Use google maps offline maps (cache) in Google Maps Android API

Question

Google Maps offers for a few months the feature to download a certain geographic region for later offline use. I use Google Maps Android API in my App and I see that while offline, in contrast to the real google maps app, I cannot zoom in to street level in my App fully, so the downloaded data is probably not used.

Is there a way for my app to make use of it?

Answer 1

You need to create your own TileProvider and access tiles locally. Check this documentation.

Here are some related threads that may help you:

• Using the android Google Maps API v2 as a viewer of offline tiles: is it possible?
• Offline mode for android app using google maps api
• TileProvider using local tiles

Check this video tutorial about caching and this example from GitHub.

You can also use osmdroid which is a replacement for Android's MapView class. It also includes a modular tile provider system with support for numerous online and offline tile sources and overlay support with built-in overlays for plotting icons, tracking location, and drawing shapes. Here is the tutorial.

org.osmdroid.views.MapView mapView = (org.osmdroid.views.MapView) findViewById(R.id.map_view); //resolve the map view by id given in the layout
mapView.setTileSource(new OnlineTileSourceBase("Google Maps", ResourceProxy.string.unknown, 1, 20, 256, ".png", "http://mt3.google.com/vt/v=w2.97") {   
    @Override
    public String getTileURLString(final MapTile aTile) {
        /*
         * GOOGLE MAPS URL looks like
         *  base url        const   x   y    zoom
         * http://mt3.google.com/vt/v=w2.97&x=74327&y=50500&z=17
         */
        return getBaseUrl() + "&x=" + aTile.getX() + "&y=" + aTile.getY() + "&z=" + aTile.getZoomLevel();
    }
});
mapView.setUseDataConnection(false); //this actually makes the controller use only offline tiles

Hope this helps!