Nominatim VS OsmAnd

You can simply use geopy API to get longitude and latitude from address. geopy includes geocoder classes for the OpenStreetMap Nominatim, Google Geocoding API (V3), and many other geocoding services. The full list is available on the Geocoders doc section. Geocoder classes are located in geopy.geocoders. Here…

I have had a lot of "fun" with this feature in the past. It has earned a permanent place in my setup script:

ALTER SYSTEM SET jit=off;

Basically a performance blackhole for more complex queries. Most OSM related projects disable it straight away as it only creates headaches.

https://github.com/osm-search/Nominatim/pull/2559

Because osm.org and OsmAnd use different search engines. On osm.org it uses the Nominatim geocoder which is good at parsing addresses the way we are used to writing them. It is also running on a server with a lot of storage and memory resources. OsmAnd is built for offline use so it can't use Nominatim and has much more limited computing resources available to it. It is searching through the map files locally on your phone and however they have chosen to implement that search algorithm seems to perform poorly on addresses.

Ako skupa s adresama imaš i njihove lokacije možeš i koristiti gotov geocoder (e.g. Nominatim je free i koristi OSM podatke, možeš i deployati svoju instancu), pa iz rezultata naći geometrijski najbližu adresu koju imaš.

Then implement a use case. We are going to use Geocoding use case with Nominatim provider. But you can, of course, use a different provider. Copy the example code into your server.js file and make a few changes, so we can send the information we will receive from the user:

There are reasons why this tech was developed: because GPS can take a long time to sync up to the satellites, because GPS often doesn't work indoors, because your phone can keep a local cache of locations, and so you have the ability to find places by name or address (Geocoding) using nominatim ( https://nominatim.org )

and nominatim which does the geocoding/reverse geocoding: https://nominatim.org/

Then it depends on how the location data is conveyed in the group chat. If it's a text message you need to parse it and possibly use a mapping service to do geocoding. Eg. convert "22 Main Street" or "upper Brooklyn" into GPS coordinates. Besides Google Maps API you can maybe use OpenStreetMaps via Nominatim. If it's something more like "we just passed John's house" then you need to figure out how to write some logic to determine a location from that. Or maybe they just used the WhatsApp location share feature, then you probably don't need mapping at all.

> Google maps and Waze does not allow for setting vehicle height

As a side note, OsmAnd supports setting vehicle height* and has support for multiple vehicles/routing profiles: https://osmand.net

*: and weight, width, and length

Slightly offtopic

I have OsmAnd ( https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd ) on my phone, download the basemaps, download my (small) country data (both sourced from open street maps), and with an app + ~1GB of data, I get the maps and full navigation within my country, POIs, etc., and can add other countries when needed.

Is there something similar for a PC? I can download data from open street maps, but then I need postgres, postgis, a tile server and styles and apache running just to generate the tiles. Is there anything portable (short of running osmand in an android virtualbox) for offline navigation on a linux pc? QGIS can display vectors, but I wasn't able to easily style the data... navigation is a no-go there too. anything else?

OsmAnd works for me. I am looking to get off Google, so I try to retire anything that is not on F-Droid. OsmAnd is a independent project ( osmand.net ) that uses the data you can also access under www.openstreetmap.org . The App is not perfect and sometimes it calls for the wrong action, for example when a road is just taking a steep turn it might ask for you to turn onto a different road which is actually the same every now and then. Also Google uses the location data of it's users to change routes depending on congestion afaik. Don't expect that from OsmAnd.

Organic Maps & OsmAnd~ are the classic map alternatives but i don't use them.

When I am on a flight and the flight does not provide the flight information, I am using the OsmAnd, https://osmand.net/, to monitor the flight altitude, speed and direction.

Regarding usage of OpenStreetMap over Google Maps - assuming we're talking mobile usage - you might give OSMAnd[0] a try. I've been using it exclusively on a Pixel loaded with GrapheneOS for a few months now. I would never consider going back to GMaps and I don't feel that I've lost anything either.

[0] - https://osmand.net/

OsmAnd~ (version 4.5.8): Global Mobile Map Viewing & Navigation for Offline and Online OSM Maps

OSMAnd tracks users using a secret supercookie by default because the developer wants metrics. This is done without consent. The defensiveness of the developer with regards to such unethical tracking means that I will never use any software they ever release.

https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/issues/15058

OSMand: https://osmand.net/