We tell our users that OsmAnd is great if you want a mapping swiss army knife in your pocket: it does a little bit of everything, for power users. It has plugins and customizability.
CoMaps' mission is to be an accessible usable privacy-first FOSS map app for the entire world (average people) and so we always have our eye on the typical expected user experience and what obstacles remain between them and uninstalling those non-FOSS privacy-invading apps, but we're not going down the rabbit hole of adding all sorts of niche powerful features: OsmAnd already does that very well, and the world doesn't need two OsmAnds.
100% agree - I think even some of the CoMaps contributors use OsmAnd for the rare specialist use cases. I know I do: CoMaps is my main map app that I use basically every day and works perfectly for all of my common/normal use cases. but once in a while I have a map/nav need beyond that and then OsmAnd's customizability is great!
To illustrate this, look at OsmAnd's most recent blog post [1]. They've recently been looking at adding pretty extensive Astronomy features. Before that, they added a lot of nautical tooling [2]. This is all very cool if you use that, but if you don't, the laundry list of such features make it harder to find the features you do use.
I used OsmAnd for a long time, and it's a great app that I learned how to use well. And while I do miss some features (most notably the Wikivoyage integration for offline travel guides), ultimately the simplicity of CoMaps makes it much more pleasant to use for the thing I mostly use it for: getting around cities.
Even if it adds some complication I really enjoy just having both features available when I need to. But then I'm a sucker for gadgets.
In a way both provide answers to the question, what is that light?
Performance is the main reason to prefer CoMaps but they've gotten a lot better at it (and inevitably you have to sacrifice some speed for customisability)
Indeed. I have a theory that software complexity tends to bring with it a subjective perception of slowness that might not show up if measured empirically. At one point Osmand certainly had an issue rendering lots of POIs, but it was addressed and these days the app feels (to me) acceptably quick.
I haven't tried using osmand much yet, but one concerning thing is the info I encountered that long (as in, cross-country) trips could take minutes (or hours?) to provide a route for. I haven't actually tested it yet, but it definitely gave me pause
It is real but not so dramatic as you heard. Offline routing must walk the graph across many downloaded regions, so time grows fast with distance. Trip inside one country is usually seconds, whole continent can be minutes. Standard trick is to put two or three intermediate points on the route. Then engine solves several short problems instead of one huge one, and answer comes almost immediately. Also OsmAnd can use online routing when you have signal, offline engine is fallback. So the bad case happens only when you plan very long route and have no connection at same time, which is not typical situation.
CoMaps' mission is to be an accessible usable privacy-first FOSS map app for the entire world (average people) and so we always have our eye on the typical expected user experience and what obstacles remain between them and uninstalling those non-FOSS privacy-invading apps, but we're not going down the rabbit hole of adding all sorts of niche powerful features: OsmAnd already does that very well, and the world doesn't need two OsmAnds.