Call for Submissions: Sep 2025 Newsletter

[ramyaragupathy]

Gathering updates for the Sep 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: 30-Sep 6 PM UTC

🎫 Previous issue: #445

🗒 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

[birkskyum]

Spatial K

We have on-boarded Spatial K (onboarding ticket), which is a set of libraries for working with geospatial data in Kotlin, created by Derek Ellis and generously passed over to MapLibre for continued collective maintenance.

Spatial K includes an implementation of GeoJson and a port of Turfjs written in pure Kotlin. It supports Kotlin Multiplatform projects and also features a Kotlin DSL for building GeoJson objects. It is already in use by MapLibre Compose.

Expanding on Spatial K

• GeoKJSON - There is a fork of Spatial K named GeoKJSON, made by Sebastian Heeschen, which we will be able to upstream to Spatial K, and Sebastian is with us for guidance on that. Ticket for porting over GeoKJSON
• MapLibre Java - Furthermore, there is a significant overlap between Spatial K, and MapLibre Java, especially after the refactor to Kotlin that Fabian Keunecke has carried out. From this work we can also fill in blanks on Spatial K. Ticket for porting over MapLibre Java

[HarelM]

Web

There were 4 versions released this month!
5.7.1, 5.7.2, 5.7.3 and 5.8.0.
The latest one, 5.8.0, introduced a very much awaited feature - the support of data-driven styling for line dash-array. Thanks Lucas (@lucaswoj) for this great contribution! This issue was the most up voted issue and we are super excited someone in the community decided to work on it!
There were fixes related to raster tiles fading and more to come in the next version thanks to Ryan (@wayofthefuture).
As part of these last releases there were a lot of fixes to global-state and we think that most of the issues have been ironed out, mostly thanks to @melitele!

Maputnik

This month has been a very productive one for our small style editor.
Maputnik had recently gained the status of a "supported project" in MapLibre, so if there's something you'd like to work on and get paid this is now possible.
We have been working hard to update all the libraries to latest version, including React to version 19, which took a lot of work replacing old libraries that are no longer maintained and fixing issues in the exiting codebase.
We also updated it to support more recent changes to the MapLibre style spec such as the globe projection and the global-state, along other less known fields that were added in recent years.
This marks a great start to Maputnik's status change, and we believe that the more stable and used it is the more features it will get back from this great community.

[josxha]

MapLibre Flutter

This month brings a big step forward for the maplibre Flutter plugin: MapLibre Flutter 0.3.0 has been released. The highlight of this release is finally support for iOS using native interoperability between Dart and Swift/ObjC. With this, MapLibre Flutter now runs across Android, iOS, and the web using a modern codebase.

All MapLibre SDK versions have been updated. We are now using version 6.9.1 on iOS, 11.13.5 on android and 5.8.0 on web.
A big ongoing goal for the package is a seamless cross-platform experience. Therefore a map style can now be added as JSON string, via a Flutter assets path or URI on all platforms. Support for PMTiles on the web has been added as well, to be feature coherent with Android and iOS.

More functionality has made its way into this release. You can find all user affecting changes in the changelog.

[louwers]

@ramyaragupathy Could you add a note about the hackathon + link to the form? You could re-use your LinkedIn message or my Slack message. https://osmus.slack.com/archives/C02B2CBSNBU/p1758887418994229

@birkskyum Let me know if you want different wording or if you want to mention other use cases.

MapLibre Native

• The C++ MapLibre Tiles decoder written by Tim Sylvester got merged this month. He also worked on the Java encoder, the integration into MapLibre Native and a new encoding style spec property for vector sources. After some last-minute optimizations this month, the MapLibre Tile Spec itself is as good as stable. Long story short, all lights are on green you will be able to use the next-generation tile format with MapLibre Native soon (before the end of the year?). Stay tuned!
• Birk Skyum has contributed a WebGPU backend for MapLibre Native. We already have dedicated backends for Vulkan, Metal and OpenGL, but the advantage of the new WebGPU backend is that it makes Native more portable. We have previously demonstrated that MapLibre Native can run in the browser as WebAssembly, by compiling the OpenGL backend to WebGL1/2, but it is heavy, and here a WebGPU backend will be significantly more performant. Additionally, the WebGPU backend can simplify cross-platform development with e.g. Compose Multiplatform and Flutter, by offering a single backend that can be used for all desktop/mobile/web targets.
• We have enabled immutable releases. A GitHub feature that makes it impossible to tamper with release assets.

[CommanderStorm]

Martin v0.19.0

This month, Martin has seen heavy refactoring.
For those not following martins' versioning, we currently do mostly SemVer breaking releases (before 1.0, every X in 0.X.Y is breaking).
This is because you can build your own tile server with our internals, as we publish as a rust library.
We have refactored this out to its library now, martin-core.

We also now warn users if we discard misspelled config keys and have a new logo 🎉

On the road to v1.0, we are currently working on these three features:

• OGC API Tiles compliant source discovery
• Server-side Style Raster Tile rendering
• PMTiles sources for more cloud providers than just AWS S3

So currently, we are on track to release 1.0 until the FOSS4G conference in November.
More on this and other ongoing work in our GitHub discussion for this topic.

Like the other MapLibre projects, we have also hardened all our CI and release infrastructure against supply chain attacks over this release and are now publishing immutable, attested releases via our CI instead of manually.
Further details on this are on slack => https://maplibre.org/community

maplibre-native-rs

The MapLibre native rust bindings have seen a steady stream of refactorings and breaking changes necessary to make server-side rendering in our and in other projects possible.

We currently offer a single-instance Pool (MapLibre Native internally multithreads) for rendering tiles, which offers quite nice performance.
For making this into a multi-instance Pool, the design work is ongoing. If you need more from your server side rendered styles, we would love to chat with you to make sure that the new APIs in this realm also work for your use case.

[nyurik]

MLT - MapLibre Tile Specification

The maplibre/maplibre-tile-spec project is nearing its first release, focused on functional compatibility with MVT.
MLT (MapLibre Tile) is a new vector tile format designed for efficient storage and rendering of map data, optimized for the MapLibre ecosystem.

Current implementations include:

• Java: encoder (research quality)
• C++: decoder (in progress, targeting production quality)
• JavaScript: decoder (research quality)
• Rust: encoder and decoder (research quality)

[ramyaragupathy]

Thanks everyone! This is published now https://maplibre.org/news/2025-10-04-maplibre-newsletter-september-2025/