What you need to know to prepare and recreate your styles
By: Josh Erb
This spring, we’re deprecating Studio Classic map styles and supporting users in moving over to our modern Static Images and Static Tiles API for improved performance and more control over styling.
We’ll be slowly rolling out this deprecation to give users time to migrate their map styles and chat with our team. On March 31st, you’ll no longer be able to create new Classic map styles or update existing classic styles via the Uploads API and Mapbox Studio. Then on June 1st, we will turn off the ability to request a Classic map style from our Legacy Maps and Legacy Static Images APIs. By that point, if you have not migrated from your Classic map style it will no longer load for your implementation.
Behind the change
We made the decision to stop active maintenance of the core technology that powers these maps (CartoCSS) back in 2016. However, we continued to support Classic Styles through our Legacy Maps and Legacy Static Images APIs. These APIs are no longer in active development, and almost four years later we’ve reached an inflection point where maintaining legacy technology prevents us from providing the best tools for our users.
Moving to a modern Mapbox Studio style unlocks benefits not available in Classic map styles like:
- Daily map data updates, carefully validated by Mapbox. Studio Classic styles stopped receiving regular map data updates in early 2018
- Ability to customize and style your maps with Style Components in Studio
- Consistent styling across the full stack of modern our SDKs and Static APIs
How to transition your Classic style
If you’re currently using a Classic map style you depend on, we are committed to making sure you have what you need to either upgrade to a newer, run-time powered implementation or migrate to a comparable static implementation that’s powered by a Mapbox GL style.
To help in this transition we’ve put together migration guides for the modern Static Tiles API and modern Static Images API. And if you want to use this change to re-evaluate your implementation, our Web Map Pricing Guide offers an overview of the different use cases for our modern map APIs.
We know that changing any map that’s already out in the wild isn’t ideal. If you have any questions at all along the way, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team.
Joshua Erb - Software Engineer - Mapbox | LinkedIn
Deprecating Studio Classic styles was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.