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OsmAnd is a highly configurable open source navigation app that can be used offline.
It’s by far and away one of the most private options for a navigation app. It would be perfect for the upcoming navigation section.
GPS and Navigation
All in for this one. At least where I live, the offline map with Google overlay live traffic is awesome for car navigation.
We whould make a note that OsmAnd is a complex app that needs quite a few hours of learning if you want to get a grasp on all the features and recommend Organic Maps as the quick&easy alternative.
I agree. We could add some configurations/settings tips for OsmAnd to reduce the learning curve.
Like the steps to add an API for overlay map, that you shared in the past.
Yeah it is clearly a not for me app. Not convenient and all but i can see that there are use-cases for it.
I would have no issue with this getting added if there was a warning that this app is pretty much Arch Linux of navigation apps.
Maybe more like the Gentoo? 
I think is more like Gentoo. Once configured you are good to go, you don’t have to once a year enter in the panic mode in the tty screen after an unsuccessful update trying to restore or fix what happened.
I would definitely appreciate some guides and tips. I find it quite overwhelming, and I’m sure I’m missing out on some features and I’m sure my setup is suboptimal.
I see Arch hasn’t changed since I stopped using it more than 10 years ago. I stopped using it exactly because of what you are describing. I still have PTSD of the upgrade to Pacman 2.0, and the upgrade that introduced systemd, which made my main computer unusable for 2 days in the middle of the week, is what made me move away. I couldn’t afford my main computer breaking unpredictably when I had important or timely things to do.
Am I the only one that find OsmAnd unbearably slow?
Redrawing the map after a scroll takes ages.
This is one of the things the guide should mention. The more layers, markers and features in general that you have enabled, the slower it will render. Make sure you have the OpenGL map rendering engine selected, which is the faster one, in Settings > OsmAnd Settings > Map rendering engine. But I believe that’s the default one, and I still find it too slow in my Pixel 8. If you configure your map source to be “OsmAnd (online tiles)”, it will render instantly. But as the name suggests, you’ll need internet connectivity for it to work. I have it set up like that in the “browse map” profile, and with regular offline maps in the rest of the profiles.
It would be great if there was a way to cache or download pre-rendered tiles so that it’s not that slow to navigate the map offline.
Thanks, it is quicker with online tiles but as you mentioned it’s still quite slow. Also I can’t understand why online tiles are faster than offline maps.
I’ll stick with organic maps and google maps pwa for my use case.
Online tiles are just pictures loaded from the internet.
Offline means rendered (on device) vector graphics.
Note: OsmAnd vector maps show way more details than Organic Maps maps.
Osmand gets a greenlight from me, I have used it for a long time and it works perfectly and reliably. Only nitpick is that the search could be better, but thats more because its based upon openstreetmaps
Organic Maps isn’t a viable alternative for me since I rely on public transit directions and OM doesn’t provide it in my area.
The PR above, which adds OsmAnd as a new recommendation, has been merged and this change will appear on the site’s next release.