Comment by kmarc
10 months ago
Thanks for the input.
I happened to work for a car navigation software development company 15+y ago. Cool stuff, Windows CE / PDAs as devices, android and ios nowhere. These were totally offline devices (map updates through usb / sdcard).
Even then, this offline navigation was super fast, across countries. Today I managed to wait a whole minute for a 5km bike navigation in OsmAnd. Then I uninstalled (after years of hoping for improvement. Yes, I was regularly donating money.)
In my experience, OsmAnd is mostly slow for very long routes.
Maybe it is a matter of quality. Because of course you can find routes fast if they are not the fastest or best routes.
But there is room for improvement. brouter could be integrated even better. Or a router like that could be used directly in OsmAnd.
And long routes could be handled more flexible. E.g., when I go from Copenhagen to Barcelona, it is not super important at first to find the optimal way into Barcelona, or shortcuts in France using regional roads. It will take several days, but I would like to start with a reasonable route giving me an estimate of distance and time. At first I just need a good route to the Great Belt Bridge or the Rødby ferry -- Copenhagen is on an island.
When I drive long distances, I sometimes use several devices. The Xzent system is much faster for longer distances, but the map is not as good, especially it is missing may POI's.
Often they disagree, especially if one is optimizing for distance and other for fuel or time. Then if there is an obstacle or a bad road, I instantly have a good alternative at an intersection.
I'm not saying that they cannot improve :)
Just that comparing Google and OSMAnd/OrganicMaps in terms of routing alternatives & speed and powerful address search is not 100% fair (even when they'd use the same data source which they don't)