Jul 2, 2025
Welcome to the June edition of the MapLibre newsletter!
This month’s roundup includes new feature updates in MapLibre Native and Web, along with milestones in projects like the SwiftUI DSL and Compose Playground. We’re also pleased to share that the MapLibre Workshop Kit now supports GitHub Codespaces, making it easier to get started without any local setup which means you can generate and serve tiles directly on cloud.
We’re grateful for the continued support of all our sponsors and contributors who make this work possible. In this edition we would specially like to highlight the renewed sponsorship support from Mapme 💙
Releases this month
Refer to the changelog and the linked PRs in the changelog for the details, but here are some highlights from this month’s releases.
We now have level-of-detail (LOD) controls available. This functionality is especially useful for navigation use-cases where the map is tilted. To avoid overloading the system you can use the LOD controls to use tiles with a lower zoom level for areas that are further in the distance.
We have also added the ability to toggle a rendering statistics HUD. This is especially useful for users of MapLibre Native on embedded systems.
Rendering statistics HUD
MapLibre iOS 6.15.0 has support for defining plugin layers as described in last month’s newsletter. See this page in the iOS documentation for more information on what is currently possible and how to create your own plugin layers. There is a tracking issue to bring plugin layers to Android too. We are looking forward to see what plugins are developed by the community.
We fixed a dangling reference bug on Android in #3522 and #3541. Thanks to the engineers from ExpressVPN who brought this issue to our attention and were quick to provide feedback to our fix.
In Development
Screenshot from Desert Bus (the game, not our test)
We have released version 5.6.0 this month which includes two great features:
color-relief
layer will allow to define coloring of the map according to elevation as can be seen in the image below.Color relief layer GL JS
Besides the above nice additions there were some bug fixes contributed. We would like once more to thank all the people who devote time to contribute to this project. Without you, it would’ve not been where it is today!
🎉 We’ve also been nominated to “project of the week” by PullFlow as can be read here on their LinkedIn post.
The SwiftUI DSL continues to support more of the underlying style features from MapLibre Native, directly from SwiftUI. Over the last month we’ve merged the following:
lineDashPattern
on LineStyleLayer
. This lets you customize the appearance of polylines directly from SwiftUI code (including via reactive bindings!).Both PRs came from first-time contributors, which is exciting! If you’re using MapLibre with SwiftUI, check it out. And if you’re missing a particular feature, adding it just might be easier than you think.
The MapLibre Compose Playground, one of several community projects integrating MapLibre Native with Jetpack Compose, has reached a new milestone: a 1.0.0 release 🎉
The milestone is a reflection that the library is now stable and being used in “real” apps. The maintainers are also happy to announce that the library now targets MapLibre Android’s 11.x branch. Previously there were a few edge cases which mostly manifested on emulators, but these have now been resolved (hat tip to the MapLibre Native team!).
The MapLibre team will be at FOSS4G Europe this month in Mostar. If you’re attending, stop by, and let’s talk maps!
🗓️ Dates: July 14-20, 2025
📍 Location: Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina
Talk/Workshop | Date | Time (Europe/Sarajevo) | Location | Presenter |
---|---|---|---|---|
Tile serving with MapLibre/Martin/Planetiler — base and overlays (Workshop) | Jul 14 | 14:00–18:00 | PL14 | Yuri Astrakhan |
MapLibre projects, in one status update | Jul 16 | 13:30–14:00 | EL11 | Yuri Astrakhan |
Serverless Rasters on the Web: The MapLibre COG Protocol extension | Jul 16 | 16:00–16:30 | CA01 | Marti Pericay, Oscar Fonts |
Scaling FOSS Development and Decisionmaking feat MapLibre Native | Jul 17 | 11:30–12:00 | SA02 | Bart Louwers |
maplibre-gl-terradraw — new drawing plugin for maplibre-gl-js | Jul 18 | 14:30–15:00 | CA01 | Jin Igarashi |
We continue our regular community calls on the second Wednesday of each month, with an additional session on the last Wednesday to better accommodate Asia/Oceania time zones.
Upcoming Calls
🌏 MapLibre Eastern Call
Held on the last Wednesday of the month at an Asia/Oceania-friendly hour:
🔗 View meeting times in your local timezone.
All calls are open to everyone. Zoom links are shared in the MapLibre Slack. Not yet a member? Request an invite via the OpenStreetMap US Slack. We’d love to see you there!