Custom map styling with the Google Maps APIs on Android and iOS

Watson Williams

22:53:00

Your app, your map style. For iOS and Android.

Cross-platform custom map styling is here—change the color palette of your maps, hide labels, vary road density and toggle points of interest. Your maps can now match your brand and style across your website and your apps!

The Google Maps APIs now support you in creating beautiful styled maps for your Android and iOS apps as well as your website using the same JSON style object.

Easily create your style

The new Google Maps APIs Styling Wizard helps you to create a map style in a few clicks. Use one of our pre-built styles or create your own style from scratch.

Access advanced options for further control over every available aspect of your map style including visibility, fills & stroke weight.

Use the styling wizard for point and click custom style creation.

Show what’s important, hide the rest

Custom map styling provides you with ways to tailor your map for a particular use case. Got your own transit stops and want to turn the Google ones off? We’ve got you covered. Want to hide highways and highlight water features? Done. You can control the visibility of labels, landscapes, transit icons, points of interest, roads and more to create the look that reflects your brand and purpose. See the samples for Android, iOS and JavaScript.

Both the iOS and the Android SDKs now support business points of interest as well; this means you’ll now see hotels, restaurants and shops on your maps. They’ll only be visible when you compile with the latest SDKs and you can control their visibility via styling.

Style once, use on any platform

When you’re happy with your new map style, you can export & use the same JSON styling object in our iOS, Android and JavaScript Maps APIs. The Styling Wizard also provides the URL for you to use with the Google Static Maps API.

To enable a custom style in your app or website, take a look at the code samples: Android, iOS & JavaScript.

You can distribute the styles with your app, fetch them dynamically, and even change them at runtime.

Custom styles now work on native iOS and Android apps as well as the web.

The Android and iOS release notes contain details of bugs fixed as well as the custom basemap styling features mentioned in this post. Read the Maps APIs styling guides for Android, iOS and JavaScript, and watch the Styling your Maps Geocast (embedded below).

A big thank you to Android and iOS developers everywhere for using the Google Maps Android API and the Google Maps SDK for iOS and submitting feedback via the issue tracker. We heard you!

Share your styled basemaps on Twitter and G+ via #mapstyle and show us what you’ve done!