@Piskvor, yes, that’s a cluster of SPOFs. The company may claim that hey, you can use the SDK to get the words offline and you’ll no longer need to connect to the servers, but that raises the question of data usage license.

Yes, they say about opensourcing their something, but it does not make sense to do that, since the whole w3w service is basically a hash lookup where the dataset is 300KB-1.1MB (as seen in Navmii).

Thank you for the replies and the pointer to Open Location Codes. A friend in Ireland confirmed they have Eircode which has a form of “A65 F4E2” and maps 1:1 to a postal address (not lat/long). Open Post Code also seems to be geared towards Ireland, but can be configured with different parameters for the rest of the world.

… aand Wired has just covered w3w, mentioning the inability to infer the location from the code, but failing to mention the single point of failure and the proprietary nature of their database.

@Warin61, yes, bicycle and pedestrian navigation work sufficiently well, and I switched to OsmAnd being completely sure the rendering issues won’t affect my ability to use it as a navigating device. I tested it on 2013 Moto X, 2014 Nexus 5, 2015 Nexus 9 tablet and found no difference in rendering performance between these devices. I removed and reinstalled the application to make sure that nothing I’ve configured influences that (OSM Live used to cause even longer redraw times, but not anymore).

There’s nothing else I would use for location surveying, though.

@gosausee, MAPS.ME, while being shiny, also suffer from delayed map updates, I’ll get to that in some future post.

Thank you, Alan. I hope I can get the import approved now that I provided all the background information on the subject and why I want to do it so bad.

@Alan Bragg, thank you, I haven’t seen it. Unfortunately it is missing Boston, so I can’t really use it.