What's wrong with Google Maps development on Android - Part Three

Update 5th December 2012 - Android Maps v2

Another sentence from the MapActivity documentation that causes developer pain:

"Only one MapActivity is supported per process. Multiple MapActivities running simultaneously are likely to interfere in unexpected and undesired ways."

This means one MapActivity subclass per Android process and therefore, only one MapView onscreen at any one time. This might not seem like a big deal, but there are times when you would like to have two maps on view at a time. A good example is my WW2 Daily app which lets you swipe locations (and their associated maps) on screen in a scrollview:

To implement this on Android I am going to have to layout image views around my map view and, as the user swipes, replace the adjacent images with a screenshot of the map view, then swap the image view and the map view in the hierarchy. So this is do-able, but compared to keeping multiple map views, a massive pain.

Based on the some of the questions on StackOverflow, this is not a unique gripe with the API (check out the this truly horrible workaround for the issue. Sticking your second map activity in a separate process? ouch!).

This rant continues:

• What's wrong with Google Maps development on Android - Part One
• What's wrong with Google Maps development on Android - Part Two
• What's wrong with Google Maps development on Android - Part Three

Permalink - Tags: Development,Android,Google