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Apps How Offlline GPS works

S

Stevish

Lurker
Hi I am taking a course in making apps and could use some help. I am just starting out but I wanted to read up on offline map making. Found a lot of good information out there but what I was really looking for was something that explains how it works. From what I have seen for far it seems that I need to have some kind of map server.

I would like to know if I could just load the map (Province of Nova Scotia say) and not have to connect online again for any tiles. This app would only be for this area only so no need to update it with other areas. I hope that I made some sense and that you can get what I mean. Just did 4 back shifts and the kids didn't let me sleep through that dam (dam kids). Anyway thank you for any help that may flow my way..

Stephen
 
Of course you still need some way of serving up those tiles to your app. I don't know how this would be done on an Android device
 
LV426 said:
Of course you still need some way of serving up those tiles to your app. I don't know how this would be done on an Android device
Click to expand...

Yes but do you need a online server for that? Can the tiles be served up right from the phone? I lay not be making sense where I'm new but I'm trying lol.
 
There are many apps available that use pre-downloaded mapping information and work perfectly well without an internet connection. So it's certainly possible to serve the information to the app from a file or database on the phone, though I cannot provide any more information than that.
 
If you're building your own app, do you need to use map tiles? Can you not just use a static map image?

Even if you have the tiles, the question is, what would be serving them up to your client application on the phone?
In the past, I've experimented with setting up a local map tile server on my desktop computer, but this still involved having a client/server system, where the client app requests tiles from the (local) server. You could probably implement a map tile service on an Android device, but it would be quite a bit of work. I don't know of any existing map tile service that you could make use of on Android.
 
Also, are you going to allow the user to zoom in/out of the map? Because then you need tiles at different altitudes. You can see how the amount of data required can quite easily escalate.
 
I've used other offline GPS apps and they work completely offline, no WiFi or mobile data connection needed. All the info is contained is the maps you download.
 
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