Customize your mobile maps with Android v6.0 and iOS v4.0
By: Lily Kaiser
Our Maps SDKs updates give you a new ways to customize your maps. Recently, the teams at Woov, The Weather Chanel, Lonely Planet, and Snap blew us away with one-of-a-kind maps that let their users explore the world in fun, intuitive ways. With the release of v6.0 for Android and v4.0 for iOS, anyone can build fast-rendering, personalized maps to engage users.
Customizable heatmaps 🔥
Now you can layer a customized heatmap into your app with a quick copy/paste of a code snippet. Map social activity in real-time during large news events, visualize the density of user activity across the world, or plot city-wide restaurant check-ins in your travel app:
Our heatmaps let you explore millions of real-time data points. View them in aggregate, or zoom in to look at each point individually. Adjust the radius, color, and opacity of data points as you zoom to encourage different user interactions at each level.The data renders at top speed (60 frames per second) so users can zoom in and out smoothly, without any “stuttering”.
Shaded terrain layers ⛰
Bring realistic, detailed terrain maps into your app with hillshade layers. Hillshade layers paint 3D elevation data points onto a 2D map. Client-side rendering makes it easy to custom-style your terrain to look like an old-fashioned trail map for your outdoors app or a minimalistic basemap for your fitness app. The lighting direction can change dynamically or stay fixed as your user rotates the map.
But wait…there’s more!
These improvements are only possible because the latest Maps SDKs release introduces expressions, which give you fine-grained control of every aspect of the map’s appearance. Expressions are far more flexible than the previous runtime styling API; and they can cut down the number of style layers you need to manage by as much as 70%. Stay tuned for a deeper dive from us about expressions on mobile.
We’ve also improved the behavior of labels on the map. Now labels fade in and out smoothly as your user zooms and rotates the map. If you add your own data to the map, the map’s existing labels avoid colliding with the ones you add. For the full list of updates, check out our iOS and Android changelogs.
Start experimenting with all of these new features — install the latest Maps SDK for iOS and Android.
New Maps SDK brings heatmaps and terrain shading to mobile was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.