An easy way to contribute to OSM is by using Street Complete (https://streetcomplete.app/) which asks questions about one's surroundings.
"This app finds missing map data in your vicinity and displays it on a map as quests. Solve each quest by visiting the location on-site and answering a simple question to update the map."
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.
This work has been slow to take off though as the OSM community has traditionally been stuck on time wasting debates about whether opening hours displayed on the wall of a shop are copyrighted (just the raw data, not a photo of their presentation), and debating the merits and pitfalls of armchair mapping vs. on-the-ground mapping. At least these historical roadblocks seem to now be mostly resolved.
For OsmAnd, you might be able to use the OBF import feature (see https://www.osmand.net/docs/user/personal/import-export/) to add the raw ATP dataset, or potentially other open data such as Overture Maps if that is more to your liking. Data is mostly sourced direct from brand websites, APIs, etc (as if you were using a storefinder map on their website).
Interesting project osmand user here mainly in Germany.
In some cities osm data is far more accurate when t comes to opening hours or if a shop actually still exists compared to Google maps. However searching for them is a pain that one needs a bug improvement.
Since I can't rely on the search I usually try to find the poi category and click though the results,super markets,restaurants, pharmacy,atm etc works but so many cliks and caveats. 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 :)
Nothing ready-to-go that I'm aware of. ATP will just observe in the next weekly crawl that a shop is no longer returned by the storefinder API call or sitemap crawl, and that shop will simply not be present in the next weekly dataset generated.
To set up archives of shop-specific pages (e.g. record of opening hours, address, etc at a point in time), one could monitor the latest builds of https://alltheplaces.xyz/builds.html and when a new build completes, take the new build and 2nd oldest build to compare differences. Then for any feature whose attributes have changed (address, phone number, opening hours, etc) archive the `website` and/or `source_uri` attribute pages again to ensure the latest snapshot is captured. Any new feature would get the same treatment so the page for the newly observed shop/feature is archived for the first time.
I'm also aware ArchiveTeam projects tend to commence once the impending collapse of a retail chain is known and someone realises there is a website not archived which would be useful to preserve. Monitoring of ATP feature counts for brands across time may give some hint of how a brand is performing and whether it is growing or shrinking without having to find press releases and financial statements of the brand. Even if a brand suddenly announces bankruptcy (it happens all the time), generally the website will remain online for at least a few months whilst a new buyer is sought or whilst each retail location has a fire sale to get rid of remaining merchandise. It's also worthwhile to be aware of acquisitions of retail chains as this often results in the new parent company changing websites soon after acquisition closes, possibly removing useful content that once existed. Websites also change "just because" and this could be observed after-the-fact by seeing when ATP spiders break and get replaced/fixed.
No solution. I am a big fan of OSM, but modern maps are not about street namesabd building, but about POI. When you go/drive somewhere you are going to store/museum/pharmacy and so on. If this data isn't reliable it's useless. Additional information like phone number, working hours and website is next level which isn't achievable by OSM.
I built a geocoder that mostly solves this https://jonready.com/blog/posts/geocoder-for-ai-agents.html. I have about 96% recall compared to google places 98% recall, but it uses an llm for query planning and ranking so it might not be a good solution for you.
I'm stubborn enough to use Google Maps in my web browser (signed out) and then copy/paste the actual destination address into the app for turn-by-turn directions (e.g. CoMaps, OsmAnd). It's inconvenient, but it's also one less Google app on my phone.
The Google Maps moat has always been its breadth of accurate, current business information. It is unfortunately the Yellow Pages of the Internet era.
Same issue, OsmAnd is great, but unless geocoding services like Nominatim get as good as Google Maps's search, I cannot use it unless I know the precise location of where I'm going.
I don't have solutions but I have similar experiences about this. It's probably a difficult problem since there are so many different queries and differences in the geospatial data.
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 perfect 10/10 opensource app until they went greedy, and the app now has tons of problems.
I went back to Sygic which is an awesome offline map app, I have a lifetime Premium licensing and as expected, now there is a Premium Plus license which some features were moved to like TTS and limited map update.
CoMaps also works really well with Android Auto and I am running GrapheneOS, it was actually somebody within GOS who recommended it to me.
CoMaps also display trains line, buses stops, public toilets, even motorcycle parking.
If you are tired of dramas, give CoMaps a go.
CoMaps is available via Codeberg opensource alternative to GitHub and they are pretty active towards reporting issues.
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
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!
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.
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*?
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...
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.
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.
The presence of such spines in open bodies of water just makes nautical routes come out particularly stupid, where the route presented calls for you to immediately go to that spine and travel along it, unnecessarily lengthening the route.
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.
Testing just now, it appears to not route through private roads unless it needs to (e.g. destination is on the private road) when you have that setting on, but it might just heavily down weight it so that if the public route is long enough out of the way, it will use it?
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?
To add, a bit complicated, but osm data can be edited with osmium (cpp) or pyosmium (python). Then the edited data can be put into osmandmapcreator to generate the file to use in Osmand. (I used this to route around ALPRs)
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.
Years ago I bought Sygic lifetime one, and it has offline maps with updates. Although I don’t use it as much anymore, but it was so accurate, and that was before google nav too.
"This app finds missing map data in your vicinity and displays it on a map as quests. Solve each quest by visiting the location on-site and answering a simple question to update the map."
Available from f-droid.
Anyone have any solutions to this?
This work has been slow to take off though as the OSM community has traditionally been stuck on time wasting debates about whether opening hours displayed on the wall of a shop are copyrighted (just the raw data, not a photo of their presentation), and debating the merits and pitfalls of armchair mapping vs. on-the-ground mapping. At least these historical roadblocks seem to now be mostly resolved.
For OsmAnd, you might be able to use the OBF import feature (see https://www.osmand.net/docs/user/personal/import-export/) to add the raw ATP dataset, or potentially other open data such as Overture Maps if that is more to your liking. Data is mostly sourced direct from brand websites, APIs, etc (as if you were using a storefinder map on their website).
In some cities osm data is far more accurate when t comes to opening hours or if a shop actually still exists compared to Google maps. However searching for them is a pain that one needs a bug improvement.
Since I can't rely on the search I usually try to find the poi category and click though the results,super markets,restaurants, pharmacy,atm etc works but so many cliks and caveats. 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 :)
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/
To set up archives of shop-specific pages (e.g. record of opening hours, address, etc at a point in time), one could monitor the latest builds of https://alltheplaces.xyz/builds.html and when a new build completes, take the new build and 2nd oldest build to compare differences. Then for any feature whose attributes have changed (address, phone number, opening hours, etc) archive the `website` and/or `source_uri` attribute pages again to ensure the latest snapshot is captured. Any new feature would get the same treatment so the page for the newly observed shop/feature is archived for the first time.
I'm also aware ArchiveTeam projects tend to commence once the impending collapse of a retail chain is known and someone realises there is a website not archived which would be useful to preserve. Monitoring of ATP feature counts for brands across time may give some hint of how a brand is performing and whether it is growing or shrinking without having to find press releases and financial statements of the brand. Even if a brand suddenly announces bankruptcy (it happens all the time), generally the website will remain online for at least a few months whilst a new buyer is sought or whilst each retail location has a fire sale to get rid of remaining merchandise. It's also worthwhile to be aware of acquisitions of retail chains as this often results in the new parent company changing websites soon after acquisition closes, possibly removing useful content that once existed. Websites also change "just because" and this could be observed after-the-fact by seeing when ATP spiders break and get replaced/fixed.
No solution. I am a big fan of OSM, but modern maps are not about street namesabd building, but about POI. When you go/drive somewhere you are going to store/museum/pharmacy and so on. If this data isn't reliable it's useless. Additional information like phone number, working hours and website is next level which isn't achievable by OSM.
This is what I do.
> but at that point I might as well just use Google maps.
I disagree. OSMAnd is so much more user-friendly as a map. Google Maps is a great business locator, but that's all it really does well.
Here's a comparison, albeit this uses openstreetmap.org rather than OSMAnd: https://i.xkqr.org/gmapsvsosm.png
The Google Maps moat has always been its breadth of accurate, current business information. It is unfortunately the Yellow Pages of the Internet era.
(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)
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 perfect 10/10 opensource app until they went greedy, and the app now has tons of problems.
I went back to Sygic which is an awesome offline map app, I have a lifetime Premium licensing and as expected, now there is a Premium Plus license which some features were moved to like TTS and limited map update.
CoMaps also works really well with Android Auto and I am running GrapheneOS, it was actually somebody within GOS who recommended it to me.
CoMaps also display trains line, buses stops, public toilets, even motorcycle parking. If you are tired of dramas, give CoMaps a go.
CoMaps is available via Codeberg opensource alternative to GitHub and they are pretty active towards reporting issues.
Comaps seems to be more active than organic maps today
When you have an option like CoMaps that is opensource friendly and very active, I got 2 maps updates within like 2 weeks, you already lost it all.
What I am impressed with is the app, it is so clean, polished and well designed so is the map.
They all start "for the community", become too big, go greedy, and forget that projects/company is nothing without users.
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.
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*?
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).
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:area:highway#Routers
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposal:Area_highway/ma...
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.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:access%3Ddestination
The map data is OpenStreetMap, so you can make edits via the standard OSM methods:
Web: https://ideditor.com/
Local: https://josm.openstreetmap.de/
Google Maps for whatever reason routes like a residential street and turn can be negotiated at exactly the speed limit the whole way through.