Mapbox Mobile just launched on iOS! The open source SDK lets developers add beautiful maps to their apps. Mapbox’s Cocoa Touch API works just like Apple MapKit: swap out MKMapView for MGLMapView and make the switch to Mapbox. And it’s free for apps with up to 50,000 monthly active users.
Unmatched style
You pick the design that fits your app. The SDK comes with four map styles, from amazingly detailed streets and terrain to new light and dark styles for data visualization.
Our map styles have detailed data at every zoom level.
And they render with the speed and smoothness of a video game.
Data dashboards for developers
The Mapbox Mobile dashboard gives developers an understanding of how, when, and where people use their apps. For the first time, developers will be able to identify regional popularity trends as they happen.
Beautiful open data
Our maps improve as people use them. Apps using our mobile SDK send location data to Mapbox — the little signals of latitude and longitude points that your phone generates. Processing location data is a key part of how we’re making an amazing map. Aggregated data helps us add new roads, show traffic flows, calculate biking routes, and estimate your time of arrival in a car.
We’ve been talking a lot about how we collect, anonymize, and aggregate this data, keep it secure, and maintain great battery life. Privacy and performance are core to our SDK.
Building in the open
The iOS and Android SDKs are 100% open source, licensed under BSD, with all development and discussions happening on GitHub. We built Mapbox Mobile (also called Mapbox GL, due to its OpenGL heritage) in C++14 using OpenGL ES 2.0, the subset of OpenGL supported by mobile devices. We’ve packaged it with first-class native APIs for Objective-C and Swift, and Java bindings for Android are in the works.
We’re just getting started. In the coming weeks, we’ll be adding support for shape annotations and offline maps while we continually work to optimize performance, stability, and energy use. Our style editor and metrics platform enhancements will launch this summer. Stay close to the action on GitHub— everything happens in the open.