I’m a fairly serious map geek, I’m somewhat media-agnostic though obviously my heaviest uses of mapping is on my Android phone.

I really wanted to like and use OSMAnd but – saying nothing new here I know – without a usable search feature is useless.

Starting with the basics, here in Los Angeles a business might state it’s address as (fake address) “123 Main Street, Toluca Lake, CA 91602”.

Even if I use hierarchical search (state, city, street, …) it fails – Toluca Lake is a neighborhood name, not an official city name. It is widely recognized and used as one – post office routes to it, emergency services, Door Dash and all that rot work.

If I lived there, I’d known the underlying town name. But that ignorance is precisely the point of computer and network based search – I don’t know and need to.

It’s been too many years with search getting worse not better. What a shame, the maps themselves are fine. But without some attention paid to the front end, it’s literally not usable to locate a persons house or a business. Seriously, Los Angeles, it’s not obscure.

It maybe that we will collectively or individually need to pay for the compiled street/building level data.