🐺 🌛 🍧 Death of MAPS.ME? 🐊 👩‍🎓 👩🏽‍🤝‍👨🏻

In November 2020, Mail.Ru Group sold the MAPS.ME mapping service, which was widely reported in the press , MAPS.ME CEO Evgeny Lisovsky on his Facebook page and many others. However, just a month later, the "new strategist" released an update on iOS that canceled out the app's long history. Instead of old technologies, they use the Mapbox framework for displaying maps, and the application started working extremely poorly.

What has changed?

The key is, it's not offline maps anymore ! Now these are online maps (in fact, not much different from Google Maps and Apple Maps) with declared offline support (yes, exactly the same as in Google Maps). For displaying maps, the Mapbox SDK is used, the logo of which can be seen in the upper left corner of the screen. I tend to think that the data now displayed on the maps comes from the Mapbox servers. A short measurement showed that the size of the downloaded Moscow increased by 4 times (from 50 to 200MB)!

In total, the new owners threw out the main, in my opinion, functionality in the application.

Now let's look at examples. I took screenshots on the iPad, since my iPhone managed to download the update over the weekend, but you can't downgrade there. On the left - as it was, on the right - as it was.