MapLibre Newsletter - February 2024

In February 2024, we were happy to announce that Microsoft has joined the MapLibre Sponsorship Program. With Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft we now have three companies that have a seat in the MapLibre Advisory Council which meets with members of the MapLibre Governing Board on a quarterly basis.

MapLibre’s fiscal host is called Open Source Collective, a non-profit organization based in the US. We would like to emphasize that Open Source Collective is a fully independent organization from Open Collective Foundation despite the similarity in name. Since the two entities are fully independent, the announced dissolution of the Open Collective Foundation will have no consequences to the operations of Open Source Collective and therefore will also have no consequences for MapLibre and its sponsors. You can read more about it in this in blog post of Lauren Gardner, the Executive Director of Open Source Collective.

MapLibre GL JS

Version 4.0.0, 4.0.1 and 4.0.2 were released and we are back with releasing versions more often after we finalized all the breaking changes in version 4.

We had an interesting discussion about geometry-type in the monthly meeting and we are looking for more feedback from the community around how to move forward. Share your thoughts here.

Lastly, we are happy to mention that Sergei Bachinin was added as a contributor to maplibre-gl-js.

MapLibre Native

Core

• Support for multiple sprite sources is now available in the main branch and will be part of the next platform releases. Thanks to @geolives for their contribution.

iOS

• After some trial and error, the release process for iOS is now fully automated. When the VERSION file and CHANGELOG.md are updated as part of a PR, the release workflow will automatically run. By getting changes in the hands of end-users quicker, we hope to encourage contributions for the iOS platform.

• The legacy MGLStyleLayer allowed using custom OpenGL ES code and shaders. A similar custom layer has been revived with the MapLibre Native iOS 6.1 release with MLNCustomStyleLayer, but of course now Metal needs to be used.

• New documentation for iOS is available. It uses the DocC documentation generator from Apple.

Android

• The pre-release of MapLibre Native Android 11.0.0 is out. Since the library underwent significant changes to the rendering architecture, we are gathering feedback before making a final release. Once the 11.0.0 release is out we will have a more regular release cadence again for MapLibre Native Android.

• Download statistics for MapLibre Native Android can be found below.