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I think you're mistaken. They are on Android so it seems odd they wouldn't be.

The ability to zoom to arbitrary levels with no pixellation seems to imply it most definitely is vector.



On iOS it appears they're a mixture of bitmap tiles and vector text. I definitely see pixelation of roads at certain zoom levels.


Can you give steps to reproduce? I was looking specifically at road outlines and they seemed like they were definitely vector.

Satellite views are obviously bitmap.


I don't have an iOS device, but here are my steps to reproduce on Android. Open a map. Turn on airplane mode. Zoom in. See pixels

Here's a screenshot I took after I enabled airplane mode: http://i.imgur.com/wc5Ie.png


The pixellation here is your phone waiting to download the higher-res vector tile. While it waits for the higher-res tile it draws a bitmap representation of the lower-res tile "above" it.


Surely if it's vector done right they can draw the lower detail vector tile at the higher bitmap res?


No because the amount of detail will change at each zoom level. Smaller roads and a higher number of local details appear.


They're not infinitely vectors. They're still tiles. If they were to use the zoomed in tile, when zoomed out, even with vectors, you'd get something unrecognizable.

It's the same reason that fonts and icons are brought up when people espouse the "vectors will save everything"! They do a lot of nice things but for something like Google Maps, I can't imagine how they'd implement "true vectors" in a practical phone-applicable way.


No, they're vectors, intelligent vectors that add and remove features at different zoom levels.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/google-maps-is-now-av...


I am using an Android device. And I do clearly see pixelation when I zoom in, before the new tiles load.

Here's a screenshot I took after I enabled airplane mode: http://i.imgur.com/wc5Ie.png


Which version of the Maps app are you using?

I don't see these blurred pixels on my phone, but note that this kind of rendering can also happen with a vector based map: The application has to convert the vector information to a bitmap anyway, for a given zoom level. When zooming in, it is possible that the app shows a zoomed-in version of this bitmap while it is generating a new one in the background.

By the way, it is not necessary to answer every single comment with a link to your screenshot. It is annoying to see the same thing repeated 5 times when reading the thread.


I'm using 6.14.1.

I answered all the relevant replies individually because I thought that would make those people more likely to see it. Sorry for annoying you.


Well now you have five answers like mine :)

Same version here though the UI looks very different. I can actually reproduce what you describe but only at low zoom levels, which makes sense: the temporary display of a bitmap at the wrong zoom level is more apparent when the phone needs more time to render a lot of vector data (there is less data to render when zoomed-in).




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