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[–] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

OsmAnd is a genuinely amazing app that I have been using for literally 14 years. For everything other than business information, it's clearly the best in class. Far better than the new kid on the FOSS block Organic Maps, let alone certain commercial apps that shall remain nameless. It's always a surprise to me how few normies have even heard of OsmAnd. Possibly not helped by the awkward semi-pronouncable name.

I'm just bothered by one thing: the ongoing opacity about OsmAnd's business model. They provide no explanations at all, despite the slick site and what appears to be an impressive staff list. They need to be more transparent about who's paying for all this and how.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Osmand isn't cheap to buy and a lot of people pay for it. Where else do you think their money comes from?

    Osmand is slow and too complex on my pixel 9, yet I still use it

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    Osmand is slow

    Yeah, rendering speed is atrocious. Organic Map renders much smoother.

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  • [+] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)
  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    @bonjour
    I think it was something like £2 when I bought it. Now it's £39.99⁉️

    https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=8483587772816822023

    They also have a €3/month subscription for 'hourly' map updates (and some cloud sync to compensate for Android getting worse).

    https://osmand.net/docs/user/purchases/android

    But is it getting very slow these days. Especially with hourly updates turned on.

    @enemenemu

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    Osmand is slow and too complex on my pixel 9, yet I still use it

    Stock ROM or possibly GrapheneOS?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    It's slow in general, they're not using vector maps like organic maps do. I love what OsmAnd does but it's definitely slower to render and more sluggish to navigate than other maps on my FairPhone 5.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    Yes and no. OsmAnd tends to have far more details to display — more data to display or filter out. I'm guessing that if you had a smaller rendering file (instruction for painting) along with a smaller obf (less data due to prefiltering), it'd be closer to comparable.

    Edit: The link, which addresses slowness with GrapheneOS not experienced with stock ROM, seems to specifically address the (non-stock) FairPhone too.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    @przmk
    They're both vector based. Purely from usage it feels like OsmAnd is rerendering everything from scratch every time with little caching. If you pan away and pan back it takes effectively the same amount of time to recreate the previously rendered view as a fresh view. This time seems to increase with addition obfs for "live" updates etc.
    When Organic Maps updates slowly it tends to feel like vector tiles "falling back" to lower zoom until more detail is retrieved.
    @goldfndr

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)
  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Yay! Now to wait while it trickles down to F-Droid...

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    When does this version 5 release on F-Droid?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    @Sir_Kevin
    The F-droid version is unofficial so they're unlikely to have an answer to that.

    @testman

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Well this version is hitting me up for money to download open street maps regions, which itself is a community driven foss project. I'll stick with the version that supports F-Droid and doesn't charge me for my own content.

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  • [+] 1 point 1 year ago*