3 ms·

On iOS it appears they're a mixture of bitmap tiles and vector text. I definitely see pixelation of roads at certain zoom levels.

• andybak 14y ago
  Can you give steps to reproduce? I was looking specifically at road outlines and they seemed like they were definitely vector. Satellite views are obviously bitmap.
  • recursive 14y ago
    I don't have an iOS device, but here are my steps to reproduce on Android. Open a map. Turn on airplane mode. Zoom in. See pixels Here's a screenshot I took after I enabled airplane mode: http://i.imgur.com/wc5Ie.png http://i.imgur.com/wc5Ie.png
    • yellowbkpk 14y ago
      The pixellation here is your phone waiting to download the higher-res vector tile. While it waits for the higher-res tile it draws a bitmap representation of the lower-res tile "above" it.
      • coob 14y ago
        Surely if it's vector done right they can draw the lower detail vector tile at the higher bitmap res?
        • andybak 14y ago
          No because the amount of detail will change at each zoom level. Smaller roads and a higher number of local details appear.
• drivebyacct2 14y ago
  They're not infinitely vectors. They're still tiles. If they were to use the zoomed in tile, when zoomed out, even with vectors, you'd get something unrecognizable. It's the same reason that fonts and icons are brought up when people espouse the "vectors will save everything"! They do a lot of nice things but for something like Google Maps, I can't imagine how they'd implement "true vectors" in a practical phone-applicable way.
  • eggnet 14y ago
    No, they're vectors, intelligent vectors that add and remove features at different zoom levels. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/google-maps-is-now-available-for-iphone.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/google-maps-is-now-av...