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https://osmand.net/blog/fast-routing/
Offline navigation is a lifeline for travelers, adventurers, and everyday commuters. We demand speed, accuracy, and the flexibility to tailor routes to our specific needs. For years, OsmAnd has championed powerful, feature-rich offline maps that fit in your pocket. But as maps grew more detailed and user demands for complex routing increased, our trusty A* algorithm, despite its flexibility, started hitting a performance wall. How could we deliver a 100x speed boost without bloating map sizes or sacrificing the deep customization our users love?
The answer: OsmAnd's custom-built Highway Hierarchy (HH) Routing. This isn't your standard routing engine; it's a ground-up redesign, meticulously engineered to overcome the unique challenges of providing advanced navigation on compact, offline-first map data.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday February 28, @07:11PM
I can summarize my summary:
At some cost in algo complexity and complicated data storage it can solve most routes faster most of the time by doing a two tier sort and by adding weirdo criteria at the end of the algo not at the start, which is not overly intuitive but I guess is makes sense.
What makes it an interesting story is you'd think in 2026 routing GPS would be boring but here's a new idea. Also this could NEVER have been invented by an AI because someone vibe coding would either have no idea what A* is so the LLM would toss it at em, or they'd ONLY know A* so they'd demand it by name. This was surely invented by a human as its got some creativity...