OsmAnd's Faster Offline Navigation (2025)

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 "<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?

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Some of those objections to Contraction Hierarchies are possibly a little out of date.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).

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.

(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.