Hi everyone im new to the OSM community but eager to contribute. Im curious how many of you use OSM on android phones and how you interact with it. I’m interested both in terms of contributing but also using it for its map functionality e.g. navigation. Based in my early research so far the most popular apps seem to be:
- OsmAnd
- Vespucci
- Maps.me
- StreetComplete
- Organic maps
- Magic Earth
Im really looking for your opinions on what apps are worth using and for what purpose. Do you just use one app or multiple apps for different purposes. Which app would you recommend to your tech savvy friend and which to your mum? There’s probably a bunch more i haven’t mentioned so please also highlight them and any strengths or weaknesses they have. Thanks 😊
OSMand is great, I use it all the time for driving and also hiking - it’s surprisingly good for footpaths.
Out of the box it’s not great at UK postcodes (some are in the dataset but not all). However, there’s an open source list of post codes defined as points of interest that you can import, which means you can just search (offline) for any post code and it will take you straight to it.
https://github.com/hvdwolf/OsmAnd-UKpostcodes/blob/master/README.md
People from other countries with different systems may not appreciate how useful this is, in most cases if you navigate to a UK post code you can see your destination so no further information is required.
Hey I live in the UK and that’s super helpful! Definitely a feature I’ll need so will have to figure this out although the setup looks a little complicated at least for only moderately techy people
Sorry, the page I linked to probably makes it look more complicated than it is. Really you only need to download this:
https://github.com/hvdwolf/OsmAnd-UKpostcodes/releases/download/202102/UK_postcodes_poi_europe.obf
And import it. The readme deals with how to create it from source.