OsmAnd's Faster Offline Navigation
osmand.net87 points by todsacerdoti 4 hours ago
87 points by todsacerdoti 4 hours ago
A 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!
I 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...
Some of those objections to Contraction Hierarchies are possibly a little out of date.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 . 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.
For 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).
You can enable the "public transport" profile in OsmAnd, today. It might not support your local area, though.
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.
Did 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.
Any 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.
I'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.
Rumor 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/Proposal:Area_highway/ma...
(2025)
At 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.
OsmAnd has the annoying quark of suggesting that I drive off my retaining wall, through some woods, and then across some wetlands, in order to get to the road behind my house, rather than directing me down my long driveway to the road a little further away. This is because the driveway is marked as private in the OpenStreetMap data, because it is private. Obviously I know to just go down my driveway, but anybody trying to get directions to my house would be sent to the incorrect road behind it and then just abandoned. I contacted the OsmAnd folks and was told it was an OSM problem. But other apps using OSM data don't have this issue. I gave up with OsmAnd after that.
Settings > Driving > Navigation settings > Route parameters > Allow private access
Now you'll be routed through private roads anywhere. It should ignore the private flag if it's directly adjacent to the start or end of a route.
I 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?
> I wonder, how difficult is it to make minor edits to the map data?
The map data is OpenStreetMap, so you can make edits via the standard OSM methods:
It's just OpenStreetMap, see https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/How_to_contribute
If you lower max speed for your chosen transportation method osmand will alter your routing very significantly
I 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.