this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2025
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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.
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
Yeah, rendering speed is atrocious. Organic Map renders much smoother.
Have you tried the "new" OpenGL renderer? It fares much better for me. (Actually, maybe it's the default now?)
@balsoft
It's faster, but still incredibly slow.
@woelkchen
But only on android ... It's blazingly fast on ios
The submission's topic is the Android version, though.
@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
Wdym with the hourly updates?
I don't have that on anymore, it's not really faster than before
It's FOSS and available free on F-Droid. Small app transactions are not paying for that staff list.
Stock ROM or possibly GrapheneOS?
Yes, graphene
You enabled exploit protection compatibility mode as mentioned in the link?
Yes, exploit protection is not responsible for osmands slowness. It could impact startup, but nothing more
It's not related to graphene. I've seen osmamd being snaily on other flagships as well
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.
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.
@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
@JubilantJaguar @testman
Hope we're not bothering here but if you're looking for more maps just take a look at our map Lokjo.
It doesn't have offline maps or an app, but does show all shops at once, and has the navigation etc.