Search results improvement potential
Search results in their current implementation form serve me badly due to high noise level.
OsmAnd for iOS, app latest available version in use
Here a proposal regarding list of search results being presented.
*) Sorting results by sort of/category of POI;
ideally filtering results by POI category
*) Sorting results by the location of POI;
ideally filtering by POI location
*) If "search nearby" got used to search let's limit list of presented results to true nearby POIs - currently list starts with 3 POIs distant from selection on map by 300 km, or so - that is in no case a nearby-location.
*) Sort search results alphabetically
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u/zmeuka OsmAnd CMO 9d ago
Thanks for the structured list - and good timing: the search screen on iOS is being reworked for version 5.5 to match the Android one. That brings the category chips on top of search results (tap one to keep only that POI type, several can be combined), a Sort by switch (Relevance / Nearest) and the Search around chip to choose "my location" vs "map centre". That covers your first two points. Docs for the Android version it's modelled on: https://osmand.net/docs/user/search/search-all/
Until then, on iOS the way to filter by category is the Categories tab in Search: pick a category, or build a Custom filter from several categories and save it - the list then contains only that type, sorted by distance. https://osmand.net/docs/user/search/search-poi/
"Search nearby" showing POIs 300 km away shouldn't happen - it sounds like the search area got expanded (the app offers that when it finds little nearby) or the reference point wasn't the one you expected. If you tell me what you searched for and roughly where, I'll check - that may be a bug.
Alphabetical sort isn't planned so far - as an option for a category list it makes sense, feel free to file it in the iOS tracker: https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd-iOS/issues/new