GoKawiilI love going on wilderness adventures. I am rarely happier than when I am far off into the mountains without a soul in sight. As a result, I have spent a lot of time learning how to safely explore and navigate when I’m away from civilization. The most important habit I’ve found for not getting lost is to be very regular in checking your location as you go, and the best way I’ve found to do that is to have a map on my wrist.
For more than six years I’ve been working towards creating the best possible mapping experience on the Apple Watch. With yesterday’s launch of Pedometer++ 8, I feel like this design journey has reached a meaningful destination. I would contend that Pedometer++’s watchOS mapping support is the absolute best available on the App Store.
So I wanted to walk through the journey it took to get here.
Early Efforts
I have wanted a good map on my wrist since the Apple Watch launched. This wasn’t realistically possible until watchOS 6, which brought SwiftUI to the platform and, for the first time, made “real” apps possible. But in those early days, the screens were tiny, and the processors slow. I couldn’t quite get to where I wanted.
This was my very first attempt that shipped in Pedometer++. These maps were generated completely on the server, which involved sending the relevant workout data roundtrip every time I wanted to refresh the display. This system let me validate the idea, but it was never going to be practically useful for navigation or regular use, and could never work offline.
Custom Mapping Engine
I knew that if I wanted to make progress towards this goal, I’d need to work at a lower level, so I got to work building a fully SwiftUI-native map rendering engine. SwiftUI was the only choice because it’s all that watchOS supported, and proved to be helpful for putting maps into widgets, which also only support SwiftUI.
In 2021, I got this engine to a place where I could reliably and performantly render a map on watchOS. With it, I can render any tile-based maps and overlay location information on top.
Map Designs
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