Introduction

The purpose of this book is to introduce you to mapping and location technology in iOS. In the first chapter, we will build a very simple mapping app using Apple’s MapKit framework, which comes with iOS. The next chapters will introduce more complicated aspects of the location and map frameworks built into iOS, CoreLocation and MapKit. We’ll finish up by creating projects with the Google Maps for iOS SDK and the Mapbox SDK.

Prerequisites

This book won’t be an introduction to iOS app development, but it is written for beginning and intermediate iOS programmers. You should be able to understand the Swift programming language, and also know the basic concepts of iOS development, such as View Controllers and Storyboards. You don’t have to know anything about mapping or location yet, and we’ll introduce more advanced concepts as we use them.

You will need a relatively recent Mac to do your development for the projects in the book. This book is written with Apple’s Xcode 10 integrated development environment (IDE). Xcode is free for download from the Mac App Store, and runs on recent versions of OS X. You do not need an iOS device for the projects in this book, but it is a lot more interesting if you do have one, especially for the projects that can use your current location. You can sign up for an Apple developer account on Apple’s web site if you want to run your projects on your own iOS devices - at the time of writing, this doesn’t require paying Apple any money:

https://developer.apple.com/

If you want to publish your apps on the App Store, you will need to have a paid Apple Developer account. You will not need one to follow these development exercises, however.