Osmand is great, but it's difficult to use, it doesn't have good place search, and it doesn't plan public transport trips very well.

My experience trying to get it to find a route to work just now involved finding my street name but not being able to enter my address, not being able to enter my workplace's exact address either, getting told to take an express train to a stop that I know it never stops at during peak hour, and searching in vain for a way to change the trip time. I bet it also can't handle delays, cancellations, or bus replacements.

Maybe it works better in your city? I notice you wrote "we can conclude that mapping isn't much of a problem for these people", but you could use the same evidence to conclude Osmand isn't much of a solution for their problem.

(I will note that I use it for hiking and it's very good for that, as it is for cycling.)

Because Google Maps is all they know? I've been on the web for 30+ years (wrote my own html home page by hand in 1995 while doing my master's) and have just now heard of "Osmand" for maybe the 2nd time in my life. The other being a few months ago. If I haven't heard of it, how would anyone else who isn't technical hear about it?

> If I haven't heard of it, how would anyone else who isn't technical hear about it?

If you assume that mapping services on a low-to-no bandwidth connection are important to them, they'll hear about it through word of mouth. Anything that solves a real problem will spread that way.

Contrapositively, we can conclude that mapping isn't much of a problem for these people.

I have the same background, and I've not heard of Osmand, though I do try to use map downloader apps when I'm abroad, just in case.

The other problem with any map tile downloading is that it eats up their entire 3GB of transfer and their phone is dead before they even start. Catch-22.