53 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown
53 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown
## Ofline routing on Android phones
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BRouter is first and foremost an offline tool. It runs on any Android phone. The
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online version offered here is just for a trial and for convenience. While many
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smartphone routing software use online services to do the actual route
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calculations, the advantages of the offline approach are evident:
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- It is more reliable, data connection problems and server-side problems are no
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issue
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- It works in foreign countries where data connections are either not available
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or very expensive
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- It does not raise any data privacy issues
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- You can use a cheap dedicated, second phone for navigation, without having to
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put your business smartphone on an untrusted bike mount and run it's battery
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low
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The downside is that advanced route calculations are difficult to do on a
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smartphone with limited computing and memory resources, which may lead
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developers to implement simplifications into the routing algorithm that affect
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the quality of the routing results. BRouter always does it's best on the
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quality, but has a processing time that scales quadratic with distance, leading
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to a limit at about 150km in air-distance, which is enough for a bikers daytrip.
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### Installing the BETA Version of BRouter on an Android smartphone.
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Before trying the Android app, you should have a look one the [online
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version](/brouter-web) to see what it's doing.
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What you should also do before trying the BRouter Android app is to install, an
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get familiar with, one of the supported map-apps. This is either
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[OsmAnd](http://www.osmand.net), which is a full offline navigation solution on
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it's own, but especially it's a wonderful offline OSM map tool and is able to
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give spoken directions to routes calculated either internally or externally.
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Other options are [Locus](http://www.locusmap.eu/) or
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[OruxMaps](http://www.oruxmaps.com/index_en.html).
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The BRouter Android app assumes that at least one of OsmAnd, Locus or OruxMaps
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is installed - it will not work otherwise.
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If you are o.k. with all that, you can install the BRouter Android app from the
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[brouter_1_6_1.zip](../brouter_bin/brouter_1_6_1.zip) installation ZIP-file
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including the APK and read the [readme.txt](readme.txt) ( **READ ME !** ) for
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details on how to add routing data and navigation profiles to your installation
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and how the interfacing between BRouter and the supported map-tools works.
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Navigation profiles and the lookup-data are [here](profiles2) Routing data files
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per 5*5-degree square are [here](/brouter/segments4)
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(The Map-Snapshot date is about 2 days before the timestamp of the routing data
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files)
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