92 posts tagged with "android"

If you have ever typed an address into OsmAnd and got a street in another town — or nothing at all — you are not alone. Search has been the most common complaint we hear, and in our 2026 survey it came up again and again in every language. So this year we did not patch it once more. We built a new search engine from scratch, and it comes to everyone with OsmAnd 5.5. If you don't want to wait, it is already in our nightly builds.

The video above tells the whole story in 23 minutes. Below is the short version, with a few interactive demos so you can play with the same ideas the new engine uses.

If you hike, ski, or drive in North America, your OsmAnd terrain may already be much sharper than you think. Since spring 2026, terrain maps and contour lines for the United States (including Alaska), Canada, and Mexico are built from high-resolution national elevation data. If you have not updated these maps since then, you are still looking at the old, smoother relief.

You've ridden the Transfagarasan three times now, and the story you tell afterward never changes: good climb, brutal hairpins, freezing at the top. Same three sentences, every time, because that's genuinely all a memory holds onto.

Your phone remembers more. It was recording the whole ride — every meter of elevation, every km/h, the exact spot where you stopped pretending you weren't struggling. None of that shows up in a photo. It shows up in the track, if you know how to ask it the right question.

OsmAnd 5.4 for Android is now available on the Google Play Store. Please update to the latest version to enjoy the new features and improvements.

At this release, we focused on improving the search experience, making it easier to find places and discover objects around a specific location. We also added the ability to attach media files to Favorites and Waypoints, making them more informative and useful for your travels.

🔄 Update Now!

Thanks to all our users for their feedback and suggestions. Your input is invaluable in helping us improve OsmAnd and make it the best navigation app for Android.

August comes with two alarms on the calendar. On August 12, a total solar eclipse sweeps from the Arctic across Greenland and Iceland, reaching northern Spain and the Balearic Islands just before sunset — the first total solar eclipse visible from mainland Europe since 1999. Sixteen days later, on August 28, a deep partial lunar eclipse covers 96% of the Moon's surface, making it nearly indistinguishable from a total eclipse for anyone watching from the Americas.

Two rare events in the same month. And both of them unusual in their own way. The solar eclipse arcs up and over the North Pole, which means its path runs north-to-south rather than the typical west-to-east sweep. In Spain, the Sun will sit only a few degrees above the horizon during totality — turning the eclipse into something closer to a golden-hour phenomenon than a midday event. The lunar eclipse, meanwhile, stops just short of totality: at its peak, a narrow bright sliver of the Moon remains uncovered, leaving the rest darkened and faintly reddish.

OsmAnd Astronomy now includes (Android only, currently available in OsmAnd 5.4 beta via Google Play or as a nightly build) dedicated explorers for both events. You can move through the timeline, check visibility for any location on the planet, and see exactly how each eclipse develops — before either of them actually happens.

Running every morning is just what you do. No discussion — just the street and whatever distance feels right that day. Your running partner lives on Yonge Street. So do you. Same street, different ends — and when he suggested a 7 AM run "somewhere in the middle", it sounded simple enough.

Yonge Street is 56 kilometres long. The longest street in the world, according to Guinness. It starts at Lake Ontario and runs straight north through Toronto until it quietly disappears near Holland Landing. "Somewhere in the middle" turned out to be a question neither of you had actually answered. You were both on Yonge Street — technically neighbours — and had absolutely no idea how far apart you were standing.

A few taps in OsmAnd, and the guessing stopped. Distance by tap, radius circles, a straight line to your meeting point — tools that turn a vague sense of scale into something exact.

Some trips exist first as an idea. You open a map, find a coastline, and start building something in your head — a route, a few stops, maybe a harbor where you'd want to spend the evening. A principality of your own, even if just for a week. Principality of Monaco takes that idea literally. In summer the water gets crowded quickly — and what looks like open space from the shore has its own logic underneath. Shallow patches, restricted zones, boats coming and going from every direction. You don't notice any of it until you're already in the middle of it.

A regular map won't tell you any of that. Roads, buildings, points of interest — useful on land, but the moment you're moving on water, the map needs to change completely.

This is what OsmAnd's Nautical Map View is for. Depth data, seabed information, navigation lights, buoys, fairways — the kind of detail that turns a general-purpose app into something you can actually use on the water. Whether you're planning a route along the Côte d'Azur or just trying to find a safe place to anchor for the night, it starts with a different kind of map.

In films like Angels & Demons, Rome never feels flat. The city unfolds through narrow streets, archways, inner courtyards, and massive stone buildings rising above the crowd. You remember not only where the characters go, but the space around them — the height of the facades, the passages through buildings, the way entire streets disappear beneath arches before opening into another square.

But on most digital maps, cities lose that depth. Buildings become flat shapes, reduced to outlines that show where something exists, but not how the city actually feels. For mappers, this is where building data starts to matter.

In OpenStreetMap, buildings can contain far more than a simple outline. Mappers can describe a building's height, the number of floors, where different sections begin, and even passages running through the structure. OsmAnd uses this data to transform flat map geometry into detailed 3D cityscapes. Buildings gain height, complex structures become distinguishable, and streets start to feel closer to the real places they represent.

Far from city lights, the sky looks different. In the Namib Desert, darkness comes quickly and the stars appear all at once, filling the entire horizon. At first, it feels simple. A guide points to a few constellations, maybe a bright planet. You follow along, recognising some shapes. But after a moment, you lose track. There are more stars than you expected, and it is hard to tell them apart.

This is where OsmAnd Astronomy changes the experience. Instead of guessing, you can explore the sky the same way you explore a map — step by step, with clear orientation, useful context, and the ability to plan what to look for next.