Hi, Victor here, founder of OsmAnd.

Search has been the thing you complained about most. It came up in every language of our 2026 survey, and it comes up here all the time. Some of you told us you search in another app and copy the coordinates into OsmAnd. So this year we did not patch search once more. We wrote a new search engine, and it ships to everyone with OsmAnd 5.5. You can try it today in the nightly builds.

The whole story is in a 23-minute video. Here is the short version.

Spatial Search

What changes for you

• Addresses typed your way. Unter den Linden 10 or 10 Unter den Linden. 23 South 2nd Street, Saint Clair or Saint Clair, South 2nd Street 23. A postcode or a state instead of a town.
• Spelling variants. S Mountain Blvd finds South Mountain Boulevard, Hemauerstraße finds Hemauer Straße, Mcdonalds finds McDonald's.
• Typos corrected. leopoldstrase 10 offers Leopoldstraße 10, mnuc offers München.
• Suggestions as you type. Start a word and search offers the most common words that continue it.
• Public services by the name people use. DMV finds motor vehicle offices and NHS finds NHS clinics, even when the map lists them only by operator.
• Categories in more words and languages. With the app in English, both school and Schule find schools in Germany.
• Places next to places. Fuel McDonald's finds gas stations with a McDonald's nearby. Shell on a named street. Two streets that cross.
• Faster. The search itself is about 5x faster.

Why is this so hard offline?

Google can afford to be clever: every query goes to a server that has learned from billions of searches. OsmAnd has no search server. Everything happens on your phone, inside the maps you downloaded, so the phone itself has to work out what you meant.

And addresses have no grammar. Every country writes them its own way, and people mix the parts in any order. The same line can mean different places:

• 5 Ave New York is Fifth Avenue in New York City, or house 5 on New York Avenue.
• New Philadelphia is a town in Ohio, or New Street in Philadelphia.
• Pennsylvania Avenue, Utah is a street named after one state, in another.
• Calle 20 301, Mérida: the first number is the street, the second is the house.
• Rue du 8 Mai 1945: two numbers, and neither is a house.
• 14-54 31st Road, Queens: one house number with a dash.

First, measure

For years every release fixed some search bugs, and every year 50 to 90 new ones came in. We could not reproduce most of them. So in 2025 we stopped guessing and built a test bench: take thousands of real addresses from the map, type each one the way a person would, and count how many are found.

The first honest number was about 80%. From then on every user report with a real address became another test.

The old way: a librarian

The old search worked like a librarian. Find the town, walk along its shelf of streets, open the street, find the house. That works in a small town. It works much worse when the town is London, one shelf with 56,266 streets, or when there is no town in the query at all.

Every address that broke got its own patch: townships, word order, abbreviations. Each patch fixed one address and broke another. One user with eighty maps installed waited more than two minutes for the right result.

https://reddit.com/link/1xhpu6b/video/i1vkxp3uy7yh1/player

The new idea: put the words on the map

We are searching a map, after all. The new engine lights up every word of the query on the map and looks for places where the lights meet. A street and its town meet because their areas overlap. A McDonald's and a gas station meet because they stand next to each other. Since June 2026 every street and town in OsmAnd maps carries its own area for this.

The zipper

Comparing every object of one word with every object of another would take more than half a minute per search. So the world is cut into tiles, like on every web map, and each word becomes a sorted list of tile numbers. Two words are joined by walking both lists at once, like a zipper. Pairs that can't meet are never looked at. Half a minute became about 50 milliseconds.

https://reddit.com/link/1xhpu6b/video/hradi0ovy7yh1/player

Tetris with words

Long queries, like a crossing of two streets, add one more twist. Each object covers only some of the words, and the answer must cover every word exactly once and also meet on the map. The engine plays it like Tetris: pieces dock into a row, every docking is checked on the map, and a row that drops to zero disappears.

https://reddit.com/link/1xhpu6b/video/ohwle37xy7yh1/player

Where we are now

The new engine had its first test run in July 2026 and beat the old search two days later. Today 99.5% of 137,000 test searches in 28 test sets are found. In Pennsylvania, where we started, the addresses we could not find went from 206 to 40 to 7. The last seven are broken in OpenStreetMap itself.

Not everything is solved. In Havana, Calle L between 23 and 25 has no house number, only the two streets around it, and we still can't find it. Ranking, typos and common words each deserve a story of their own.

Help us make it better

• Tell us what you typed. If search can't find something, reply here with the exact text and the place you meant (a link to osm.org is perfect). Every miss becomes a test.
• Help the map. A street without a name can't be found, and streets in a town without a boundary may be missed. Names and boundaries in OpenStreetMap help everyone.

The video has subtitles in 7 languages and dubbed audio in German, French, Italian and Spanish. The blog post has interactive versions of these animations that you can step through.

Hello,

I just created a route on www.osm.com and saved it as a GeoJson file.
Can I, and if so how, can I import this route to my Android OSMAnd app?
I want to use this route later when traveling.
Thanks in advance.

on OsmAnd v 5.4.11

my use case is road cycling, following a GPX route on android phone, android 17, Osmand+ 5.4.10

I find that the position lags at junctions, and it sometimes makes it difficult to determine which road to take if there are multiple choices close together, or at similar angles.

I cant be certain if this happens all the time, i think its natural that you notice it when its a problem and if its all good then you don't take any notice.
I also seem to experience similar problems when bringing the app out of sleep mode. I have it set so that the power button brings the phone out of sleep and shows the app (BTW, this and volume buttons for zoom are two of my favourite Osmand features)

The app has precise location permissions.
i have tried to include some settings where which seem relevant

position animation - enabled
Kalman filter - off
use magnetic sensor - off
remove animations - off

map rendering engine - V1

I am aware that the phone is only doing position update on a 1s interval, but when it has an issue it seems like it is further than 1s behind.

I am not sure if it is some kind of issue with snap-to-road, not sure if that’s even a thing or where i would find settings for that.

Any suggestions on things to try would be every welcome, along with whether i can provide any settings that i haven’t already included

I can remember when there was an option to have the screen turn on just prior to an intersection while navigating - I think you could even set the time for when the screen came on and the amount of time it was on for.

I've since changed phones and lost all my settings and now that I've gone back through the myriad of settings options, I can't seem to find it. Does it still exist? And can someone tell me how to find it?

I'm using 5.4.10., maps+.

I added Google's traffic data as a map overlay, which is kind of nice, but it would be great if navigation made use of that data for more accurate routing and ETAs. Is there any way to accomplish this currently?

Hi, I'm trying to route to Kew Gardens and other destinations in the Brentford area, however OsmAnd seems to hate routing through Kew Bridge Road at the end of the North Circular Road, does anyone know why this is happening so we can fix it via OSM?

I've tried using an address on the road and it still avoids it like the plague.

Let's say I downloaded a big area of Satellite imagery on my iPad and it took a long time, now I want to have the same thing on my iPhone, is there a way to transfer that? Or do I need to download it again on my phone?

Olá. Sou um usuário iniciante do Osmand. Estou com dificuldade quando pesquiso o destino. No Waze eu busco o endereço com a rua e o número da casa por exemplo e ele me leva até lá. No Osmand incluo o nome da rua com o número da casa, mas só aparece no mapa o rua correta, mas sem o número. Tenho que configurar algo ? Obrigado.

I needed the ZIP code for my pharmacy earlier today. I was able to find it fine in OsmAnd, but unlike e.g. Google Maps, it doesn't provide an address that I can see. Am I just missing something?

Routes, heightlibes, the map itself are not visible. I can't find the setting to change this, does it exist?

Who thought it was a good idea to set it enabled by default?

And hiding so well the toggle switch as well? Master joker, surely! 🤣

Where is it please? (the toggle switch)

Never mind, I 've just found it

when navigating to a new area and the standard map download popup appears, it should also ask the user to download the terrain map.

a bit confusing to download both separately in settings etc.

On my iPhone, following a GPX track in Car profile gives 73 h 29 min for 179 miles. That's about 2.4 mph, basically walking speed. Screenshot attached.

A Pixel using the same GPX file shows 2 h 43 min, so the file itself seems fine and the problem looks specific to my app's settings. That said, the Pixel's 66 mph average also seems optimistic for a back-roads loop. So I'm curious what actually drives the estimate when following a track.

Questions:

1. Is there a setting that controls how remaining time and ETA are calculated for a followed track, such as a default speed in the profile?
2. Does attaching the track to roads switch the estimate to real road speeds?
3. What settings should I compare between the two phones?

I was a little late on the download, but here I am. Can’t trust apps that randomly change names of international bodies of water based on the demented & delusional whims of a wanna-be tyrant.

So anyways, how do I get this app to display full screen in landscape? It does full screen if I turn the iPad vertical like a phone, but I prefer the full-screen landscape view when I’m using the iPad. Is this a feature that is only available in the paid mode? (Not doing that. If I pay money for maps, I’ll buy a hard copy.)

I was having trouble getting OsmAnd's Map mode to stay set to Day or Night on my Android Auto car screen, and figured out what was going on. Posting in case it saves someone else the head-scratching.

The problem: While driving, I'd open OsmAnd's Map mode menu on the car screen and change it from Automatic to Day or Night. The only way out of the menu was the back arrow in the upper left. When I backed out, it reverted to Automatic every time.

What was actually happening: When I tried the same menu with the car parked, there was an Apply button in the upper right that I'd never seen before. Tapping Apply saved the setting and it stuck. My best guess is that Android Auto hides some controls while the car is moving, so the Apply button wasn't there while driving, and backing out with the arrow cancelled the change.

Two ways to set it:

1. On the car screen, while parked: change Map mode and tap Apply.
2. From the phone, anytime: open Settings, search for "Android Auto," and find Day/night mode for maps. This switches the car screen's day/night appearance. Note that OsmAnd's own Map mode button may still show "Automatic" when you do it this way, but the display follows the Android Auto setting.

Hope this helps someone.

Pessoal eu queria que um aviso sonoro de minha escolha fosse reproduzido ao atingir o limite de velocidade da via, queria poder escolher um arquivo do meu celular pra isso, isso é possível, estou perdendo alguma coisa?

Hey everyone !

I'm using OsmAnd for at least a year now and there are two things that are missing or I can't find how to do and would be mandatory in my opinion :

1/ Is there a way to show different ways to go from a position to another ? Sometimes the suggested route isn’t the one I’d like to take, and I can’t change it easily to an alternate path.

2/ During navigation, can I mark a road as closed, at least locally, for myself ? There are a lot of roadworks blocking the entire road and it is really is complicated to find an alternative path not using the closed road.

Thank you !

I use OSMAND on a motorcycle, a Honda NT1100 DCT, and love it. I especially enjoy being able to create routes on my laptop and then sync them to my phone. The Android Auto support is excellent.

I only have one issue. I ride a lot of twisties, and when running a prepared route, coming up to a turn, I get "turn left in 200 feet" followed by "turn right in 150 feet," and so on. There are no turnouts or opposing traffic on these mountain roads.

How do I turn down the granularity of the voice prompts?

Long time the lack of understanding how stuffs work in app led to blind spot on my side regarding matter described below.

You ask why can't I use those? This OP got created to present reason hotly.

*) over-/underlays use online resources. However my device with OsmAnd installed and in use undergoes following usage pattern. While outdoors the connection with internet (cellular data) gets enabled only due to discrete needs, e.g. email check, some web-browsing session, online-banking, public transportation, using shared vehicles.
WiFi rather/never in use/enabled while outdoors.

*) when over- or -underlay is enabled the app tries to fetch appropriate online resource. App's log captured demonstrate that due to missing connection with public address space the app retries it practically infinitely - hundreds thousands of such lines in the log. At certain point of time also following sort of log entry gets encountered

OsmAnd Maps[81406:4901369] OAAppDelegate applicationDidReceiveMemoryWarning

This log line also happens be present a number of times in one log file. So far so good, problem begins because since a long time ago I experience frequent crashes of app, for long time I had no clue what is going on. A rough counter-test with over-/underlay disabled leads to feeling on my side that all that above altogether may be the reason of frequent app crashes. I need to have under-/overlay disabled in order to not experiences app crashes. So far I did not find a hot use-case for myself of over-/underlay use while myself stays outwards.

crash got reproduced recent 60 minutes, the time I am back to home with theoretically WiFi available but intentionally disabled for test (cellular data never enabled while at home).

ChatGPT deepwiki's Devin trained on OsmAnd iOS app code base found that iOS may teardown running app when above pattern gets identified. Eventually some memory buffer runs full or gets overwritten.

Eventually it is feasible to make resource used by over-/underlay be stored locally in app data. However this hypocritical path still wasn't evaluated by myself so far.

By the way I never use plugins wikipedia, weather. Some period of time I used mapilllary but only during WiFi connection available. It happens that I investigate map frames presented by app or let app to find routes while at home but wifi disabled. In this case crashes happen to occur as well.

Search results in their current implementation form serve me badly due to high noise level.

OsmAnd for iOS, app latest available version in use

Here a proposal regarding list of search results being presented.

*) Sorting results by sort of/category of POI;
ideally filtering results by POI category

*) Sorting results by the location of POI;
ideally filtering by POI location

*) If "search nearby" got used to search let's limit list of presented results to true nearby POIs - currently list starts with 3 POIs distant from selection on map by 300 km, or so - that is in no case a nearby-location.

*) Sort search results alphabetically

Concern as title line summarizes. I have been updating offline maps successfully for ages. Today however when I want enable the astronomy plugin the app [iOS version, latest app update conducted minutes ago successfully] the app reacts like Maps+ subscription was missing. According to presentations by OsmAnd sales channels the astronomy plugin is comprised in Maps+. I can however find no path for successful completion of that plugin enablement. All what I get is only the mentioning which subscriptions are needed to enable astronomy plugin.

iOS-level in-app purchases are enabled. Also purchase restore has been redone few minutes ago. Nothing helps.
I can furthermore enable among others Contour Lines and Terrain visualization.

EDIT

Plugins External Sensors and Wikipedia are affected same way. It is however possible to enable plugins Vehicle metrics. List of feature does not match iOS app submenu Plugins versus presentation on http://osmand.net/pricining - both list have entries not present on the another list.

as the coverage of PL may historically have its validity on another side however as of time being it is ages no more valid.