel I download all the details for the country and am self-sufficient. Can't get lost or hungry. Everything is just there. Am willing to suffer a bit to keep that functionality. UI needs a big improvement though.
- charlie-83 8mo agoI really want to stop using Google maps but the issue I have with every other option is that I can never just search for the place I want to go to. 99% of the time, the place I am going to is a business, searching "<shop name> <city name>" on anything other than Google maps either gives me nothing (OsmAnd in this category) or might give me some the shops of that chain but in a random order and intermixed with towns a hundred miles away which have the same name. More generic queries like "petrol station" are even worse. The best solution I have come up with is to use Google maps to find the actual address and then copy that into the other app but at that point I might as well just use Google maps. Anyone have any solutions to this?
- rzmmm 8mo agoI don't have solutions but I have similar experiences about this. It's probably a difficult problem since there are so many different queries and differences in the geospatial data.
- dobladov 8mo agoSame issue, OsmAnd is great, but unless geocoding services like Nominatim get as good as Google Maps's search, I cannot use it unless I know the precise location of where I'm going.
- matkoniecz 8mo agoSadly, often shop data is simply missing in OpenStreetMap. (I have an ongoing project attempting to make slightly easier to detect and add missing ones but it will be just tiny step forward, not solution)
- Aachen 8mo agoDon't be a tease and link that project lol. Always happy to consribute to such projects
- matkoniecz 8mo agohttps://codeberg.org/matkoniecz/list_how_openstreetmap_can_be_improved_with_alltheplaces_data https://codeberg.org/matkoniecz/list_how_openstreetmap_can_b... https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/pull/6302 https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/pull/6302 https://matkoniecz.codeberg.page/improving_openstreetmap_using_alltheplaces_dataset/ https://matkoniecz.codeberg.page/improving_openstreetmap_usi...
- tamimio 8mo agoYears ago I bought Sygic lifetime one, and it has offline maps with updates. Although I don’t use it as much anymore, but it was so accurate, and that was before google nav too.
- h4kunamata 8mo agoCoMaps is by far one of the best offline navigation map app available. They forked from Organic Maps project which seems to have gone evil. CoMaps calculation is very fast, map update is constant, it is very lightweight, it has a very clean layout, usability is top tier. CoMaps can find places by the business name, there is still room for improvement but it works. I was using EarthMagic before that, it was the perfect 10/10 opensource app until they went greedy, and the app now has tons of problems. I went back to Sygic which is an awesome offline map app, I have a lifetime Premium licensing and as expected, now there is a Premium Plus license which some features were moved to like TTS and limited map update. CoMaps also works really well with Android Auto and I am running GrapheneOS, it was actually somebody within GOS who recommended it to me. CoMaps also display trains line, buses stops, public toilets, even motorcycle parking. If you are tired of dramas, give CoMaps a go. CoMaps is available via Codeberg opensource alternative to GitHub and they are pretty active towards reporting issues.
- lorenzohess 8mo agoWhat happened to Organic Maps?
- TheLNL 8mo agoThe community forked and created comaps because the organic maps maintainers were unwilling to listen to the community, taking decisions that the community disapproved of. Comaps seems to be more active than organic maps today
- h4kunamata 8mo agoThat is what I gathered tho, Organic Map seems to have lost not just the interest of the cummunity but everything in between. When you have an option like CoMaps that is opensource friendly and very active, I got 2 maps updates within like 2 weeks, you already lost it all. What I am impressed with is the app, it is so clean, polished and well designed so is the map.
- CamelCaseCondo 8mo ago
- culebron21 8mo agoCould anyone explain, please, where's the 100x acceleration they mention? The screen records compare 36 seconds to 13 seconds, that's roughly 3x. Also, this piece: > 100x speedup is achieved by comparing HH with bidirectional A*. 2-phase A* already uses many heuristics which don't always create an optimal route and still 5-10x slower. So, 2-phase A* is 5-10x slower than bidirectional A*?
- nicman23 8mo agomaybe cputime shenanigans ie multi core?
- dominicrose 8mo agoThe documentation is also confusing, these labels don't make any sense. Routing type (Android) / Routing algorithm (iOS) - A* 2-phase (Android) / A* (iOS) - A classic* (Android) / Highway hierarchies (iOS) - HH (Highway Hierarchies) x C++ (Android only)
- Aachen 8mo agoThe part you cited explains it. The 100x speedup is achieved by comparing to a method they didn't use anyway because it was too slow, but one that would find an optimal route like HH presumably does—when you have the default profiles and not a custom vehicle speed (like me who doesn't drive 130km/h because it's marginal gains for exponential fuel/CO2 use, so I configured the routing engine to find the best route for a vehicle with max speed 105)
- pluto_modadic 8mo agoOsmAnd still hasn't fixed utah addresses. If I enter in how we call addresses in local slang, it has no idea how to find it.
- nicman23 8mo agowhat the fuck? can you share some examples?
- pferde 8mo agoStart fixing it in Openstreetmap yourself, or even better, get in touch with active OSM mappers in Utah, and talk to them about this. OsmAnd merely makes use of the data from OSM.
- SahAssar 8mo agoI'm not sure if supporting local slang formats for addresses should be very high on the list of priorities.
- gpvos 8mo agoAssuming "slang" is an exaggeration: the basic principle of OSM is that things are mapped and named as they are on the ground. So local names and naming conventions should work; if they don't, it's a bug.
- gpvos 8mo agoIs it an OSM or OsmAnd issue? Does it work on osm.org?
- marcus_lam 8mo ago[dead]
- B5C8ECB24DB47D1 8mo agoAn easy way to contribute to OSM is by using Street Complete (https://streetcomplete.app/ https://streetcomplete.app/) which asks questions about one's surroundings. "This app finds missing map data in your vicinity and displays it on a map as quests. Solve each quest by visiting the location on-site and answering a simple question to update the map." Available from f-droid.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]