React-native-mapbox-gl: Update mapbox-android-sdk to 6.1?

[jshearer]

Hi! I'm using this library in my app, and noticed some subtile but annoying interaction issues where the map doesn't do _exactly_ what I would expect, when compared to, for example, google maps, or maps on iOS.

Examples of the things that feel weird:

• When trying to rotate the map (two finger rotate around center axis), the threshold feels too big, and I start to wonder why the map isn't rotating before it suddenly jerks to where it should be.
• When zooming out, there are two weird things. First, the threshold again feels too big -- when I start pinching, the map doesn't zoom out until I get to about 15%, and then snaps to the correct location before starting to act naturally. Second, if I start zoomed in all the way, and then zoom out, once my fingers have gotten about 75% of the way to touching, the map just stops zooming out. But I'm obviously not at the highest zoom level.
• Velocity seems weird. It's _decent_, but it's clear that there's a threshold over which the map will try to move in the direction I throw it, but it doesn't really line up with how fast I throw it, and if I move my finger too slow, it just jerks to a stop.

I had originally just accepted these minor issues as mapbox not having the bandwidth to spend developer hours on fine tuning map interactions like google/apple does, but I saw the blog post about revamping gestures for android:

https://blog.mapbox.com/revamping-gestures-for-android-maps-e298a7a2832a

I couldn't find any references to AndroidGesturesManager in this library, and it seems that the revamped gesture detection was introduced in version 6+ of the underlying mapbox-gl-native library, which gets used in mapbox-android-sdk here. But looking at master, it looks like that dependency hasn't been updated for 2 months:

https://github.com/mapbox/react-native-mapbox-gl/blob/548b91c66eb56bdd3e63071922de7ab2936e2474/android/rctmgl/build.gradle#L31

Are there technical reasons preventing the update? Is it a major breaking change? Is it being worked on? Can I contribute to that effort in any way?

Thanks!

[nitaliano]

@jshearer it's a very large breaking change, that we will be taking on in June. The only "technical reason" is I've switched focus from this SDK to a different React Native project. My focus will be back on this project in June.

[jshearer]

Ah, thanks for the response :) Is this library getting replaced? Or you've just been working on a completely orthogonal project?

[nitaliano]

nope this library is not getting replaced, in fact more resources are going to be added to it. I'm the only React Native dev at Mapbox at the current moment, but that is going to be changing. We have plans to release more React Native SDKs to cover other parts of our stack, which is what I'm working on now.

[olegwn]

@nitaliano nice to hear this!! Because it starts to look like this package is abandoned :( Looking forward to more activity!

[mrtnzlml]

@nitaliano Hi, can you please tell us what is the status here? 🙂