BRouter: offline routing on Android phones

BRouter is first and foremost an offline tool. It runs on any Android phone. The online version offered here is just for a trial and for convenience. While many smartphone routing software use online services to do the actual route calculations, the advantages of the offline approach are evident:

  • It is more reliable, data connection problems and server-side problems are no issue
  • It works in foreign countries where data connections are either not available or very expensive
  • It does not raise any data privacy issues
  • You can use a cheap dedicated, second phone for navigation, without having to put your business smartphone on an untrusted bike mount and run it's battery low
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    The downside is that advanced route calculations are difficult to do on a smartphone with limited computing and memory resources, which may lead developers to implement simplifications into the routing algorithm that affect the quality of the routing results. BRouter always does it's best on the quality, but has a processing time that scales quadratic with distance, leading to a limit at about 150km in air-distance, which is enough for a bikers daytrip.

    Installing the BETA Version of BRouter on an Android smartphone.

    Before trying the Android app, you should have a look one the online version to see what it's doing.

    What you should also do before trying the BRouter Android app is to install, an get familiar with, one of the supported map-apps. This is either OsmAnd, which is a full offline navigation solution on it's own, but especially it's a wonderful offline OSM map tool and is able to give spoken directions to routes calculated either internally or externally. Other options are Locus or OruxMaps.

    The BRouter Android app assumes that at least one of OsmAnd, Locus or OruxMaps is installed - it will not work otherwise.

    If you are o.k. with all that, you can install the BRouter Android app from the brouter-1.6.3.zip installation ZIP-file including the APK and read the readme.txt ( READ ME ! ) for details on how to add routing data and navigation profiles to your installation and how the interfacing between BRouter and the supported map-tools works.

    Navigation profiles and the lookup-data are here
    Routing data files per 5*5-degree square are here

    (The Map-Snapshot date is about 2 days before the timestamp of the routing data files)

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