Disclaimer: I do not know much about the specifics of the iOS implementation, so can only speak about overall approach and possible concerns.

* Per WMF privacy policy, we cannot use outside servers if that exposes our user's browsing behaviour. Thus any outside servers must be proxied to be consumable by our users.
* OSM data is not the same as the tiles people see - there is data (clone of OSM db), there is data tiles (vector tiles) that only contain the features we try to show on a specific zoom level for that area, and there is rendering of that data as an image.  From what I have learnt so far, most of the OSM-based stacks implement "raster tiles" - all images are pre-rendered as PNGs for speed.
* We are trying to switch to vector based approach, where tiles are stored as data, and converted to image on request, either by the server or by the user's browser. Which means that if you have retina screen, the image will be rendered twice the regular size, and will be much crispier. This also means that you can rotate it on your device, or dynamically change the language.
* I suspect, and please update me on this if you know the details, that the built-in iOS implementation can only handle images (raster) from the 3rd party (WMF). Mapbox's vector format is gaining in acceptance, and IIRC, has been selected by OSM community in general for the future development, but I am not sure iOS supports it natively.

On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 10:24 PM, Brian Gerstle <bgerstle@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Agree with Corey, I've mentioned this elsewhere, but it's important to note that as of iOS 6, Apple has been (and still appears to be) using OSM for map data.  I don't know the rationale behind why we need our own OSM servers, but does that rationale also prevent our iOS app from using Apple-provided OSM data?


On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 4:05 PM, Corey Floyd <cfloyd@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Any reason to import a 3rd party library for functionality built in to the iOS SDK? Seems like work to explore/integrate a dependency where none is needed. Without this extra work, this is something that can be built in < 1 day.



On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 10:01 PM, Brian Gerstle <bgerstle@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Cool, looks like mapbox has an iOS SDK.  Is there somewhere that the progress on funding is being tracked?  Put another way, where should I direct PM, design, etc. to get this prioritized?  Also, I think it'd be worth it to ship this to a percentage of users to (further) validate the feature.

On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 3:56 PM, Yuri Astrakhan <yastrakhan@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Current state of affairs:  https://karta.wmflabs.org/static/  is up and running, and should have all the data soon.  It uses mapbox stack, which means that it generates vector data tiles, and creates a PNG tiles on the fly. This also means that in a few days, you will be able to view WebGL based maps there too - rendered on the browser, with multiple styles, and rotatable.

The community needs this service, and has already built a large number of amazing projects even without the production-level vector service. Examples include
* atlas-style drill-down map (umap, see more info)
* Wikidata-based map of pages by class, e.g. all rollercoasters.
* There is an amazing presentation (pdf) by Kolossos (Tim Adler), that gives many more examples of the community-built map services and projects (OpenOffice format)


P.S. Tomasz, it's Yuri, not Yuvi, and don't blame IRC auto-complete  :)

On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 7:57 PM, Max Semenik <maxsem.wiki@gmail.com> wrote:
Hey - yes, we're workig on serving map tiles. Both raster and MapBox vectors. Our current demo implementation is at https://karta.wmflabs.org/static/ - only raster tiles ATM, vectors coming in 1-2 days. The main problem, however, is budgeting - yet if we get very little hardware, concentrating on maps for apps might even be a reasonable option as apps traffic might be lower than if we exposed maps to all web users. Getting no bugdet at all is also a possible outcome, though.

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