Location isn’t a luxury. It is essential. From the moment we wake up, accurate and readily available location information is essential to everything we do. Think about it. Check the weather – location. Get directions to a meeting – location. Navigate to a holiday party - location. Order food – location. Plan a hike or a run – location. Where is a new movie playing – location. Grab an e-bike or hail a ride to get across town – location. 

Developers who build the applications and services we depend on for all these things depend on fast and accurate location intelligence to make our lives run smoothly and happily. Whether working for a small, medium or global Fortune 500 company, developers build with Mapbox.

The latest release of the Mapbox platform offers a wealth of new features that deliver richer data to power decision-making, make it easier for developers to build quickly with our platform, and drive amazing user experiences to delight their customers. 

Want to know more about what is new? Read on, then get started with Mapbox.

‍Data that drives better decisions

Mapbox is delivering better quality data. But first, what is Mapbox data anyway? 

Mapbox data underpins every service available on the Mapbox platform. Mapbox uses artificial intelligence to continually conflate, compare and correct data from thousands of sources to dynamically update it. These sources include satellite imagery, vision extraction from vehicle and stationary cameras, road telemetry from GPS and light detection and ranging (LIDAR), address data, traffic information from millions of sensors, third-party licensed data, daily feedback and telemetry from users, and open data sources. Developers can also bring their own data. As a result, developers that build with Mapbox delight their customers by helping them discover the world around them. 

The new Mapbox Boundaries 4.0 release includes more than 200,000 new boundaries added to a global dataset that goes deep into a variety of place-types, best-in-class data quality, and supports various worldviews. This release provides highly accurate, complete, and detailed boundary data on the administrative, government, postal, and statistical boundaries in Asia-Pacific and the Americas. Customers, like Varicent, use Boundaries to differentiate their products, make sales territory planning easier, and communicate to distributed sales forces.

The new Matrix API will excite Mapbox customers that already use it to optimize route planning and build advanced logistics solutions. We made significant upgrades to Matrix API that deliver improved, up-to-date routes and ETA calculations enabling advanced functionality on fleet optimization and cost-savings with future departure time capability that account for traffic patterns. Matrix API now provides accurate route estimates based on specified departure times and real-world conditions composited by Mapbox historic and live traffic data. 

The Mapbox Matrix API is a high-throughput API that enables scalable low-latency x-by-x matrix calculations. These matrix calculations are made with the same engine that performs turn-by-turn navigation so planning on the backend matches up perfectly when it comes time for the driver to execute the plan and follow the guidance on their dashboard.

Easier and faster development

We know that our customers need to get to market faster than their competition and sell all over the world. Our latest Mapbox release enables customers to maximize limited developer resources and scale development velocity and agility all without increasing engineering investment.

Navigation SDK – Drop-In UI enables our customers to launch their applications and go to market faster. Mapbox has invested years of research and design in delivering an elegant and easy-to-use drop-in UI. With this new turnkey UI, developers are able to access a pre-built navigation layout composed of standalone core navigation and UI components responsible for delivering and presenting location and guidance data. Navigation SDK offers a simplified layout for setup and implementation, out-of-the-box functionality, and the ability to customize to meet our customers unique brands and specific use cases.

Navigation SDK – Copilot provides fleet customers with insights into their route performance through detailed trace files and search analytics to improve driver experience and fine tune routes.

Maps Internationalization makes localizing maps a snap. Our new Maps Internationalization capability makes it easier for our customers to localize their maps and expand into new markets. Customers with a global user base need their maps to dynamically render with the preferred language and worldview of their users’ devices and browsers. With this latest release, customers can go global faster and at a lower cost by avoiding the complexity of having to create potentially hundreds of individual custom styles for every combination of language and worldview needed. Mapbox now supports 34 languages and 8 worldviews. This capability is currently in private preview and will be generally available in early 1Q2023.

Drive amazing user experiences

It’s no secret that in the competition for customers, an amazing user experience (UX) is one of the most powerful tools. Forrester recently reported that every $1 invested into UX returns $100. That’s an ROI of 9,900%. User experience (UX) is a competitive advantage. And it also happens to be one of the core strengths of Mapbox.

When Globe View initially launched in June 2022, we gave  our developers an alternative to the skewed Mercator Projection when aiming to display visual information that is continental in scale. We have been very impressed with how our customers have innovated with Globe View and the strong level of adoption generated. Read our blog post to see just some of the ways customers are using Globe View. 

Redesigned Core Styles brings our latest features and data to our customers' users  in beautiful base maps – creating a rich experience in which their users can discover the world around them. The redesign offers better performance, better land-use classifications, improved icons, Globe View at low zoom levels, and more location data to make our base maps easier to navigate. 

Our Core Styles are ready-to-use base maps composed by the expert Mapbox map designers. We built them to save developers time and serve a broad range of use cases. Customers can use them as-is, make incremental adjustments, or layer their own data on top.

Mapbox Studio Folders help keep our customers and their collaborators organized.  Customers can: create and name a folder, move styles in and out of folders, search and sort folders, deep link to a folder and there’s a new “Trash” page to access deleted styles. If customers have many projects with a large number of custom styles in Studio, this new feature will change the game and make it easier for collaborators to pop into a project and pick up where the last person left off. Folders will be available in Studio on December 9, 2022.

Intuitive and seamless developer UX. We believe that the developer UX is just as important as the UX they deliver to their customers. We are thrilled to formally announce an enhanced developer relations program and a series of in-person developer relations events that will be coming to a city nearby soon.

BUILD with Mapbox

We've worked hard to deliver great features and upgrades, and we're excited to share them. For more details, check out the full release notes, visit our developer's webpage, or watch our latest launch event #BUILDwithMapbox.

If you don't already have an account, you can create one for free at account.mapbox.com.