My current rig:
- old android phone with GPS disabled
- external GPS device (NMEA over bluetooth)
- OSMand from f-droid for offline maps and navigation
- BlueGPS to connect to the bluetooth GPS device, grab the NMEA signal, and feed it as a mock location
- developer options » mock locations enabled
The idea is to save on phone battery so I can navigate more than an hour. The phone’s internal GPS is energy intensive because of all the GPS calculations. By offloading the GPS work to an external bluetooth GPS, the phone’s battery can be somewhat devoted to the screen because bluetooth uses much less energy than GPS. And NMEA carries lat/long so the phone need not do the calculations.
Not sure it actually works though.. been waiting for satellites for a while now. Anyway, I would like to know if this config can work on any FOSS platforms, like pmOS. Can OSMand run on pmOS or is there a better option? IIUC, Android apps are a huge CPU hog on pmOS because of emulation.
Ideally I would like to buy something 2nd-hand like a BQ Aquaris X5 and put pmOS on it. I’ll need a quite lean mapping and nav app that runs on pmOS, and also has the ability to use an external GPS.
For the first 15 minutes when satellites are taking forever to appear, I would like to use something like WiGLE WiFi Wardriving which makes use of wifi APs and cell towers the same way Google location does, but without feeding Google. Is there anything like that on pmOS, or any other FOSS phone platform?
Updates
Every mobile FOSS platform listed by the OSM project have been abandoned as far as I can tell. But perhaps OSM is just poorly tracking this because osmin and pure maps apparently both run on Postmarket OS:
There is a network-dependent nav app called Mepo, but that would not interest me.
There is also Organic Maps which comes as a flatpak for aarch64. It requires the whole KDE framework which is fat in terms of size but probably not relying on emulation so it could perform well enough.