Map Styles
Map styles define the look and feel of a map, including its colors, background, roads, labels, points of interest, and other visual elements. The Mapbox Maps SDK for iOS enables developers to apply predefined styles or load custom styles to fit their application's design needs. Once a style is loaded, developers can programmatically change the style's appearance at runtime, add and remove layers, change layer properties, and more.
By default, the Maps SDK for Flutter will load the Mapbox Standard style, a versatile and visually appealing map style suitable for many applications. Mapbox Standard offers many configuration options, allowing developers to customize the map's appearance to suit the needs of their application. With Mapbox Standard, developers can adjust the map's colors, feature visibility, and other properties to create a unique map experience. Additionally, developers can bring their own data to the style either through adding a source and layer or by importing a style fragment.
These guides explain core concepts of loading and configuring styles, adding sources and layers at runtime, and styling data with Mapbox expressions in the Maps SDK for Android. For a general introduction to map styles see this getting started guide:
Learn how Mapbox styles work and get started developing your map.
There are two approaches to customizing the look of the map:
- Update map features dynamically at runtime using the Maps SDK. Lighten or darken the map based on the time of day, personalize icons and map colors based on your users’ activity, switch languages dynamically, or increase the size of labels based on user preferences to improve legibility.
- Create a custom map style with Mapbox Studio. Upload data, build styles from scratch, and style groups of layers together using style components. Publish your custom style and load it into your application. If you update the underlying data or you edit and publish updates to the style in Mapbox Studio, those changes will be reflected in your application.
These approaches are not mutually exclusive. You can load a custom style and update map features from that custom style in your application at runtime.
These guides cover working with the map style at runtime. For more information on how to create a custom map style in Mapbox Studio, see the Mapbox Studio Manual.