Comment by jech
9 hours ago
> It has more features but is slower and clunkier
Just to clarify: OsmAnd has more features, CoMaps and Organic Maps are much faster.
(Aside: I'm using CoMaps myself. The main missing features are tracking (I use OpenTracks for that) and public transportation (I use a website for that). End of aside.)
OsmAnd is not that much slower nowadays since they added the new OpenGL renderer. It is, however, less convenient and pretty. I think OsmAnd really shines for things like hiking, whereas for regular urban navigation CoMaps works just as well.
Exactly my experience as well. OSMAnd is a lot better for hiking as it has 3d views, hiking routes, topo maps and better routing in general. Comaps is great for city navigation or casual usage
Wait, I just used the tracking the other day and generated a GPX from it. It also drew me an elevation map and gave me some other info about the trip. Is there some other tracking that it can't do?
I stand corrected, CoMaps can do tracking. It was introduced in Organic Maps a couple of years ago, but I was already using OpenTracks, so I never switched away from it.
CoMaps lets you record a route, though it's somewhat limited
What website do you use for public transportation?
I was recently recommended https://api.transitous.org (it's a webapp despite the domain). It can do things like "someone can pick me up on the far side and I don't mind walking 30 minutes at the start at 6 km/h, what's the optimal route to take?"
Revolutionary! Finally I don't have to look on a map to find all stations in walking/cycling/driving distance and then route to/from every possible combination of start and end station manually to see what busses and trains run there. And repeat the process with each schedule change in each involved country. Every other transport app that I know of will try to keep you within a few hundred metres of a bus stop or train station at all times and say "there exists no route" before telling you to cycle 10 minutes or from which station you have the shortest remaining distance by taxi or whatever
There is actually work being done to integrate exactly this API into Comaps! Although it will certainly take some more time, especially until these more niche routing features are available
I've found that websites specific to a single European country or, in the case of France, to a single city are the ones that work best.
KDE Itinerary, a mobile and desktop application, is becoming better and better for this. It's based on MOTIS / Transitous.
I just discovered cartes.app can do this too!