Why are the maps of European countries in OsmAnd becoming fragmented more and more?

General talk
1

I’m not sure if I’m in the right place.

Just a quick note: I’m a big fan of OsmAnd and have been using the app for 10 years now – in the car and with my caravan all over Europe and on my bike – and I’ve also submitted a few POIs. So I just have a few creative questions and suggestions, and I don’t want to offer any unfounded criticism.

  • I’ve worked in IT for a long time and there I worked among other things in data organisation.

  • Now I have some questions to help me understand the strategy behind the Osmand database, and I also have a suggestion.

The maps of the European countries are being split up more and more, and I don’t understand the point of it. Splitting the maps triggers a new INIT-run every time a single map is loaded.

France 61 maps / total 9,8 gigabyte

Germany 33 maps / total11 gb

Italy 20 maps / total 5 gb

Spain 19 maps / total 4 gb

Austria 8 maps / total 1,8 gb

I’ve understood the previous breakdown by federal states / politcal regions - so for example Germany had 16 maps. Now there are 5 maps of the administrative districts for North Rhine-Westphalia alone ! In the past it was 1 map. The same with Bawaria (7 maps) and Baden-Württemberg (4 maps).

The same situation is the fragmentation of maps in France, Spain, Italy …

Even more questionable is the fragmentation among small countries such as Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland and the Czech Republic.

What’s the point of it all?

  1. To navigate longer routes (e.g. from Warsaw to Nice or from Berlin to Bordeaux or from Cologne to Rome), I need, in any case the maps of all the countries that might lie along the way.

  2. To navigate only in France or Germany, for example, I still need the full map of the country and perhaps also the countries ‘next door’ for „alternate routes“.

  3. To ensure correct routing, all the necessary maps must be up to date.

  4. Storage space on a modern smartphone (perhaps with an SD card) shouldn’t be a problem … and downloading just “a few” OsmAnd maps doesn’t make much sense

So what’s the point of splitting the cards into so many small units?

And … there’s one thing that could be reconsidered and perhaps changed.:

  • The whole database is initialised after each single map is downloaded.

  • If I update only Germany and France the db-init runs ninety-four times.

  • At present, the process of initialising the database several times takes considerably longer overall than downloading the maps (updates) with WiFi (router 5G/1200 mbps - fibre-optic cable from provider to the building distribution box).

    • (Smartfone SAMSUNG A25 / Android 16 / 6 GB RAM / OSMAND data on fast micro-SD-Card 128 GB)

Can’t be done the db-init just once, after all the necessary maps have been downloaded?

2

This is probably not the best place for such detailed questions about OsmAnd. OsmAnd is just one of many apps that use OpenStreetMap data. This forum is more about the OpenStreetMap project as a whole, rather than in-depth support for any app, and there is no guarantee that the relevant developers/maintainers will see your question.

Maybe try one of the contact channels listed in the footer at

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3

File size?

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4

The simple answer is the data size limit for maps in OSMand.

I used to use a single file for England but one month the amount of data in Openstreetmap had increased and the England file would have exceeded 1GB so a single file for England is no longer available and I need to use the regions.

The same for other countries, they need to be split because of the amount of data.

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5

Consider that perhaps not everyone has such a fast connection?

This is a valid feature request for OsmAnd, which you could make to OsmAnd at the page linked by Alan.

(As a programmer I can also imagine some reasons why OsmAnd might want to re-init each region separately: it avoids the weird limbo state where new data is in but not yet initialized, it’s simpler, and perhaps most users don’t have too many regions and they have slower internet connections, so it’s not a big issue and not worth the effort. But I’m not an OsmAnd programmer so this is just my idle thoughts.)

6

If it has not changed, users of the standard version get 5 maps for free.
So the point may be to get more revenues…

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I wish Belgium was also split up by province (not by region) because I stay in Hainaut most of the time and really only need up-to-date maps there

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OK. I wasn’t aware of this 1 GB file size limit.

9

There are many people who use our data on very limited devices. I like to think that our work is available to most people who have some kind of digital device and only sometimes a bit of connection. And I hope that many of the developers behind the software that uses our data think of those use cases.

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10

That’s a point …

If someone is updating countries with lots of maps and the battery runs out or the user switches off their smartphone, we have an inconsistent database. That’s not good :-)

11

Btw. it’s worth noting, that once you downloaded the maps and just want to update them, you can do this by country.

12

I’m not sure where the numbers of megabytes came from. I have checked Germany and I can’t see how you have reached 11 GB.

Screenshot_20260721-104338_OsmAnd
Screenshot_20260721-104338_OsmAnd1080×802 101 KB

Also I believe that car map is just less-detailed car-oriented version of regular map so you don’t need both. I actually use OsmAnd with just Car Map and it works fine so you probably don’t need anything else if it’s just for navigation.

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I use only the standard maps and it uses 11,18 GB for germany.

grafik
grafik395×145 15.5 KB

But never mind.

My question wasn’t about the file size, but about the number of maps and the db-init after every single map.
Even the simple road maps for Germany alone have 33 individual maps, and for France its 61 maps. So a db-init run after download (update) every single map in that case too.

“Trigpoint” wrote about the 1GB limit for files in the OsmAnd-App. I didn’t know that.

As for the init run after every single map, “Jarek” has written a logical explanation:

As a programmer I can also imagine some reasons why OsmAnd might want to re-init each region separately: it avoids the weird limbo state where new data is in but not yet initialized.

14

Thank you for your discussion.
The posts by “trigpoint” and “Jarek” have certainly helped me to better understand the data model in the OsmAnd app.
That was, after all, the main point of my post.

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15

Your screenshot shows the download size. After unpacking, the maps are bigger.

Your screenshot shows the size of the downloaded maps after unzipping.

The limitation is also intended to prevent routing issues, see:

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16

That observation came from watching the England map become no longer available.

17

I always download the full maps as OSMand is also my goto map for walking and I also use it for mapping.

18

Meanwhile, OsmAnd has published a post about this on their blog:

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