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OsmAnd’s Faster Offline Navigation (2025)

osmand.net

71–80 of 105 posts

Re: OsmAnd’s Faster Offline Navigation (2025)

#71
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 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

If you would make the effort to compare commits, you'll see that contributors for Co are mostly fiddling with: - the UI (pixels here, different label or color here - just check the commits by "Yannik Bloscheck"!) - adding objects to the map, which are not often justified (like rendering single(!) trees and tree rows, which is from a performance POV insane) - translations / strings They rarely touch navigation, the en…

Making map generator proprietary won't help to solve "freeloaders hogging onto their map CDN" issue. In fact, it actually forces potential forks to use their CDN because they can't setup their own map generation (as its closed source).

The OM's map generator was made proprietary in order to hinder the right to fork and enforce vendor lock-in. Later, a proprietary "Data License" had been introduced for binary files (incl. maps) with the same goal - effectively one can't build/fork OM without these files anymore.

Re: OsmAnd’s Faster Offline Navigation (2025)

#72

CoMaps 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 perfec…

What happened to Organic Maps?

IsItReallyFOSS has recently summarized concerns about Organic Maps in regards of FOSS values, check isitreallyfoss.com/projects/organic-maps/

Re: OsmAnd’s Faster Offline Navigation (2025)

#73

I 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 " " 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 wh…

Sadly, 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)

Don't be a tease and link that project lol. Always happy to consribute to such projects

Re: OsmAnd’s Faster Offline Navigation (2025)

#74

CoMaps 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 perfec…

How do they do routing? Is it alsothis fast?

Re: OsmAnd’s Faster Offline Navigation (2025)

#75

I 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 " " 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 wh…

I thought, I'm the only person who faces this and feels like this.

Re: OsmAnd’s Faster Offline Navigation (2025)

#76

Could 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*?

The 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)

Re: OsmAnd’s Faster Offline Navigation (2025)

#77
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened to Organic Maps?

The 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

I "fell" for Comaps but switched back to Organic Maps (where the original real good devs are). Comaps felt a bit too much like fork, "fabricate" nice media and beg for donations. Both are imho inferior to (non-foss) Magic Earth but consume much less power.

Re: OsmAnd’s Faster Offline Navigation (2025)

#78

I 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.

Several 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 or elsewhere. If you think it'll be reproducible, then the bug tracker would be the right place 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

Re: OsmAnd’s Faster Offline Navigation (2025)

#79
post #36

I 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 " " 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 wh…

The situation with retail chains is improving thanks to projects such as https://alltheplaces.xyz/ (disclaimer: I'm a contributor) and efforts of some OSM contributors to focus their contributions towards comparing OSM and ATP features to add missing shops, remove closed shops, update opening hours, etc. For one such example, see https://matkoniecz.codeberg.page/improving_openstreetmap_usi... for a tool (created by h…

Also, one of the best projects that help with that "last mile" is StreetComplete (https://streetcomplete.app/ available in Google Plasy and F-droid), it makes quite easy to add e.g. opening hours to shops.

Re: OsmAnd’s Faster Offline Navigation (2025)

#80
post #43
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The situation with retail chains is improving thanks to projects such as https://alltheplaces.xyz/ (disclaimer: I'm a contributor) and efforts of some OSM contributors to focus their contributions towards comparing OSM and ATP features to add missing shops, remove closed shops, update opening hours, etc. For one such example, see https://matkoniecz.codeberg.page/improving_openstreetmap_usi... for a tool (created by h…

Is there a feed of closed shops somewhere? If so, ArchiveTeam could use that to save their websites to archive.org. https://wiki.archiveteam.org/

Your best bet is probably to look for wikidata entries that are marked defunct; and match up to something like name-suggestion-index to get broad categories.
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