Show HN: AirMapView – An Android Library for Maps Without Google Play Services

[epetzel]

https://github.com/airbnb/AirMapView

[keehun]

This is great! I wonder if Google will prohibit access to Google Maps tiles in the future for working around Google Play requirement?

[joemccall86 → keehun]

I'm sure if they do the fallback implementation could just as easily be OpenStreetMap. It's really great to see this open-sourced though. It seems like it would be a common problem.

[epetzel → joemccall86]

We are also currently working on adding OpenStreetMap as a map provider, so that could also be the fallback instead of the web based solution.

[toomuchtodo → epetzel]

How much of the world from OSM could you fit on a 128GB SD card?

[ncza → toomuchtodo]

All of it 4 times.

[BHSPitMonkey → epetzel]

Offline? Wouldn't that mean you'd need a vector map data renderer handy? (Or did you mean storing OSM tiles on the device?)

[jimktrains2]

There is also OSMand that uses OpenStreetMaps and allows you to download tiles for offline access (which is wonderful if you're overseas).

While I realize AirMapView is a library that you can include in your map, I wonder how difficult it would be to modify OSMand to do this, which would be able to leverage the offline maps as well

[wongarsu → jimktrains2]

Not to mention at least in Western Europe OpenStreetMap often has much better maps than any competitor. The routing isn't as good yet but that's getting better quickly.