Yesterday was my first real test of using OsmAnd instead of Google Maps and it didn't go great. I wasn't getting any audio for turn-by-turn so I spent a while fiddling with the voice settings. Turns out Graphene doesn't ship with a TTS engine and nothing in OsmAnd was indicating that. It would be nice if there were some kind of indication in the settings for voice that lets you know but I guess most OSs probably ship with an engine. The FOSS options for a TTS engine aren't too wide and again I didn't want to just play with loopholes to get the Google engine, so I went with RHVoice. Once I set that as the default in my system settings I finally started getting audio.
The bigger issue was just telling it where I wanted to go. I was meeting up with friends for a drink at a popular bar that's been open now for about 9 months now. It wasn't findable by search, which was a little annoying but fine, but when I tried to input the address things got really wonky. The menus are a bit of a mess and it's not clear how it wants addresses input. The bar is in a building that has been standing for decades at that address but it seemed like the address wasn't in the OpenStreetMap database, so the app kept setting my destination to a random point on the street. This might work well enough sometimes but in this case the street spans half the city and the point the app selected was miles away from my actual destination. Eventually I just zoomed in close and manually set the destination to the right building on the map and things were fine from there.
Again, a situation I hadn't really considered. It looks like OsmAnd updates their OpenStreetMap database monthly (though I saw mention of being able to set it to instant) and there are numerous ways to contribute and fix/update/expand maps for the whole community. One method I've taken note of is called StreetComplete, which shows missing map data nearby in the form of "quests" to complete that then gets passed as updates to OpenStreetMap. I haven't started using it yet but it could be a fun way of exploring, too. We'll see.
See Part 4 HERE.