[Newsletter]: Call for submissions: July Newsletter

[ramyaragupathy]

Gathering updates for the July edition of the MapLibre newsletter! If you have project updates, community event announcements, or other highlights you’d like to share, please comment below.

🕕 Submission Deadline: 31-July 6 PM UTC

🎫 Previous issue: #733

🗒 Previous newsletters: https://maplibre.org/categories/newsletter/

What to Submit

• Project updates (MapLibre GL JS, Native, plugins, etc.)
• Community events, talks, or meetups
• New features, demos, or documentation updates
• We also invite submissions for Community Spotlights, that features projects built with MapLibre. To be featured:
  • Your project must be open-source, or have a significant open-source component
  • Projects that are non-commercial, non-profit-oriented or created for the public good will be prioritized.
  • Please include a short description and a link (demo, repo, or blog post)
  • Screenshots or gifs are a plus!
  • Please note we aim to highlight work that aligns with MapLibre’s community values rather than promotional or commercial content

[hactar]

Maybe a community spotlight:

Maptoolkit, long time commercial geo provider using maplibre, and also code contributors (via for example @prozessor13) have recently released what appears to be a very liberally licensed free vector tile service - maplibre based, requiring no registration, no api key and including commercial usage for smaller companies: Free Vector Tile Server - so not fully non-commercial, but personally I'd say definitely free enough and aligned with the community values to make it worth a mention?

Please note that while I do not work for Maptoolkit and am not associated with them, they are an ex project partner of mine.

[Kenyat1989]

📍 Community event: MapLibre Meetup Hiroshima 2026 — "One map, many engines. Render together"

We're hosting an evening meetup for the MapLibre community during FOSS4G Hiroshima 2026!

🗓 Thursday, September 3, 2026, 19:00–21:00 JST
📍 Orizuru Tower 12F, Hiroshima — right next to the Atomic Bomb Dome, walking distance from the FOSS4G venue
🎟 Free admission, capacity 100, held in English — FOSS4G ticket not required

Built around the question "What is the future of map rendering?", the evening features a talk on the present and future of MapLibre, community lightning talks (open call, 4 slots!), and a developer panel, "Inside the Engines", on WebGPU, 3D, and new tile formats.

Registration: https://maplibre-meetup-hiroshima.peatix.com/

[HarelM]

Web

The last 4 pre-releases of version 6 were published along with the official version 6.0.0 itself this month!
This is a huge milestone as we have broke a lot of stuff but also paved the road to future improvement.
Check out our migration guide for more details.
It's been more than a year and a half since our last breaking change version, and breaking changes were pilling up, so we needed to carve out a breaking change version. We don't plan to do another one soon, we know how painful it can be.
We already saw that this created some complications for some people pinned to the latest version, which is something we advise not to do, and this exact scenario is why not.
We had some stacked features and bug fixes that we didn't want to introduce as part of version 6.0.0, and so we also released version 6.1.0 this month.
It's definitely easier to contribute now with the momentum of AI, but we strongly request to focus on a single PR and drive that through instead of opening a lot of PRs, as we take quality very seriously and it takes time to align to our standards and get the PR reviewed and corrected to get to a "ready to merge" state.

Thanks again for all the contributors this month:
@CommanderStorm @DoFabien @birkskyum @Plantain @YuChunTsao @qorexdevs @bradymadden97 @kamil-sienkiewicz-asi @mondsichtung @lazerg @clement-igonet @hugosmoreira @cat0825 @jan-grzybek @pabueco

[gabbopalma]

Flutter

This month flutter-maplibre-gl grew an experimental new engine: a pure-Dart FFI backend for Android, on the exp/native-ffi-android branch. Instead of a platform view driven over method channels, the map is driven directly through the MapLibre Native C API with dart:ffi and rendered with EGL and Vulkan into a Flutter Texture.
Gestures, camera animations and HTTP live in Dart, while a native thread paced by the Android Choreographer draws every frame, so no Dart work (a GC, a style parse) can ever delay one. The public maplibre_gl API is unchanged: a single MapLibreGlNative.use() call before runApp opts an app in.

The motivation is the data pipeline. On the benchmark suite (same device, same scenarios, profile mode), replacing a 20,000-point GeoJSON source is about 10x faster and live updates hold ~30 Hz with 2,000 points on screen, where the method-channel path collapses to ~9 updates per second with a fully janky UI thread.

Interaction, where the platform-view backend historically had the edge, reached parity after moving to a vsync-aligned frame loop and display-thread rendering:

It is an experimental spike, Android arm64 only, and not for production: the native library is built from a pinned maplibre-native-ffi plus a small local patch stack, most of which is being proposed upstream, and the threading lessons learned here are feeding into maplibre-native-ffi's executor design (#433).
Built on the project's Dart bindings; thanks to @sargunv for the C API and the quick upstream collaboration. Feedback are very welcome.

[sargunv]

Similar to the above, MapLibre Compose now has an experimental desktop implementation rewrite backed by maplibre-native-ffi on the desktop-ffi-rewrite branch. This has allowed us to:

• bring Compose Desktop to near-parity with Compose Android and iOS in functionality
• support proper compositing with Compose UI on desktop

I expect to resolve a large number of longstanding open issues with this new implementation, for example:

• Desktop target feature parity maplibre-compose#570
• desktop: build with amalgamated maplibre native maplibre-compose#627
• desktop: isCameraMoving state is not true during gestures maplibre-compose#595
• The map on desktop is always on top of Compose UI maplibre-compose#184
• Building maplibre-native from source takes a long time. We should use the prebuilt core.  maplibre-compose#568
• desktop: map click events are generated on the first click of a double click gesture (quick zoom) maplibre-compose#608

[CommanderStorm]

Martin

Over the last two months, Martin shipped three major releases (v1.11.0, v1.12.0, and v1.13.0).
Key highlights include:

• Live Source Reloading: Hot-reloading has been completed across all source types to keep data fresh without server restarts. Local PMTiles and COG files reload on filesystem changes, while PostgreSQL and remote object stores poll on a configurable timer to update their schemas and sources.
• Direct GeoJSON Tile Serving: Martin can now serve vector tiles directly from WGS84 .geojson/.json files on the fly. It constructs a Hilbert R-Tree index on startup, then queries, clips, and encodes MVTs per request. It also supports filesystem-event hot-reloading.
• Upstream Tile Passthrough: Martin now supports acting as a proxy cache for upstream HTTP tile servers. It fetches tiles from configured templates or mirror servers, allowing developers to wrap external tiles in Martin's caching pipeline and hide upstream credentials.
• Static Map Overlays: A new endpoint renders static map images with styled vector overlays (fills, lines, circles) drawn on top. The camera can center on coordinates, a bounding box, or auto-fit to the overlays.
• GSoC Spotlight: GSoC student @manbhav234 laid the groundwork for serving tiles from DuckDB and GeoParquet. This includes core integration logic and initial config-resolver wiring.

Thanks again to all the contributors: @AnayGarodia, @chrisdebian, @Auspicus, @floze-the-genius, @CommanderStorm, @gabeschine, @JakeLow, @johncarmack, @manbhav234, @hamarituc, @michaelkirk, @pawelurbanek, @thomfuhrmann, @Weixing-Zhang, @yuiseki, and @nyurik.

[louwers]

MapLibre Native

Screenshot showing the new rounded corners for fill extrusions in action. OpenMapTiles based map style.

• Support for rounded fill extrusion corners has been implemented by Alex Cristici in #4343. You can use the fill-extrusion-rounded-corner-distance style spec property, which is the first new visual style spec property that landed in MapLibre Native before MapLibre GL JS since the fork. See the original proposal made by Steve Gifford.
• CJK characters that use local glyph rasterization are now rendered with double the resolution, as they have in MapLibre GL JS for a while. This allows for much more legible characters. This was implemented by Taku Fukada, an engineer at our valued sponsor MIERUNE.
• The feature-state functionality is a way to read and set properties on individual features, which can be used for styling with a style expression. Android support was added in #4219 by Brandon Roeder. A PR from Markus Wendorf that adds a similar API to MapLibre iOS is still open.
• Stephanie May contributed fresh new PMTiles documentation in #4278. Check it our the MapLibre Android docs and the page in the MapLibre iOS docs.

[ramyaragupathy]

Newsletter published here: https://maplibre.org/news/2026-08-02-maplibre-newsletter-jul-2026/