Update 2023: while this still works, the OsmAnd interface looks a bit different now, and the “easy” method does not work consistently at the moment.

OsmAnd is a great app for hiking, mountain biking, or other outdoorsy things, however, one can make it even better by underlaying (or overlaying) data from Strava’s heatmap in addition to the offline Openstreetmap data. This is quite useful for spotting potential trails or routes that are not in Openstreetmap yet, or for identifying how “good” (poular…) a trail might be, based on how many Strava users take it. Here’s what it looks like:

How to set it up, the easy way

(Note that this service currently does not work consistently, I’ll leave this section here in case it does work again in the future. See below for the alternative.)

(This uses an online proxy to retrive the map tiles from Strava, so you don’t have to login, fiddle around with session tokens in the URL, etc. yourself) You can find more details about it here, including other maps available.

In OsmAnd, go to “Configure map”, then “Map source…”, “Add manually…”, and enter the following details:

Name: Strava heatmap (or anything you want)

URL: https://anygis.ru/api/v1/Tracks_Strava_All_HD/{1}/{2}/{0}

Maximum zoom: 15

Minimum zoom: 0

That’s it. Just enable “underlay map”, and set it to “Strava heatmap”. If it doesn’t work for you, read on:

And in case the easy way doesn’t work (you’ll need a Strava account and a desktop computer):

First, strava requires you to be logged in for this. Then you need the “session tokens” to carry over your login to OsmAnd. There’s two ways to do this:

1. The “harder” way: Go to https://www.strava.com/heatmap, login, and then open your browser’s developer tools (hit F12). You’ll need to go to the storage tab (in chrome, that’s under “Application” -> “Cookies”), and copy the values of CloudFront-Signature, CloudFront-Key-Pair-Id and CloudFront-Policy, to make up the following URL: (replace the dots with the values of those cookies…) https://heatmap-external-a.strava.com/tiles-auth/all/gray/{0}/{1}/{2}.png?px=256&Signature=.......&Key-Pair-Id=.......&Policy=.......
2. The “Easier” way: Use the browser extension: JOSM Strava Heatmap to automatically retrieve the URL for you, select the “no TMS prefix” option when you copy-paste it. On Android, Kiwi Browser, or Firefox nightly both support extensions, so you can use this on mobile even without a PC.

Send this to your phone somehow once you’ve got it all.

In OsmAnd, go to “Configure map”, then “Map source…”, “Add manually…”, and enter the following details:

Name: "Strava heatmap" (or anything you want)

URL: the URL you got earlier.

Maximum zoom: 16

It should look something like this:

After that, just enable “underlay map”, and set it to “Strava heatmap”. You might also need to set “map source” back to “Offline vector maps” if OsmAnd changes to only the heatmap.

If it stops working; Strava probably logged you out (usually after about a week), you’ll need to do the whole URL assembly-copy-paste thing again - but instead, you can go to the “download maps” screen, then “Local”, and here you can update the entry.

Have fun!