v10 is the latest version of the Mapbox Maps SDK for iOS and Android. It succeeds the 6.x line on iOS and the 9.x line on Android. v10 brings substantial performance improvements; new features like 3D terrain and a more powerful camera; modern technical foundations; and a better developer experience.

Using real-world map styles and locations, v10’s overall Time To Render Completion (TTRC) is typically 25 to 35% faster than earlier versions of the SDK on iOS and 25 to 40% faster on Android.

Thanks to local glyph capabilities and other optimizations, v10’s bandwidth requirements for initial map load can be up to 18% smaller than earlier versions of the SDK. Glyphs are the individual symbols that comprise a font. The Mapbox platform gives users deep control over the fonts used in a map style. Typically, those fonts must be downloaded along with the map style. These resources can be a significant portion of initial network activity, particularly for CJK fonts with large character sets.

v10 includes support for local glyphs--the already-downloaded font characters made available by the mobile operating system in accordance with its locale. Using local glyphs avoids the need to download fonts, which can result in substantial efficiency gains.

Efficient map rendering depends upon multiple types of resource caching. Earlier versions of the Maps SDK employed basic heuristics to determine what to cache, when, and for how long. v10’s new predictive ambient cache examines how the map is being used--including everything from coarse heading to search activity--to make better guesses about what resources should be fetched for future use. Resources are retrieved with less network overhead and improved tolerance for intermittent connectivity. And cache expiration has been improved to boost efficiency and ensure that maps, navigation and other services stay in sync as data is updated.

v10 includes 3D terrain and skybox support, as well the new globe view API on a preview basis. In order to unlock the full potential of 3D, these new features are paired with a new and more powerful camera system.

Additional 3D capabilities are under development and will be announced by email and blog as they become available.

Prior versions of the Maps SDK included support for basic animations with easing, including simple panning, rotation, pitch, and the parabolic flyTo method. These methods remain available, but are now augmented with support for complex transformations through 3D space. Advanced camera support is integrated with the native iOS and Android animation frameworks, providing a familiar experience for developers and a performant one for end users.

Navigation use cases have been prioritized throughout the development of Maps SDK v10. Label positions are more stable as the camera follows a route. A new approach to tile loading when viewing the map at high-pitch orientations improves efficiency and level of detail. Support for nine-part images reduces highway shields’ storage impact and improves their flexibility. A predictive caching system preloads resources intelligently when a trip is underway. The user location puck has been rewritten to be more accurate and flexible--in 2 or 3 dimensions. And optimized distance and within expressions provide highly performant feature filtering along routelines. These and other improvements combine with the Mapbox Navigation SDK to provide a superb nav experience.

The Maps SDK Snapshotter provides programmatic methods for generating static images of rendered maps. These images are often used in apps for thumbnails, previews, or in other circumstances where the full capabilities of a Mapbox Map instance are not required. Snapshotter is broadly comparable to the Mapbox Static Images API, but it consumes more local resources and has fewer styling limitations. In v10, the Snapshotter has become even more powerful, adding support for capturing runtime styling changes to the map.

Metal is an Apple API for interfacing with GPUs. It is the successor to OpenGL on Apple platforms. Metal fills the same functional role as OpenGL, but offers substantially improved performance and a more efficient interface to underlying hardware.

Apple deprecated OpenGL support in summer 2018. Since that time, iOS and Mac developers have been strongly encouraged to begin using Metal, in anticipation of Apple products ceasing to support OpenGL. A specific date for the end of OpenGL support has not been announced, but the current deprecation period has already lasted longer than many observers expected. By using the Maps SDK v10, your maps will render with Metal and be fully supported for your iOS users now and into the future. Unlike some competing SDKs, v10's Metal support is not based on an inefficient translation layer that rewrites OpenGL calls into Metal: it's designed from scratch to fully unlock this technology's potential.

If you upgrade to the Maps SDK v10 for iOS, Metal support will be automatically enabled for your end users. No other changes are necessary unless you have implemented custom OpenGL layers by using the MGLOpenGLStyleLayer API. If you have, those layers must be ported to Metal using the Maps SDK’s MGLMetalStyleLayer API.

Not on iOS. The iOS SDK v10 only supports Metal. Metal is supported on all devices that use Apple A7 chips and newer (iPhone 5S, 5SE, iPhone 6 and later, as well as iPad Air, iPad Mini 2, iPad Mini 3 and later), which make up over 99% of all active iOS devices. It is not available on the iPhone 5 or iPad 4 (less than 1% of all active iOS devices). We will continue to support the legacy Maps SDK for iOS with OpenGL rendering only.

Metal is only available on Apple devices. The Android SDK v10 continues to use OpenGL.

Although undeniably powerful, manipulating styles and Mapbox Expressions was a sometimes awkward experience for developers using earlier versions of the SDK. In v10, a domain-specific language (DSL) improves the experience of changing styles on both iOS and Android. By melding the JSON of the Mapbox Style Specification with familiar primitives from each platform, these DSLs ensure that Swift and Kotlin developers will find the experience of working with styles and expressions much more intuitive than in the past.

The Maps SDK v10 substantially reduces crashing behavior in two ways: architectural changes that improve object lifecycle handling and remove common sources of error; and capturing all C++ exceptions so that they can be properly handled.

The Maps SDK v10 has removed one of the biggest pitfalls in the Legacy SDK: object lifecycle errors. Previously, the SDK implemented Style, Layer, and Source objects that mirrored the same objects in the core C++ library. In C++, Layer and Source objects belonged to the Style object, which could be reset in ways that resulted in stranded Layer and Source objects in the SDK. In the Maps SDK v10, everything is handled in the Map object so that style changes do not result in dangling pointers, crashes, or other lifecycle issues.

The Maps SDK v10 captures all C++ exceptions from the core library, preventing them from leaking to the platform. Leaky exceptions are problematic because they can cause crashes and because they typically provide insufficient detail for developers working to identify the root problem.

The Maps SDK v10 for iOS is published on the Mapbox website and via Swift Package Manager and Cocoapods. The Maps SDK v10 for Android is published via Maven.

The Mapbox iOS SDK v10 is available to customers for distribution in their applications according to the Mapbox Terms of Service.

You can find Maps SDK v10 source code for iOS and Android at https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-maps-ios and https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-maps-android, respectively.

For Apple devices, the minimum deployment target for Maps SDK v10 is iOS 11. For Android, the minimum deployment target for Maps SDK v10.0 is Android API level 21 (Lollipop).

Yes. To avoid disruptions for customers and users during the migration to v10, the legacy Object-C and Java SDKs are still supported at this time.

The legacy Maps SDKs will continue to receive bugfixes. We may also publish compatibility changes to ensure that customers who are unable to quickly transition to v10 do not experience regressions. However, most new functionality will not be backported to the legacy Maps SDK. We encourage customers to begin planning their upgrade to v10 as soon as possible.

Yes. You can use the Mapbox Maps SDK with one or more map resources (tiles, fonts, icons, styles, etc.) served via your own APIs for a variety of use cases, whether that’s running an application on a private network or integrating with legacy or custom application implementations.

Yes. By replacing the default HTTP network requestor with a custom implementation, you can add custom authentication headers or modify requests as necessary to authorize requests against your own service. Doing so will not interfere with the SDK’s ability to validate your Mapbox token for use with our services.

Yes. Any active installed instances of the Mapbox Maps SDK that renders a map is tracked as a Mobile Active User for metering and billing purposes.

Pricing for the Maps SDK v10 release is consistent with recent releases of our mobile SDKs. We have a large free tier allowing up to 25,000 monthly active users (MAUs). For pricing beyond 25,000 users, please see the pricing calculator on https://www.mapbox.com/pricing/.

Not directly. If your iOS application is written in Objective-C, you will need to write a Swift compatibility shim for those parts of the public API that your application uses. This is because the SDK uses pure Swift constructs that cannot be used from Objective-C directly, for example, associated enums, default values, the `Result type` and similar.