Saving power with OsmAnd while hiking

While hiking, my main concern is logging my track, and sometimes routing, and a long battery life. Walking with a phone plugged into a powerbank is possible, but it’s a pain (the cables become dislodged or worse: bent)

I have a Lenovo Moto G5+, which I primarily selected for having dual sim and a great battery life (3000mAh).

When I use OsmAnd while driving, I want all navigation information in my field of vision, all the time. That draws power, hence it’s plugged in. But while hiking, that’s not a comfortable option

What I often do, is plan a route with a few waypoints so I know how far it is till the next waypoint and/or the final destination. But I do not need navigation, I can read that from the screen.

I found that the battery will last a day, but just, if I have GPS recording on and a track with a few points, from my location
But the next day, I changed that to be a track from a set point. Which means OsmAnd won’t recalculate on te fly. I had about 35% battery left at the end of the day, despite using my phone a lot more.

The steps to do this are:

Make a route by selecting a few points on the map, clicking “Directions ↱”, then adding them as subsequent destination (or intermediates, if you wish)
On the route overview, do not click “Start”. This will cause your phone to start actual navigation (meaning it will continuously assess your location and point out navigation directions. You want this while driving a car. But it drains battery. So not while hiking).
Insted, click on the edit icon (✎).
In the list of destinations, click on the 🗙 right of “my position”, and click “Apply”
Now, the first of your points has become the start point.

This means the first point of your route has become the fixed start point, and OsmAnd will not do any recalculation until you reorganize the points, thus saving power!

Note that OsmAnd in this overview shows you the intermediate distances between points.
To get a distance to your first point, you could add your current location as the point of destination. But I found that while hiking, I usually remember a route up to the next waypoint. So all I need to do is remove the first waypoint ­ ­— then it will try and calculate a route from the current location. But when you delete the current location again, it will navigate from the next (now first) point.

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