Announcing Mapillary SDKs: Add Mapillary Capture Functionality to Any Mobile App
The Mapillary apps are great, but what if you wanted to upload images to Mapillary with an app you have developed already? Or create your own capture app tailored to the specific needs you, your company, or mapping group has?
This has always been possible with the Mapillary REST API, but you would have to implement a lot of things yourself, like creating GPX files, interpolating GPS data, handling uploading, creating an interface for authentication, and so on.
Today we are announcing the Mapillary Software Development Kits (SDKs) for mobile apps, which make it easier than ever to create your own capture apps.
We’re releasing the SDKs in beta as a start, and they contain the following functionality:
- Authentication
- Creating sequences
- Adding GPS, sensor data, and images to sequences
- Uploading to the Mapillary database
The SDK does not contain any camera functionality at the moment, so you will have to implement that part yourself. A full-blown camera UI is planned for the future, which will take care of all camera-related functionality that you can just drop into your app with a few lines of code.
Example of using the iOS SDK in Swift
Available platforms
The SDK is available for both iOS and Android. They are still under development, which is why the release is a beta. We would love any feedback you might have as we keep on working on improvements. Currently, the iOS SDK is at version 0.7 and the Android SDK is a preview version.
The iOS SDK is available on CocoaPods as well as GitHub. The Android SDK is only available as a binary for now, which you can download from our website. It will be available on GitHub eventually.
Open source
Here at Mapillary, we love open source and want to contribute as much as we can to the open source community. We already have upload tools, MapillaryJS (the library for building the Mapillary viewer) and OpenSfM (the technology we use for 3D reconstruction) available as open source.
Both the iOS and Android SDKs will be open source under the MIT license. Since the iOS SDK is closer to a 1.0 release, it is available under open source already now. We are aiming to open source the Android SDK as well when it has matured a bit, but right now it’s only available as a binary.
Included in the SDK is an example app with code that you can look at to see how to use the SDK. You can also use it as a base for your own app. Currently, it’s only available in the iOS SDK, but there will be one for Android as well.
The iOS example app
What’s next?
We’re releasing the SDKs to enable anyone to easily build apps with Mapillary capture functionality. To make sure they fulfill that purpose, we also intend to develop with them ourselves. The Mapillary apps for iOS and Android will soon be updated to use the SDKs for all core functionality.
Plans for the future include a camera UI so developers don’t have to implement a full-blown camera interface, for even easier integration.
Who is using it?
A few companies have already planned to try out the SDK. One of them is OsmAnd, that builds a maps and navigation application. They have previously already integrated Mapillary image viewing functionality and we can’t wait to see what they do with the SDK to enable contributing to Mapillary straight from the OsmAnd app.
If you have a project in mind, shoot us an email or leave a comment below, we would love to hear about it!
/Anders, Mobile Apps Lead
For quick reference, here are all the relevant links one more time. You’ll always find the most up-to-date information on our developer page.