Comment by palata
2 years ago
If you find it "pretty good", I guess you have never tried an OpenStreetMap-based app like Organic Maps. I also like OSMAnd a lot (I use both for different use-cases).
2 years ago
If you find it "pretty good", I guess you have never tried an OpenStreetMap-based app like Organic Maps. I also like OSMAnd a lot (I use both for different use-cases).
> I also like OSMAnd a lot (I use both for different use-cases).
This is the first come I come across Organic Maps but I do use OSMAnd. I'm wondering how the two compare and would love to hear more about the use cases you have for each of them.
I use organic maps most of the time but osmand has much better support for hiking trails: you can see them (not just a path, but the name of the route, with a different color to separate it), I can tell the app to prefer it when building an itinerary, and the altitude info is way more detailed. You can spot the exact altitude and gradient at any spot. You can add a second map as an overlay, and I typically use a contour maps to quickly see where the peaks are, where the route will be flat, etc...
OSMand is slightly too powerful for everyday use, organic maps is the perfect good-enough, less-is-better example.
I tell people OsmAnd is a swiss army knife that does everything for power users (the cyclists or hikers or drivers who find it really important to do a few specific things that most apps can't do) whereas Organic Maps is the app I actually recommend to family and friends as soon as I know that there's decent address coverage in their area (it's OSM only, so if an address POI doesn't exist in OSM it isn't searchable in OM. But volunteers and everyday users are adding new addresses all the time.)
I dowloaded Organic Maps ten minutes ago so take my comparison with a grain of salt. I could have missed some features in OM. Here we go:
Moving the map is much faster in OM than in OSMAnd. I hope that OSMAnd study the code of OM.
The visualization in OM is much nicer. Another thing to copy.
OM is extremely better at displaying POIs and their information. Again, copy it.
Despite the claims it seems that OM does not show walking and cycling routes. OSMAnd shows them with their name, that matches the one you see on signposts along the routes.
OM does not seem to have a way to record a route and save it as gpx. OSMAnd does that.
OM does not seem to have a way to place markers on the map. I use them to plan new routes for biking, then I follow the markers. Navigation would bring me where it wants to go through, not where I want to.
OM is less than half the size of OSMAnd but it's still 58 MB. I wonder why these mapping apps must be so large.
Having to dowload all the maps again is very bad. I wish there is a way to share them among apps but I think that Android makes it impossible, unless we want to use a folder on an external storage (SD card) or root the phone or whatever.
I'll keep using OSMAnd because of recording, markers and routes. However I might recommend OM to friends that only need a replacement for Google Maps.
I find the UI in Organic Maps to be much nicer. OSMAnd seems to have a larger feature set and extensions and stuff you may or may not need/want/require. Navigation seem to add an announcement in OSMAnd whenever the OSM object for a road changes (seemingly), which leads to a number of totally unnecessary »Continue straight on road X«.
Those were a few differences I noticed.