OsmAnd’s Faster Offline Navigation (2025)

That’s why I switched from map.me to Organic Maps. This one too?

I found it able to route me to where I need to go if I decide to switch careers and become a train driver, but planning something easy like "take a bus to the train station" is impossible in OsmAnd.

Adding a few avoid road markers might help.

> Search needs massive improvement.

Absolutely. Improving this would be a great boost in usability.

I love OsmAnd and I've been using it ever since I've been using phones that can navigate. That's why I've acquired a lot of arcane knowledge on how to find places in the search function. But I could never explain to anyone what I am doing there.

It starts by the mere fact that entering a street name will always search around the current location, which is usually not where you are but the city where you last ran a lookup.

If you want to change the city, there is a tab for that. But consider using postal because sometimes the place's name may be different from what people call it. Sometimes, the same postal code appears multiple times with subsets of streets of the place. So you'll have to go for each one and look for your street. That just happened to be for Avignon (postal code 84000).

Another fun OsmAnd-introduced activity is semi-leaving German Autobahn main tracks onto the side tracks that can be used to drive off but also lead back onto the main track but with more crossing traffic. It just loves to do that.

None of such disadvantages outweigh the level of detail and possibilities in OsmAnd and further in OSM. I love knowing that I could use the same app if I once had to use a wheelchair. I love being able to add notes to a place and getting an E-Mail update months later that someone fixed an issue that I've reported.

And when I use Google Maps every once in a full moon, I run into weird little glitches that surprise me a lot because the one thing I'd expect from this marvel of our monopolistic dystopia is that it "just works" - but it really doesn't. Don't ask me what issues I ran into last time. I forgot and they've probably been replaced by more confusing ones by now :)

We should push the typically publicly funded (and via that path: the big single entity that pays you the largest (single) share of your income as a transit company gets to dictate a LOT if they try and it's inherently close to free) to literally just publish the real time traffic information as open data for at most a fee (if getting directly from the source, not any aggregator/CDN) equal to AWS's bandwidth charges for the traffic itself. With a license that allows others to just offer caching proxy access with no stipulations other than maybe some reasonable amounts of attribution. Because sadly many places routing with no schedule awareness increases "typical" journey times by >50% for a decent chunk of the ridership base.

On that note, I should see how open data my municipal utility's EU-forced-outcrop of a "mobility" branch handles it's real time data, because I did notice (from ads in the busses at the doors where they put what are essentially D2C "press note"s) about a year or two ago that they started offering a mobile browser usable (without giving any permissions to the site, at least above default android Chrome) live position tracker for their bus fleet.

Could be useful to do some predictive modeling on it together with the schedule to enable streaming commands to one's earbuds (if one's just listening to music while on the way) about haste (/lack thereof)/catching a different station.

Like even just telling me if I catch the bus at the closer station when leaving home or if I should walk to the other branch line which is about a minute further to walk (and that entire minute is uphill) but has the bus scheduled to depart 3 minutes later. They connect shortly after at a transfer/crossover where the routes alternate between physically crossing and merely briefly meeting up at the same "named stop" with just two driveways separating the nominal positions at the sidewalk the busses park alongside to open their doors.

I don't have the mind to check that real-time position map for the duration of the shared walking path between home and the "fork in the road" where I have to choose between the two bus stops, while analyzing the moment on the map to identify if it's getting held up in traffic (shorter) or actually stopping at the stop it'd have to be at (AFAIK pretty much exactly) for me to not need to run (but only walk with purpose on my mind) to still catch it at the closer station. That's particularly relevant because leaving on time with margin for retying shoelaces or stuffing mail in a backpack and aim for the father station makes me catch the closer station exactly once it's a little bit delayed (on the order of 60~90 seconds).

I'd probably want it so I tap the phone to one out of a couple NFC tags in the hallway that tell my device what kind of thing I'm about to do; be that leaving for shortly or for longer (latter case it can also cut the heating until I give it an ETA of when I'll be back; due to good insulation the savings of less thermal flux due to less temperature Delta between inside and outside are not worth having to remember to give it an ETA to have it back up to temperature before I arrive).