Google recently released new vector cartography for their mobile maps. I'm curious if anyone here has any insight into the wire format they use for transmission? I've experimented with a few formats over the years, including bencode, bson, variants of WKT and WKB, and gzipped, limited-precision geojson which I've found to be the best trade-off in comprehensibility and file size. I'd love to know what Google decided on, but I don't have an Android device to test with.
[GIS] the wire format for Google’s new vector map tiles
datafile formatsgoogle mapsvector-tiles
Best Answer
I couldn't make any sort of sense of the file once I saved to disk and I think Adam is on the right track with the decompiling idea.
I was able to decompile and poke around. Trying to sort through hundreds(maybe thousands) of classes named 'a','b','c' was too much for me, but I think the answer is in there for someone who knows their away around. I definitely prefer just using the app!
If you are inclined to unpack the
dexfile out of theapkfile and convert it to a jar, you can open it with a java decompiler. This may or may not be legal depending on the software license or the country in which you live--although I couldn't find anything specifically about my app on my droid. Maybe it's legal text in using the android OS (in which case, I'll have to come back and delete part of this answer).