Can I use navigation and addresses in Android for free?

[Psijic]

Hello, can I use navigation and addresses in an Android SDK for free in a commercial app? I didn't find a thing about geocoding or OSM support.

[ianthetechie]

That depends on your definition of "free" 😂 You need 3 things (at least) to make a navigation app. Here are the options that I'm aware of:

Map tiles: The OpenStreetMap Foundation operates a public map tile server using donated resources, but use is subject to the Tile Usage Policy. There is no commercial use restriction, but there is also no SLA, and if you're a heavy user, you are quite likely to get blocked for abuse. Note: while the Google Maps SDK does have free (within some limits and restrictions) map tiles for Android apps, their terms of service expressly forbid any usage for navigation. And their APIs all require usage of Google's maps for display of results. This means you can't use Google for address search and then show the results on a map from another vendor. They love their lock-in!

Geocoding / autocomplete search: The OSM geocoder has a similar usage policy. It also does not support autocomplete (search as you type).

Routing: The OpenStreetMap Foundation doesn't operate any routing servers as far as I'm aware. FOSSGIS eV hosts Valhalla and OSRM routing, subject to a similar usage policy.

In short, I would say that no, you can't really build a commercial navigation app with maps, routing, and search for free, since the free services have no SLA, tight rate limits, and (in the case of address search) don't support autocomplete search. I would suggest looking at the commercial vendors page on the docs for some alternatives. At the time of this writing, everyone offers free API keys for evaluation use with some reasonable limits, but requires a subscription for ongoing commercial use.

[Psijic]

What about offline maps? There're no server requests. Does ferrostar SDK support all the stuff like OsmAnd does?

[ianthetechie]

Yes, this is possible! Off the top of my head, there are a few approaches to this.

The most common is to use the Offline Manager in MapLibre Native. You can instruct it to download a region of tiles offline out of band. Then future requests for those tiles will occur offline.

The Offline Manager has a few issues though, since it deals with each downloaded region separately, and refreshing, merging regions, etc. is really difficult or unsupported. I think it is possible bundle tiles with your app or download them from another source (using your own code) too, but I think tis' a bit of work to tell MapLibre where to find this data.

You might get some better answers in the #maplibre-native channel of the OSM US Slack chat. I've seen a few threads there in the past from people who have built their own (sometimes fairly elaborate) offline tile caching systems on top of MapLibre Native using a SQLite database. Ferrostar would support any such solution (or could be very easily made to support it; if you think something isn't working due to a Ferrostar limitation, feel free to open an issue!).

[Psijic]

MapLibre Native
Open-source C++ library for displaying maps inside of your mobile applications

I meant, can I use ferrostar SDK to get navigation and geocoding for offline maps out of the box without 3rd parties or at least to make it smoothly and fast if I have known free OSM offline maps server downloads?

[ianthetechie]

Ferrostar isn't a geocoding library. You bring your own, and just give the library the points you want to route between.

Similarly, you can bring your own route provider and calculate the routes however you want, including offline generation, caching from your servers, etc. Have a look at https://stadiamaps.github.io/ferrostar/route-providers.html