Osmand doesn’t appear to be able to locate street addresses. Like if I input something like “123 4th Street” all it can do is offer some cross streets, which may be miles away from my intended location.
Is there a way to augment it’s data so street addresses work? Maybe there’s a service I can add?
Similarly, it doesn’t know the names of many businesses.
Two things I’ve recently discovered:
- The data simply isn’t there. One of the reasons you can’t find address is because nobody has entered them to OpenStreetMap.
- OsmAnd search isn’t good or intuitive. For the few places that do have addresses, you’ll have to search for them in a very specific format:
$CITY $STREET $NUMBER
If you want to contribute addresses you know to OpenStreetMap create an account here: https://www.openstreetmap.org/
Once you create an account, you’ll be able to use editors to update the map.
Editors include:
- https://www.openstreetmap.org/ (the edit button on the webpage, this editor is called iD)
- https://rapideditor.org/ (made by facebook… very similar to iD)
- https://streetcomplete.app/ (for your phone, easier to enter small bits of info)
- https://josm.openstreetmap.de/ (full fledged, industrial desktop editor)
After you update the map, you’ll have to wait somewhere between 1 hour to 1 month for updates to propagate to different apps. OsmAnd has a pro tier that gets hourly map updates… although… I’m not sure if address data is included in those map updates or just other things like buildings…
I have found this app to be absolutely worthless when it comes to finding anything. It does a great job of showing where you are. I really wanted this app to work and it has potential. But until you can type a physical address and get a location, the app has no real utility.
If you want to find something add it by yourself.
Weird answer… But it works. Kinda.
Try typing the number after the street name.
In your example: 4th Street 123
If it can’t find it, it’s because it’s probably not in OpenStreetMap. Same thing for businesses. It’s our collective responsibility to fill those gaps as a community!
So start editing your local map on OpenStreetMap.org, you can also join local communities that will help you out on your doubts.
You can add missing data by yourself. Start with StreetComplete app for address numbers and https://www.onosm.org/ for businesses. If you want to go deeper check https://learnosm.org/en/
Your area might be covered by opensupermaps.
You can add to the map at openstreetmap.org or with apps like Street Complete. There’s a great community behind OSM too 🙂
So its basically useless if I don’t know where something is in gps coords. There’s got to be a better way than osmand users manually putting in addresses.
