Osmand+ vs. Locus Pro - Initial Impressions

Well, I got the maps moved, when you move them to the sd card they apparently end up /storage/1927-BA22.

I was unsure about some folders, so while Locus seems to be working, I feel like it would be smart to uninstall it and start over. I assume I won’t loose my locoins balance and maps that I have already purchased?

Maybe double check from the locus help, but locoins should be linked to your google play account, and maps can be downloaded for one year after purchase.
Maybe this kind of discussion should move to the dedicated locus thread though :)

I just uninstalled everything and started over, and most importantly got my son to help me:)

Relative to this thread, from my experience with the two apps being compared, if you are willing to spend the time to learn Locus, it’s hands down the better tool. The ability to tailor the visibility of the tracks via line weight, color intensity, and dashed lines with alternating colors is awesome.

I’m looking forward to learning Locus.

check out the backup tool also... you can use it to automatically backup and upload those backups to your cloud storage..... very handy if you're right on devices-it takes about two minutes to restore that backup to any other device running locus, so you never lose your tracks and waypoints even if you lose your phone.

locus is great for off-road activity motorized or not... but several applications do a better job of street navigation, looks Google maps.

Thanks. My main concern is off road nav via tracks. If I need routing with spoken directions, I’ll use Google maps. I will probably spend some time looking for a decent offline routing app, but I had having a bunch of apps all with maps burning up storage.

The new Samsung Tab Active2 is awesome and has a great processor in it, even the guy at the Verizon store mentioned how responsive it was when he setup the 4G LTE, but why they only gave a commercial tab 16gb of internal memory just boggles my mind. Should have been at least 64gb.

cool, that's where locus shines. enjoy the learning, it's pretty tough at first.

OSMAnd I prefer a lot better. Two reasons: 1) the Locus interface is a nightmare. I am not a total imbecile and still I can't get Locus to help me navigate. I have installed Locus a few times over the past three years, and each and every time I get lost in the system. Also it gets more complicated each and every time because of the functionality creep. Online tracking, heart rate monetoring, parking, weather, geocaching, you name it, it is all in there. Way too complicated. 2) Whereas OSMAnd is a cooperative effort and has a team of developers, Locus is mainly a one-man-show, and this guy wants to make money. That's ok, I paid for the pro-version just as I paid for the pro-version of OSMAnd, but then Locus wants additional money when I download OSMAnd maps. These are free maps, mind you, and this guy still wants money for data that he gets for free? Bye bye Locus.

Interesting thread. I come from a Garmin and iOS background -- have been using the Garmin Oregon and Montana for a decade and have played around with all the major GPS apps available for iOS, including OSMand (and Pocket Earth Pro, and Galileo, and most importantly Scenic). A couple of weeks ago I picked up a cheap Android phone so I could play around with Android GPS apps, since I kept hearing how much more advanced they supposedly are than iOS GPS apps.

My discussion is going to be directed at road routing/trip planning, because that's what I need a GPS for. I'll leave the strictly offroad portion of the discussion to other people, because I don't do any riding that's strictly offroad -- here in Vermont, we don't have an offroad trail network, there's just private land (if you're lucky and know the landowner) and class 3 (maintained)/class 4 (unmaintained) dirt roads, which are on the road maps.

OSMand is a pretty decent tool, capable of displaying a good amount of information on screen, and with some useful map themes for easy legibility at a glance (ie, high contrast). But where it falls on its face (in the iOS version at least; I haven't played much with the Android version) is trip planning/management. Trying to plan routes in advance and select them as needed is an exercise in frustration.

Locus Maps Pro is clearly a very powerful app with a ton of configurability -- the dashboard editor is brilliant, and the developers of all other GPS apps should be looking to it as an example. But where Locus fails badly is in map themes -- everything available is fairly low contrast. Minor roads are white on beige. This renders it fairly useless for me -- I need to be able to see those roads on the map at a glance. From what I've been able to glean through googling, it is possible to create custom themes that change the color of map objects, but I haven't found any useful premade themes anywhere, and developing my own requires editing config files, which strikes me as a colossal oversight. If Locus has an excellent dashboard editor, why does it not have a map theme editor? This actually really gets under my skin.

The other thing about Locus that gets under my skin, and that I consider thoroughly inexcusable, is its need for a helper app to do offline routing. And worse, the helper app, BRouter, does a piss poor job. I end up having to plan the route with an excessive number of via points because BRouter chooses a really nonintuitive, illogical route if I don't (and yes, I've changed routing profiles).

That said, I am still new to Locus so need to play around with it some more and use it on some road trips before I make a final decision. I want to like it because it's clearly a powerful app -- but my overall impression of it so far is that it's unrefined -- powerful for people willing to dive into the nerdy details and get under the hood, but not very useful for people who want to concentrate on planning their trip and riding and have the software just work conveniently.

Most of the iOS apps have the same map theme issue as Locus -- minor roads are really hard to see at a glance because they're too low contrast. OSMand, as I've mentioned, is the exception here. Of all the iOS apps, Scenic is far and away the best for motorcycle purposes when dealing with roads appearing on a map. It does share the minor-road contrast problem (which the developer is aware of, but his hands have been tied because of how the maps are provided), but its other features are impressive. It offers an excellent route-planning interface (including the ability to directly import routes from Furkot and other online trip planners), a list of routes you've created to quickly and easily choose from, different routing profiles for generating the routes (including a curvy roads setting), track recording, and much more. One unique feature it offers is that it will display a thin blue line for the route you originally created and a wider red line for the route you're following -- usually these will be synchronized, but if you do something to get rerouted, the red line will show your recalculated route while the blue remains where it was. This makes it easy to sync back up with your original route or see how much you're deviating from it.

The developer is very responsive (he has a thread in the Vendors section), and has been hard at work on version 2.0, which will fix the map contrast issue, add a lot more customizability, and add some useful new features like weather radar overlay. I expect that when that becomes available later this year (he's shooting for May), it'll be an outstanding app.

Meanwhile, I haven't found anything on either platform that works better than my Garmin. Say what you will about the company -- they certainly have their problems -- but the Montana is an excellent GPS unit. The user interface is highly customizable without having to jump through hoops; the map is easily legible at a glance because even minor roads stand out clearly against the background; route planning in Basecamp is very powerful despite that app's quirks; and I can store a long list of routes and tracks on the Montana that I can activate with a few button presses. That said, I expect Scenic 2.0 will likely equal or surpass the Montana. Locus could too if the developer spent a little time refining the customizability and routing capabilities.

--mark

Can't you just continue to use basecamp to plan the routs and then export to OSMAND or LOCUS?

Sure, but I still need to be able to manage the routes in the GPS app, and edit them as necessary. I'm not dragging my laptop with Basecamp with me on trips.

--mark

see https://www.openandromaps.org for free maps.
see @SRTie4k 's posts reguarding themes. his is one of the best.
see this youtube playlist for simple procedures

i can't make the STEEP LEARNING CURVE of this app any easier for you, but I can help here and there with pointers.

that's the first time (i remember) that someone wanted a theme editor. cool, not a bad idea at all. locus has a support forum where you can submit requests. i would ask for it there.

brouter normally does a really good job for me. the newer versions of locus have NOGO points availability i the route planner, maybe that will help you out ? also, graph hopper is available to do offline plotting. it's not normally as easy to setup, so I don't recommend it. keep in mind if locus had ALL of the worlds roads available for routing it would be around 7-10GB of data included. the way osmand does map loading is good, but it would easily double the size of each map in locus. i THINK that's why it's seperate, although I can't confirm it.

see @SRTie4k 's posts concerning themes for locus. his are some of the best. if adv would allow uploading of .zip files I would put a 2.8Mb file of themes here for you to try out, including srtie4k's.

man, i hope I used the right username in this post (LOL) i would hate to start a bunch of confustion and delay

I would agree there are a lot of options in Locus and that could be overwhelming. It was not even designed for motorized activities in the first place, and is so versatile that it still does a good job at it. That been said all the "accessory" functionnalities that you are listing are somehow buried in options or functionnalities menus. I don't use them (well actually I hijacked the heart rate monitoring functionnality to show the battery status of another device directly on locus screen ), but never come across them so i don't really see how that is a problem.
Choose what you want to use, put shortcuts for it on your main screen, and voila :).

As for pricing. Payed 7€50 more that 4 years ago for an app that has been significantly updated/improved since then for 0 additionnal cost. OSM maps you can get for free if you want, but I like the POI database a lot so spent a whole 5€ on lomaps credits. Support is reactive. All that is super cheap. There certainly are cheaper solutions but at 3€/year, price is not a decision factor for me.

Route/track editor and database management certainly are strong points of locus.

Short story of an event last year, organizator sent the tracks beforehand to everyone by email. Immediate negative returns from the garmin users "track will not load", "some tracks are incomplete" etc.. => "ho sorry guys, i forgot to trim the point number of the tracks in basecamp!". No issue for all the (various apps) android users.
Same event, "surprise" night riding with partial tracks given just before starting. All garmin users in a line to connect to the organizator laptop, then trying (for some of them) to share it "one to one". Zzzz. Finally an android guy get the tracks, uploads to whatsapp group and bam all android users have them.

I've been told over and over again this exact scenario never happen in real life, that it's just people dreaming that their phones are better....

but then, it happens over and over again, right there on the trail.

I´m coming from Garmin too and do streetriding only as you do. First used Osmand, now Locus Maps Pro as for its database capatibilities. I had the same theme problem but found a solution that works for me. I modified the "Voluntary UK" theme with a text editor and took the colours from the Osmand high contrast theme:



As for routing, Brouter does the job for me. Planned a 3500 km trip day by day through Romania last year with Locus. No need for carrying a laptop anymore, just use my 8" Sony Tablet for planning and navigation. Never looked back to Garmin and Basecamp. Now having all my data in Locus. Using Locus on my Win PC with an Android Emulator and synchronize data via dropbox to my android devices.

very nice. are you using bluestacks for emulation ?

I use Memu for Emulation: http://www.memuplay.com
Initially Memu is a chinese product made for playing and for this, it is really fast and Locus works well. Their website looks a little bit crappy, but who cares ;-)

But your minor roads are still white.

A while back I was communicating with the developer of Scenic and mentioning this common issue to him; at the time I put together this comparison:


Here's a screen shot of the most legible map theme available in OSMand:


Gaia and OSMand are pretty easily legible at a glance, but to me, the Garmin map theme is still the easiest to read for motorcycle purposes.

As I've mentioned before, the developer of Scenic has been hard at work on version 2.0, which includes new high-contrast map themes. He posted a preview to his blog:


Given the amount of effort he's been putting into v2.0, and how receptive he's been to user feedback, I think the conversation is going to get very interesting when Scenic 2.0 hits the market.

Meanwhile, I'll have to try some different Locus themes.

--mark

Yes - but the white roads in this theme are not of any interest for my style of riding. They are roads in villages / towns. I want to ride between, not in towns.
And - if there are any white roads between villages, you can be sure that you are not allowed to pass them here in germany. They are restricted to farmers and woodworkers only.

Here´s an example with white roads in a town - as they are drawn thick, I find them legible enough:

don't know how i can help... but i did want to congratulate you on one of the best put together complaints (criticisms? critiques? i dunno!) I've seen in a while.

i love to see what people really need in pictures and thought out sentences instead of

"it won't work for me" posts.

good job