I am currently looking at the various SatNav apps for Android.
One thing I’m particularly looking for is the option to plan trips - and by that I don’t mean “Display the route from here to point B without starting the navigation”, but “display the route from an arbitrary point A to point B”.
The only one I’ve found so far that has this option (sort of: without GPS signal, the app gives the option of manually entering the starting point) is Sygic, but that one doesn’t use OSM, going instead for the rather hideous TomTom maps.
Is there any app with “A to B” route planning that uses OSM?
Regards,
Jochen
PS Re TomTom’s reliability: one of the first things I noticed when I gave Sygic a workout - apart from the perceived uglyness of TomTom’s maps - was that there is, apparently, a petrol station right around the corner from my office; I somehow must have missed it completely in the 29 year’s I’ve been driving along that street.
Yes, I have, and I’m afraid that I find it extremly unintuitive: it took me about twenty minutes to find a way that reliably computes a route from A to B - there may hopefully be something MUCH more straight forward (have you found one?), but I certainly didn’t find it.
The only reliable method I found is
-save A and B as Favourites
-tap Search/Favourites
-tap Favourite B
-Select Use As Target (all menu entries translated from German)
-tap Search/Favourites again
-tap Favourite A
-select Display On Map
-tap the Star on the map
-select Start Route From Here / Only Display Route
Since my original post I actually have found an app that does exactly what I’m looking for; unfortunately, it’s otherwise completely useless for me:
MapQuest!
You tap Directions and are shown two text fields; the first one is prefilled with Current Position, but that can be replaced with any address of your choice.
Unfortunately there is no German localisation at all, which makes it extremely hard to use with German street names (and the voice module completely slaughters German place names).
There also appear to be quite a number of bugs - I received countless error messages while testing the app.
(The “perfection” of the app is probably most visible if you try a feature that in theory is great: at the bottom of the screen you can toggle a long scrolling line of icons which are predefined searches for stuff “near you”; I tried it, and, from a position in the middle of Central Europe, was directed to two airports “near me”… in Israel and Kenya, and to two post offices… in the UK and the USA!)
Hi,
you don’t need to go via favorites. Long click on the map for B and say “set destination”. Long click on the map for A and say “route from here”.
Chris
However, I just deleted Osmand+ anyhow to make room for other test candidates, because the structure of the program and the structure of my brain are simply incompatible.
Thanks - I am currently testing NavFree, but wasn’t aware of NavDroyd; I’ll try out that one as soon as I have eliminated either NavFree or Navigator
which have a large number of similarities, making it hard for me to decide which one will be better for me.
Regards,
Jochen
Edit:
I’ve deleted NavFree - it looks great with its colorful icons and its elegant maps, but …
-the maps I installed take up nearly twice as much space as those for the same areas in Navigator (2.7 GB to 1.4 GB), and …
-at least the Irish map is horribly buggy.
(I wonder how they worked all those mistakes into the perfectly correct OSM maps! Three examples: the Lakes of Killarney look more like an exercise in fractal geometry than like lakes at higher magnification / the 50 m wide harbour promenade in Wexford appears as two roads 50 m appart that float on the Irish Sea / even with “POI: Hotels” ticked hardly any of those hotels I checked - knowing they have been on OSM for at least a year - were displayed.)
NavDroyd costs 5€ so I won’t check that for now - Navigator is free and quite nice (even if the GUI is rather primitive)
I’ve just downloaded Maverick:GPS Navigation. (Edit 2:…which is a tracking software, not a satnav)
Thanks - someone put a lot of hard work into that page; it may not be complete, but I certainly found a number of new test objects.
I’ll have to take a look at if/how I can contribute to that list.
If you want to contribute to the OSM wiki, you need a login there. An account for the wiki is not automatically created if you open an account on osm.org.
But I recommend to open a wiki account with the same user name like on osm.org
Then contributing to OSM wiki is as easy (or difficult) like contributing to Wikipedia Ask here or in the german subforum.
Thanks; this is indeed what “won” my test marathon last year.
Some time ago I also bought TomTom Western Europe when it was offered at half price for a day, but even though theoretically it is much better than the free version of Navigator, I hardly ever use it - especially since I had both compute a number of routes that I know very well, where to my surprise Navigator was better every time the proposed routes differed.