MapLibre Newsletter April 2026

Welcome to the April 2026 edition of the MapLibre Newsletter! This month, we have exciting updates across all our projects. Key milestones include overhauls for React Native and Flutter, the transition toward MapLibre GL JS v6, and foundational research into a native MLT 3D tile format.

📱 MapLibre Native

Alex Cristici improved the resilience of MapLibre Native when the system runs out of memory (see PR).

There now is a new experimental C API for MapLibre Native, which can serve as a foundation for new platforms. See the new repository as well as the onboarding discussion. This is the work of Sargun Vohra, who also used what he learned when creating MapLibre Compose for the new C API.

Releases:

Platform	Latest Versions
Android	13.1.0
iOS	6.25.1 , 6.26.0

🌐 MapLibre GL JS

Versions 5.22.0, 5.23.0, and 5.24.0 were released this month, introducing mostly performance improvements and bug fixes along with minor public API additions, and marking the final releases for version 5.

We have begun releasing version 6 pre-releases featuring the breaking changes planned for this major update. We will continue rolling these out over the next few weeks and expect to finish shortly.

The primary breaking changes for this version include:

• Dropping WebGL1 support to resolve long-standing bugs and feature requests while improving performance and compatibility with modern libraries.
• Transitioning from CommonJS to ESM, which will allow us to move faster, adopt modern tools, and upgrade our overall build system and infrastructure.

It has been over a year since our last major update, and we believe now is the right time to move on from legacy constraints we have carried for a while.

As always, we would like to thank all our contributors:

👏 Xavier Bourry, Frank Elsing, Birk Skyum, Jakub Pelc, itisyb, Yu Chun Tsao, neodescis, Matt Van Horn, Will Field, Ashwin Chandran, Seokcheol Jeong, Sam, and Kyℓe Hensel.

🧩 MapLibre Tile (MLT)

Markus Tremmel has shared initial design considerations and encoding strategies for MLT 3D, building on an original proposal by Anas. This project explores how a dedicated 3D tile format can be optimized for the MapLibre ecosystem while identifying key areas where it diverges from existing standards like 3D Tiles.

There is potential for direct MapLibre GL JS integration, which would pave the way for more robust 3D capabilities natively and the project is currently seeking feedback on both use cases and technical encoding.

⚛️ MapLibre React Native

MapLibre React Native v11 is here, and it is the first release to exclusively support React Native’s new architecture. Alongside this foundational shift, the entire API has been overhauled to align with MapLibre GL JS, making it easier than ever to share knowledge and code between web and native map implementations.

One of the most exciting additions is style-spec compliant paint and layout props on the unified Layer component. This means layer definitions exported from the style spec can be spread directly onto a Layer component with no translation needed.

🪶 MapLibre Flutter

flutter-maplibre-gl

flutter-maplibre-gl, the long-standing Flutter plugin, has shipped v0.26.0! This release focuses on closing years of accumulated backlog and bringing the package back to a healthy maintenance baseline.

Highlights:

• Offline regions, rebuilt end-to-end — the offline manager now supports pause/resume of downloads, per-tile progress reporting, cache eviction policies, and rate-limit safety on the tile server side.
• WASM release mode on Flutter Web — long-standing build issues with WASM in release mode have been resolved, making Flutter Web a viable production target.
• takeSnapshot() — a single, unified snapshot API now works consistently across Android, iOS, and Web.
• Tap handling — onMapClick now reliably fires on every tap, including taps on rendered features.
• Feature State on Web — setFeatureState, getFeatureState, and removeFeatureState are now available on the Web platform, closing a feature parity gap with the native platforms.
• Camera interpolation — easeCamera now accepts interpolation curves, removing velocity jumps in GPS-following scenarios.
• Synchronous GeoJSON drag — drag handling for GeoJSON features is now synchronous, eliminating stale positions during interactions.
• A long tail of fixes — including Android split-screen behavior, an iOS onStyleLoaded race condition, and a brand new example app.

Full changelog: https://github.com/maplibre/flutter-maplibre-gl/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md

Package: https://pub.dev/packages/maplibre_gl

Special thanks to all the contributors and maintainers for shepherding the package through this work.

flutter-maplibre

Version 0.3.5 of the flutter-maplibre has been released, featuring several improvements to consistency and stability alongside general maintenance. The MapLibre SDKs and the dependencies on jni / jnigen have been updated.

✨ Community Spotlight

HDTP is an open data platform by Codeando México that features a notable GTFS Realtime (GTFS-RT) visualizer. This tool combines MapLibre with deck.gl to create an interactive map (checkout the cine mode) for exploring real-time transit data, efficiently displaying live vehicle positions.

👥 Conferences & Events

LinuxFest Northwest

On April 25, Stephanie May and Matt Wilden delivered a joint presentation at LinuxFest Northwest on the synergies between MapLibre and OpenStreetMap US. They discussed how the tooling and infrastructure across both ecosystems have matured enough for anyone to build an open-source map—including building custom tiles, styling layers, and scaling a CDN or dynamic tile server.

The enthusiastic crowd was eager to dive deeper into the world of open mapping. You can find the slides for their talk, titled “The Latest in Open Source Maps,” here, along with various demos showcasing how accessible working with open-source data and maps has become.

🗓️ 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 Native: May 13, 2026 – 7:00–8:00 PM Berlin Time (UTC+2)
• MapLibre GL JS: May 13, 2026 – 8:00–9:00 PM Berlin Time (UTC+2)

🌏 MapLibre Eastern Call

Held on the last Wednesday of the month at an Asia/Oceania-friendly hour:

• May 27, 2026 – 9–10:00 AM UTC

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 and join the #maplibre channel. We’d love to see you there!