MapLibre Newsletter March 2025

Apr 4, 2025

Categories: Newsletter
Authors: Bart Louwers Harel Mazor Ramya Ragupathy

March has been a busy month across the MapLibre ecosystem, with new releases, major community contributions, and powerful features in the works. We’re also incredibly grateful that MapTiler has joined as a Silver Sponsor of the MapLibre project. MapTiler has been a long-time supporter of open-source mapping, and their sponsorship helps ensure the sustainability and growth of our community.

With that note, let’s dive into this month’s highlights.

MapLibre Native

  • Grab is contributing to MapLibre Native. While they currently use an internal fork, they plan to adopt MapLibre Native later this year. We’re looking forward to collaborating with them and supporting their onboarding process.

  • MapLibre iOS 6.12.1 and MapLibre Android 11.8.3, 11.8.4 and 11.8.5 were released.

  • We have started publishing the core as a static library to support the Rust wrapper currently in development. (Note that there are no API stability guarantees right now.)

  • Some neat improvements are in the pipeline for MapLibre Native, including:

    • Level-of-detail controls, to limit tile loading in scenarios like navigation.
    • A toggleable rendering HUD for quick access to performance stats, especially useful on embedded hardware where getting these numbers through other means may be difficult.
    • Support for MapLibre Tiles, offering better performance, improved battery life, and reduced bandwidth usage.
Rendering HUD screenshot

Rendering HUD screenshot

Web

  • We released two minor versions of MapLibre GL JS this month: v5.2.0 and v5.3.0, both focused on bug fixes and small enhancements.

  • Work is underway on an exciting feature: supporting fonts via system fonts, as an alternative to the glyphs field. This addition will make it easier for style authors to design and theme maps more intuitively. Big thanks to all the contributors for helping push this improvement forward - stay tuned for what’s next!

MapLibre Style Spec

  • A change to the style spec was adopted that makes the glyphs no longer be required, even when using text in maps. You can track support by MapLibre GL JS and MapLibre Native in the documentation like all style spec changes and additions.

  • A change to the MapLibre Style Spec that introduces a global map state is being discussed. Join the conversation and share your thoughts.

Martin Tile Server

Martin v0.16 has been released, now supporting style sheet serving and nemerous minor improvements and bug fixes.

Monthly meetings

We’re continuing our practice of meeting on the second Wednesday of each month, and now we’re adding an additional session on the last Wednesday to accommodate eastern-friendly time zones.

  • MapLibre Navigation: April 9, 2025 4:00–5:00 PM UTC
  • MapLibre Native: April 9, 2025 5:00–6:00 PM UTC
  • MapLibre GL JS: April 9, 2025 - 6:00–7:00 PM UTC

MapLibre Eastern Call (held on the last Wednesday of the month at an Asia/Oceania-friendly time)

  • April 30, 2025 - 9:00–10:00 AM UTC

View meeting times in your time zone: https://notime.zone/ONFoqtmyHWCO5

All calls are open to everyone. Zoom links can be found in our MapLibre Slack. If you’re not a member, request an invite at OpenStreetMap US Slack community. We look forward to seeing you!