[OSM-dev] Vector tiles stack for Android

[Tim Teulings]

Hello,

> After days of efforts and workarounds, I decided to give up because this mapsforge thing i loved is still too buggy. Also, the project has very little activity since mid-2013 and it seems unlikely that these issues will ever be fixed.

> If you are still there… thanks for reading all this depressing stuff… but it's time for fresh ideas now!

> Can you suggest better solutions to:
> 1) convert OSM data to some compact binary vector format?
> 2) render this data to bitmap tiles on Android devices?

> (i am especially interested in conversion and rendering: the view layer is not an issue, osmdroid allows building custom tile providers to hook to almost any bitmap tilesource).

libosmscout (http://libosmscout.sourceforge.net/ - the project is alive, 
even if there not much change on the homepage) is a C++library for for 
offline OSM map rendering, location lookup and routing.

It does enable you to render tiles or full screen maps. There is a 
prototype Android backend (by a 3rd party person) using JNI to delegate 
map rendering primitives to Android native drawing primitives. The 
backend is likely slightly broken (3rd party is currently not active) 
but it should be easy to fix it. I do not have performance measurements 
on recent android devices but native rendering on recent iPhones is said 
to be OK.

You can place a custom infrastruture directly on the custom file based 
database layer. Depending on your detailed requirements the library 
might suite your needs - or not.

There are additional backends for cairo, Qt, iOS/Mac OS X, libagg, and 
an exemplary SVG backend.

-- 
Gruß...
    Tim