OSMAnd vs. Organic Maps

[pbsurf]

I've been building https://github.com/styluslabs/maps with support for 3D terrain, custom layers, and plugins for search and routing.

Vector tiles are generated and served on-demand by https://github.com/styluslabs/geodesk-tiles so there's no need to download an entire country or region first.

[jraph]

A good OSM app for desktop is sorely needed, I'll be sure to check this out. Thanks for building this as free software and for making it available on Linux. Nicely detailed README as well.

You should probably submit a Show HN.

edit: just checked it out, building and running it on Linux was very easy. Nice!

[jazzyjackson]

Wow the readme looks very impressive, would love to try this on my next off grid trek

Is it just you building it, is there a business behind it?

[dvdkon]

A new maps app and a revival of Tangram ES from the developer of my favourite note taking app, I'm glad I checked this comments section :)

And I see you open-sourced Write, thanks!

[kabes]

But can you download a country up front? For offroad motorcycle trips I often get in to areas with no mobile connectivity

[maelito]

Why not Maplibre ? I'm curious.

[stevage]

I use Osmand a lot. It work well, but I dearly wish they'd improve some UX issues.

I always seem to have the map telling me how far it is to some temporary marker I placed months ago that I can't easily work out how to remove.

Also any time I do navigation, the Trip Recording plugin pops up as a sticky system notification even when I haven't enabled trip recording.

But the offline navigation is a killer feature, and following custom GPX's.

[lmm]

> I always seem to have the map telling me how far it is to some temporary marker I placed months ago that I can't easily work out how to remove.

You can either tap the marker and tick it off, or use Menu -> Map markers if you can't find it. You can also use Menu -> Configure map and turn off Map markers completely.

> Also any time I do navigation, the Trip Recording plugin pops up as a sticky system notification even when I haven't enabled trip recording.

Hmm, it does pop up every time for me but dismissing it works.

[mnmalst]

You can disable the notification. Took me a while to find this as well.

Menu > Plugins > Trip Recording > Settings > Notification (Second to last option)

[nicman23]

did they implement A* for offline pathing? i remember they were thinking on it and what was in place was oom on my phone

[NoboruWataya]

It calls Organic Maps new (and the article is recent) but Organic Maps has been around for a while now?

FWIW I prefer Organic Maps for casual usage - I think OSMAnd is very featureful but the UI is less intuitive IMO.

[jraph]

It's been around for some time and is a fork of Maps.me, which was called MapWithMe before this.

[carabiner]

What do you use Organic Maps for? Driving directions, walking, hiking, cycling? All of those or something else? It doesn't seem good for hiking because it's missing so many basic metrics that Gaia has (elevation data, different speeds like rate of ascent). I've got a rough impression that it's mostly suited for urban European locales for walking directions, but in the US I only use mapping apps for driving (turn by turn directions) and hiking in mountainous wilderness (as opposed to some places in Europe that had nearly urban "hiking").

[neilv]

Recent HN thread on the fork of CoMaps from Organic Maps:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44994927

[thisislife2]

Note however that unlike Organic Maps, CoMaps lacks support for old devices. Without Organic Maps, an old iPad would be a useless junk instead of a great navigation aid.

[risico]

I've been trying really hard to get off Google Maps and almost managed to do it, but one thing that Google Maps offers and the others are not even close (at least for me) is discoverability.

For example if I am out riding some trails and then I want to pop out of the wilderness to grab a bite only Google has been able to provide good information of whats nearby (reviews help a lot as well).

Other than that I've been switching between OsmAnd and Gaia GPS (and Garmin built in device maps).

[pferde]

I guess that's country-specific. Over here, Google Maps has woefully outdated business info, apart from big names like McDonald or Starbucks. And I'm not even talking about building shapes, sidewalks, paths, or even roads.

Meanwhile in OSM, everything is much more detailed and kept up to date. I know, because I'm a mapper myself, and help keep it that way.

Google Maps seem like just another ad platform, for companies to pay if they want to be shown in higher zoom levels.

[31337Logic]

I use exactly this feature (and for the exact same reason!) and Organic Maps has been more than helpful for me. Search, Categories, Food, and then View on Map.

[sohkamyung]

I still use OSMAnd because it can take photos (with GPS coordinates) at waypoints while recording a track.

I use this to take photos of images from my DSLR while on nature walks.

I later download the waypoint photos and upload it to iNaturalist to get the location information I need to link the location to my higher resolution camera images.

More reliable than linking my camera to my phone (via Bluetooth) to record the location info.

[globular-toast]

JOSM, the OSM editor, has a clever way to do this. It links photos to locations on your track using the timestamp of the photograph. The only problem with that is the time on the camera is probably off by a bit. So to solve that you just take a photo of the time on your GPS device at some point in your walk (usually the start). That's then used to determine the offset to align everything.

[dvdkon]

Personally I've settled on OSMAnd, due to its extra features (e.g. hillshading and map configurable hiking trail display) and better (IMO) map styles. The Topo style is one of my favourite styles for hiking.

It has two downsides not mentioned in the article: OSMAnd's maps are noticeably larger, and the renderer is much slower.

[jazzyjackson]

I couldn’t make heads or tails of how to navigate with OSMAnd until thumbing through GitHub issues and finding out about https://opensupermaps.com/ which, after importing a few gigabytes of text files, allows general search of street addresses - not a great learning curve for adoption!

What I’d really like to do is copy the old school car GPS interface of, select state, select city, select street, house number, where at each stage it narrows down the list of possibilities so you only have to type 3 or 4 letters before auto completion. If there’s any pull request I would make it would be to build that out using the open super maps database

[dvdkon]

Maybe it depends on regional data availability, but here in the Czech Republic, that's mostly how search in OSMAnd works: You search for a town, then a street, then a house number. I don't know why it only works for you after importing third-party data.

[SchemaLoad]

Modern maps apps basically do this for you by using your current location or currently viewed area to automatically put the current city results first.

[polairscience]

Related but annoying question. What are you all using for public lands access and land ownership? This is a similar problem where the paid/closed apps (OnX et al) have very good data but serious issues for obvious reasons.

[aqfamnzc]

Caltopo is great for this. They require a subscription to download (raster) maps but you can cache a bunch of tiles before you leave to get the gist. These days this is one of the very scarce use cases I don't use OSMand for.

[khimaros]

there is a plugin for US data in OSMand which can be enabled for BLM, USGS, and some others

[jraph]

And now we have CoMaps [1], an Organic Maps fork.

I have both OSMAnd and CoMaps installed and started with OSMand, but I see myself reaching for CoMaps exclusively now.

Both apps are very good.

[1] https://www.comaps.app/

[vzaliva]

I am sympathetic to the motivation for forking CoMaps, but their website, aside from a few vague statements, does not give me any reassurance that they are better governed. Who are these people (names)? How are they incorporated, and where? How are donations spent? How is the development direction decided? Until these points are clarified, I am hesitant to switch to CoMaps.

[chris_overseas]

There's some backstory to the CoMaps fork that is detailed here: https://openletter.earth/open-letter-to-organic-maps-shareho...

Disclaimer: I don't know anything about this other than having seen the above link mentioned in a comment elsewhere as to why people should switch to CoMaps.

[deepsun]

One of the best map apps I saw is Mapy.com -- same OSM database, but works way smoother and looks better than OsmAnd. Less features, of course, but 99% of time I just need to see the map.

[ximeng]

They have a really nice feature I haven’t seen elsewhere to find a circular walking/cycling/ski route of a certain length. Useful to get ideas on where to go if you have some time for a walk or ride in an area you’re not entirely familiar with.

[fisiu]

It's better known as mapy.cz Indeed, works really well, I use it mostly when hiking or cycling, but it's also helpful when sightseeing. It provides all details from OSM tiles when needed.

[xigoi]

Note that Mapy is built by a spyware company, just like Google Maps.

[timeon]

Mapy are (that name is plural) cool but as I remember the app requires account.

[pavon]

I have both OSMAnd and Organic Maps installed, but I usually end up reaching for OSMAnd. I like the softer color scheme of Organic Maps better, but not the decrease in detail. Neither are perfect about choosing when/where to draw street names, but I have to zoom/pan a lot more to find them in Organic Maps.

Also, the address search on OSMAnd used to be much worse than Organic Maps, but it has improved, and I actually prefer it over Organic Maps now.

[Almondsetat]

The only reason I have OSMAnd installed along with OrgMaps is for those occasions when I want to find water fountains nearby, since you can filter by object type

[jraph]

You have this in the category search on Organic Maps and CoMaps as well :-). This, and toilets.

[charles_f]

I have used osmand for a long time, but one thing that really broke it for me is when Android removed the ability for apps to read other apps data, thus making it impossible to backup track records with folder sync

I think it can be fixed by configuring where to save these. But I find it interesting that one os change in the api can have a somewhat remote impact on feature use.

[metalman]

That was unsettling, I downloaded OSMand, which determined my location is spite of my dissabling everything possible related to location on my phone, and then wanted another 100megs for my area on top of the 150 for the app, which means that it is worse for time and data than just useing osm, when looking at areas all over the world, which I do daily. I am looking at one(or more) of the newer 2 Tb, ultra mini ssd's that I would then consider building into my franken phone that works as my mobile data wifi hotspot for all of my other devices, as I realy realy want a local copy of OSM, and Wikipedia, all of it.

[mastermage]

My problem with OSMand even though it is immensely powerfull is the rendering speed is so slow. Sometimes i just want to have a quick look where I am, but it takes so long to load higher detail levels.

[gausswho]

Have you tried it since the vector map release a few weeks back? I found it greatly improved rendering performance.

[orbital-decay]

What I don't like in Organic (and by extension CoMaps) is curve and polygon rendering. If you put it side by side with OSMAnd, you can see how crude they look in Organic.

[charlie-83]

An important thing to mention is that OSMAnd has multiple (somewhat confusing) paid tiers.

Since its FOSS you can presumably just compile it yourself if you wanted to bypass the paywall (the ethics of this are left as an exercise for the reader). However, Android Auto support is behind the paywall and Android Auto only works with apps downloaded from the play store.

OSMAnd definitely has more features (especially with the paid tiers) but, personally, I just wanted to get from A to B and I actually struggled to work out how to do that in OSMAnd which didn't give me a great impression of it.

I have both installed since I can imagine OSMAnd being better if I was planning a hike or something, but for day to day navigation CoMaps (Organic Maps fork with better governance)

[scheeseman486]

If you download OSMAnd from F-Droid you get all those features for free, except for Android Auto integration which isn't the fault of the developer, but because Google arbitrarily restricts anything not using GMS from working with it.

[Vinnl]

> Since its FOSS you can presumably just compile it yourself if you wanted to bypass the paywall (the ethics of this are left as an exercise for the reader).

You don't even have to do it yourself - F-Droid does it too. (Which is why it's called OSMand~, as a nod to OSMand+.)

[sorenjan]

One killer feature in OSMAnd is the ability to add new maps layers. It's possible to find Strava's heatmaps as overlays (unofficially), which can be really helpful for instance.

[nine_k]

I frankly don't see any trouble in paying for open-source software once. I see it as a way to support the development. I often buy "premium" versions even if they add nothing on top of the OSS version.

As of OSMAnd, $40 might look like a steep price even for a lifetime unlimited license, but they regularly run sales where the same costs $25.

[kelnos]

> Since its FOSS you can presumably just compile it yourself if you wanted to bypass the paywall (the ethics of this are left as an exercise for the reader).

Why would this be unethical? If the licensing -- that they explicitly chose to release it under -- allows this, then what you are really paying for is the convenience of someone else doing the build for you, and getting automatic updates. If you don't value that enough to pay, then it's perfectly reasonable -- and ethical -- to build it yourself and get the paid features for free.

(Not saying I'd do that; I do value someone else building and updating for me, and also appreciate the difficulties in funding open source enough that I'm fine parting with some cash for useful stuff. But I wouldn't look down on someone for doing a self-build.)