I recently went abroad in Europe and because of the price of data roaming I decided to install the OsmAnd android app for navigation.<p>In Romania, Transylvania using instead of a map it was very good. Even the little dirt roads were there. I had three problems with the app. The navigation did not wanted to respect my setting for "prefer highways", we always tried to regenerate the route, "we are near, maybe now it will know". Seemed like it hated highways. The app felt very buggy, I know it is free, but froze a lot of times and has un-intuitive controls. For example if I wanted to add navigation to a target it sometimes used a location from yesterday or something totally unrelated. Asking a question "Do you want to keep the current route?" it sometimes keeps the current route, sometimes reverts back to a route before, sometimes even just shows where I was yesterday. Third is, searching is a PITA. Because a lot of house numbers are missing you can only input intersections, sometimes it works, sometimes not. Searching for POI-s is good (remember, it is offline), but a lot of things are missing. I found if I add favorites and want a route between them then that usually works. (I don't know how the app creators are related to OSM.)<p>Anyway, I recommend the app because it is valuable and usable if you don't have connection (and free if you use only 10 maps).<p>Recently I wanted to use a web based map in one of my project and I found it is very easy to use OSM with <a href="http://leafletjs.com/" rel="nofollow">http://leafletjs.com/</a>. It has some bugs (I couldn't get a "map loaded" event out of it, maybe it is just me) but overall I think it was easier to set up than a google map. The one thing I missed is the geocoding of addresses, it is not really reliable because of the missing house numbers, instead of OSM I used the google solution and they can work together flawlessly.<p>I am glad to see a free map solution gaining popularity. Where I live there are events for mapping. I think on Saturday there was an event for mapping accessible roads/buildings for disabled people and someone even added all the fire hydrants downtown.