Sep 4, 2025
August was a busy month for the MapLibre community. From welcoming new Voting Members as part of the Governing Board election process to new releases across key projects, there is plenty of progress to celebrate.
First and foremost, we extend our gratitude to Microsoft for continuing, and increasing their sponsorship for MapLibre this year. Their contribution has nearly doubled, elevating them to Gold Sponsor and providing vital support for the sustainability of our projects.
🗳️ New Voting Members
As part of the 2025 Governing Board election process, we held a round of nominations to expand the Voting Members group. Voting Members are responsible for electing the Governing Board and voting on changes to the MapLibre Charter.
We’re pleased to welcome 19 new Voting Members this August and look forward to their contributions in shaping MapLibre’s future.
You can checkout the full list of 141 Voting Members in our GitHub documentation.
📱 MapLibre Native
- Want to help test MapLibre Android? In addition to our existing continuous integration tests we are taking a crowdsourced approach to testing. We now make releases of the MapLibre Android TestApp. If you want to help, simply download the apk and install it on a Android device you have laying around. Next, open the ‘Long running Maps’ activity and let it run for up to 72 hours! Crashes are logged to our Sentry so that MapLibre developers can investigate and fix issues.
Android TestApp running the long running test (or ‘Desert Bus’)
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MapLibre Android 11 was released well over a year ago, but some people are still on MapLibre Android 10.x.x. We made a release for this previous major release to bring 16 KB pages support since Google will require it for apps on the Google Play store starting November 1.
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Two minor regular releases MapLibre Android 11.13.1 and MapLibre iOS 6.18.1.
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MapLibre Node.js also had a release that fixes a problem where it would not render more than 32 frames.
🌐 MapLibre GL JS
Version 5.6.2 and 5.7.0 were released this month.
These releases focused mainly on some bugs fixes, especially related to the recently added global-state which probably still needs more ironing out. There was also an addition of the coveringTiles method to the public API after it was buried a bit too deep when adding the globe support in version 5.
Huge thanks to all contributors who helped make these improvements possible, we appreciate your efforts and look forward to more contributions!
🧩 MapLibre Tile Format
Work continues on the maplibre-tile-spec project as we are finalizing the specification for the 1.0 release next month. Additionally we are also preparing the Java based MVT to MLT converter for release.
Last-minute comments are still possible in this thread. Contributions and comments are highly valued!
🎉 Slint SDK Onboarding for MapLibre Native
We’re excited to share the onboarding of a new Slint SDK for MapLibre Native, made by @yuiseki.
This project provides a Slint-based integration for MapLibre Native, allowing MapLibre Native rendering to be embedded into Slint-based native GUI applications. For information on platform support, please checkout the documentation in the project repository.
Windows screenshot
macOS screenshot
🌍 Ecosystem Spotlight: Sprite Sheet Benchmarks
OSM contributor pnorman recently benchmarked three tools for generating sprite sheets: spreet (Rust), @basemaps/sprites, and sprite-one.
These tools are often used when building MapLibre styles. Results show spreet produces smaller, more efficient PNGs, especially after optimization.
👥 Conferences
MapLibre is happy to be one of the sponsors of FOSS India 2025, taking place in Bengaluru, India this September. 🎉
As part of our sponsorship, we’re giving away a limited number of free tickets to community members and contributors. Details and sign-up are in this discussion thread: MapLibre: FOSS India 2025 – ticket giveaway
- 📅 Event Dates: 20-21 September 2025
- 📍 Location: Bengaluru, India
- 🔗 Event Info: https://fossunited.org/indiafoss/2025
🗓️ Monthly meetings
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 Navigation: Sep 10, 2025 – 4:00–5:00 PM UTC
- MapLibre Native: Sep 10, 2025 – 5:00–6:00 PM UTC
- MapLibre GL JS: Sep 10, 2025 – 6:00–7:00 PM UTC
🌏 MapLibre Eastern Call
Held on the last Wednesday of the month at an Asia/Oceania-friendly hour:
- Sep 24, 2025 – 9:00–10:00 AM UTC
🔗 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!