Current Limitations of OpenStreetMap Smartphone Apps – First Post

Summary

Issue #1 when first using offline OpenStreetMap navigation apps for Android, such as OsmAnd, Comaps, and Organic Maps: the size of the map to be downloaded. In many places, it’s the entire country or nothing. And that often amounts to over 100 MB, with some cases exceeding 500 or 600 MB. Why is that?

Personal experience: the rise of smartphones in the Global South

During the summer of 2013, I coordinated an OSM mapping HOT project in northern and northeastern Haiti with others. At that time, the go-to tool for field data collection was the small, rugged, and energy-efficient Garmin Etrex series devices, though they required a fairly lengthy editing process on a computer. I had had my first Android smartphone for a few months by then, and as I recall, OSMtracker already existed, perhaps Vespucci as well (though I didn’t discover it until later), and OsmAnd was in its early stages. However, the app ecosystem wasn’t yet mature enough to replace the eTrex. At the end of the mission, I saw some Haitian participants start to get their first smartphones.

A few months later that same year, during another mapping mission in Mongolia, I had a meeting with officials from the Asian Development Bank whom I was trying to convince of all the benefits of OpenStreetMap. At one point, I used the emergence of these OSM mobile apps as an argument, noting that they would soon allow anyone to easily access and contribute to OSM data, given that smartphones would soon be in everyone’s hands. I didn’t feel like I was making wild guesses: cell phones were already everywhere, and it seemed quite logical that Android smartphones—whose affordable models were just starting to hit the market—would also be successful and boost both contributions to and use of OSM.

Perhaps my conversation partners were only familiar with the far more expensive iPhones? In any case, they practically laughed in my face that day, retorting that no, that wasn’t going to happen in a few years. Instantly, in their eyes, I had become a geek out of touch with reality, and OSM a project of dreamers.

The smartphone: the primary device for accessing OSM

That said, GSM is not dead; its network is still widely used, and its devices are sometimes still predominant in certain rural areas around the world, particularly in the Global South. Nevertheless, smartphones are very prevalent, as shown by these reports from the GSM Association in Africa, Asia and Latin America, or this world map showing a mobile connectivity index.

Admittedly, these statistics appear to be based on the proportion of the population with an internet connection, and it is difficult to estimate the proportion of the population that owns a smartphone, given that some basic phones are capable of connecting to the web or that in certain countries (Ivory Coast, for example), it is common to subscribe to two carriers to take advantage of their respective benefits.

Nevertheless, the smartphone—far ahead of the computer—is the device most people around the world use to access the Internet. And thus OpenStreetMap. Since 2013, the number of Android-based apps has grown, and their features have expanded, both in terms of data editing and consumption, for navigation and search activities. However, they remain ill-suited for certain contexts and uses, particularly in the Global South. Since this blog post is already too long, I will address only one of these shortcomings today.

The first current shortcoming of offline Android navigation apps: map files that are too large, particularly for countries in the Global South

I have often noticed, during training workshops dedicated to getting started with apps like OsmAnd or Organic Maps/Comaps, how the map to be downloaded could sometimes be a large file exceeding 100 MB, covering the entire country, without being able to be limited to the administrative area of the training location.

This is doubly problematic in countries where the internet can be slow, unstable, and is often significantly more expensive than in the Global North, with no unlimited data plans. Having to pay a sum that is significant relative to the cost of living to download—sometimes after several attempts—a map of which you will only use 10% of the area is not necessarily motivating.

The Statistical Approach

I wanted to verify this by analyzing all the available maps. OsmAnd provides this webpage, which lists all available maps along with their size and update date, but I couldn’t find an equivalent for Organic Maps/Comaps. The following statistics are therefore limited to OsmAnd and are from last month (I procrastinated a bit on writing this post), but the results would likely be similar for Organic Maps/Comaps, for which I’m also providing a few examples.

The results are shown by continent. By level_0, I mean countries for which there is only a single map covering the entire national territory (so-called admin0 level); by level_1, those that also have maps based on the first administrative division (admin1); and by level_2, countries that have a second level of demonstrative administrative division (admin2) in OsmAnd.

I arbitrarily chose 100 MB as the threshold above which a map can be considered a large file to download. The statistics are grouped by continent, showing the number of countries where the size of the map to be downloaded exceeds 100 MB, for each of the categories (levels 0, 1, and 2). For countries with levels 1 and 2, the average map size is used.

The last column lists the data for each country in descending order of file size, including those that are under the 100 MB threshold. These are highlighted in green for easy identification. The other countries are shown in orange for file sizes between 100 and 200 MB, and in red for file sizes over 200 MB.

The Results

We can see significant disparities among countries on each continent, with some exceeding 400 MB:

• Portugal, Romania, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Slovakia, and Belgium in Europe
• New Zealand in Oceania
• Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia in South America
• Nigeria, Madagascar, and Kenya in Africa
• Thailand, South Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Nepal in Asia
• In Central America, the grouping of all Caribbean countries is not a country in itself and should instead be considered an additional download option. The small size of these countries means that none yet have a map without administrative boundaries exceeding 100 MB,

We also note that only Europe has twelve countries with a Level 1 or even Level 2, yet their maps are still larger than 100 MB on average. This is likely due to the density of OSM data in Europe. Elsewhere, only vast countries like Australia, Russia, and Brazil exceed 100 MB despite being at level 1.

For everyone else, having to download a map larger than 100 MB means having to download the entire country. This applies to 27 African countries and 22 Asian countries. In Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country (and the sixth most populous in the world), using OsmAnd requires downloading a map larger than 600 MB, making it the country with the poorest coverage in the app. For reference, the situation is barely better on CoMaps, where users can choose between Nigeria – North (217 MB) and Nigeria – South (479 MB). In Thailand, the OsmAnd map is over 500 MB, and CoMaps offers three maps (the largest of which is still 182 MB).

However, three other major African countries are well-served in OsmAnd with a Level 1 setting that drastically reduces map size: the DRC, for example, with an average of 16 MB (and a maximum of 77 MB), Tanzania at around 55 MB, and South Africa just under 100 MB. The same applies in Asia with China, Japan, India, Indonesia (though some provinces are still over 200 MB), and the Philippines, where it is possible to download maps of reasonable size.

Why is that?

How can such unequal treatment be explained? Why not systematically offer a first-level map division for all countries where the map of the entire country exceeds 100 MB—or, as we’ve seen, much more—rather than just a few? Is this simply the result of a lack of demand from these underserved countries?

OsmAnd recently published the results of a survey conducted among its user community, which spans five languages, without specifying the users’ countries of origin. The issue of map size does not appear in the survey, but perhaps this is precisely because it limits the number of users in those countries? It would be interesting to know the number of users of the app’s maps for each country, or at the very least the number of downloads for each map.

In any case, this issue with map size in certain regions is the primary barrier to the adoption of these navigation apps in those areas and a constraint for those who have nevertheless decided to use them.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)