💡Motivation

Mapbox SDK is one of the best maps and location service out there in term of pricing in comparison to Google Maps. Tuyen Vu used to integrate Mapbox SDK to his client mobile apps since 2017. There are prebuilt Mapbox libraries for .NET at that time, but they weren't built well, then he decided to create his own version of Mapbox SDK for Xamarin (bought by Microsoft in 2016) when he still runs Naxam Co. Ltd. Later on, he and his team kept the effort to maintain the libraries until 2020 when Naxam stopped its missions.

Back in 2022, there are many requests from companies asked for the upgrade of the libraries to its latest version, v10+ because the lower versions will no longer get support from Mapbox in 2023. It was really a big challenge, because Tuyen Vu no longer has that plenty of spare time while he has a busy, full-time job. In fact, his first attempt to upgrade the library to v10.5 was in 2021, but he failed because Mapbox v10 is totally different from the previous versions. There are many reasons for that failure:

• Artifacts (Android AARs, JARs, iOS's frameworks) are distributed privately

• iOS frameworks are no longer fully Objective-C compatible

• Xamarin was changing to be part of .NET6+

• Xamarin.Forms was changing to .NET MAUI

As a developer, he didn't allow him to quit easily, he finally delivered Mapbox SDK for .NET v10.11.1 by July 17, 2023 after almost 2 years from the first attempt and more than 1 year since he was back on track.

He hopes his work will help .NET community a lot by providing them another option to work with maps and location in a mobile app. He decides to make the SDK free and open source so that everyone can benefit, provide feedbacks, and contribute to improve it.