If you hike, ski, or drive in North America, your OsmAnd terrain may already be much sharper than you think. Since spring 2026, terrain maps and contour lines for the United States (including Alaska), Canada, and Mexico are built from high-resolution national elevation data. If you have not updated these maps since then, you are still looking at the old, smoother relief.
You've ridden the Transfagarasan three times now, and the story you tell afterward never changes: good climb, brutal hairpins, freezing at the top. Same three sentences, every time, because that's genuinely all a memory holds onto.
Your phone remembers more. It was recording the whole ride — every meter of elevation, every km/h, the exact spot where you stopped pretending you weren't struggling. None of that shows up in a photo. It shows up in the track, if you know how to ask it the right question.
August comes with two alarms on the calendar. On August 12, a total solar eclipse sweeps from the Arctic across Greenland and Iceland, reaching northern Spain and the Balearic Islands just before sunset — the first total solar eclipse visible from mainland Europe since 1999. Sixteen days later, on August 28, a deep partial lunar eclipse covers 96% of the Moon's surface, making it nearly indistinguishable from a total eclipse for anyone watching from the Americas.
Two rare events in the same month. And both of them unusual in their own way. The solar eclipse arcs up and over the North Pole, which means its path runs north-to-south rather than the typical west-to-east sweep. In Spain, the Sun will sit only a few degrees above the horizon during totality — turning the eclipse into something closer to a golden-hour phenomenon than a midday event. The lunar eclipse, meanwhile, stops just short of totality: at its peak, a narrow bright sliver of the Moon remains uncovered, leaving the rest darkened and faintly reddish.
OsmAnd Astronomy now includes (Android only, currently available in OsmAnd 5.4 beta via Google Play or as a nightly build) dedicated explorers for both events. You can move through the timeline, check visibility for any location on the planet, and see exactly how each eclipse develops — before either of them actually happens.
OsmAnd has discontinued "merged" maps — large country- or region-level files that were assembled from smaller regional maps. If you have one of these installed, it will no longer receive updates.
Running every morning is just what you do. No discussion — just the street and whatever distance feels right that day. Your running partner lives on Yonge Street. So do you. Same street, different ends — and when he suggested a 7 AM run "somewhere in the middle", it sounded simple enough.
Yonge Street is 56 kilometres long. The longest street in the world, according to Guinness. It starts at Lake Ontario and runs straight north through Toronto until it quietly disappears near Holland Landing. "Somewhere in the middle" turned out to be a question neither of you had actually answered. You were both on Yonge Street — technically neighbours — and had absolutely no idea how far apart you were standing.
A few taps in OsmAnd, and the guessing stopped. Distance by tap, radius circles, a straight line to your meeting point — tools that turn a vague sense of scale into something exact.
Some trips exist first as an idea. You open a map, find a coastline, and start building something in your head — a route, a few stops, maybe a harbor where you'd want to spend the evening. A principality of your own, even if just for a week. Principality of Monaco takes that idea literally. In summer the water gets crowded quickly — and what looks like open space from the shore has its own logic underneath. Shallow patches, restricted zones, boats coming and going from every direction. You don't notice any of it until you're already in the middle of it.
A regular map won't tell you any of that. Roads, buildings, points of interest — useful on land, but the moment you're moving on water, the map needs to change completely.
This is what OsmAnd's Nautical Map View is for. Depth data, seabed information, navigation lights, buoys, fairways — the kind of detail that turns a general-purpose app into something you can actually use on the water. Whether you're planning a route along the Côte d'Azur or just trying to find a safe place to anchor for the night, it starts with a different kind of map.
In films like Angels & Demons, Rome never feels flat. The city unfolds through narrow streets, archways, inner courtyards, and massive stone buildings rising above the crowd. You remember not only where the characters go, but the space around them — the height of the facades, the passages through buildings, the way entire streets disappear beneath arches before opening into another square.
But on most digital maps, cities lose that depth. Buildings become flat shapes, reduced to outlines that show where something exists, but not how the city actually feels. For mappers, this is where building data starts to matter.
In OpenStreetMap, buildings can contain far more than a simple outline. Mappers can describe a building's height, the number of floors, where different sections begin, and even passages running through the structure. OsmAnd uses this data to transform flat map geometry into detailed 3D cityscapes. Buildings gain height, complex structures become distinguishable, and streets start to feel closer to the real places they represent.
Far from city lights, the sky looks different. In the Namib Desert, darkness comes quickly and the stars appear all at once, filling the entire horizon. At first, it feels simple. A guide points to a few constellations, maybe a bright planet. You follow along, recognising some shapes. But after a moment, you lose track. There are more stars than you expected, and it is hard to tell them apart.
This is where OsmAnd Astronomy changes the experience. Instead of guessing, you can explore the sky the same way you explore a map — step by step, with clear orientation, useful context, and the ability to plan what to look for next.
In the first half of March, we ran a survey to better understand how people use OsmAnd and what they expect from it. At OsmAnd, we often talk about offline maps, route planning, and outdoor navigation. But the most important question is simpler: how do people actually use OsmAnd, and what do they need from it?
To explore that, we collected feedback across five language groups: English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish.
The results gave us a clear picture. Users value OsmAnd for its depth, flexibility, and offline capabilities — especially in situations where reliability and preparation matter. At the same time, the survey highlighted areas where the app still creates friction, particularly around usability, search, and routing confidence.
This post shares some of the main themes that appeared across all five surveys.
In classic adventure stories, traveling through remote regions meant you had to rely on maps, luck, and intuition. Patagonia — famously portrayed in "In Search of the Castaways" — was once a place of uncertainty and long, unpredictable routes. Today, exploring Patagonia can look very different with OsmAnd Web Explore. Modern tools make it easy to discover key places, explore what’s nearby, and plan routes across one of the world’s most spectacular regions.
