Mapilio Mobile is now open source

General talk
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Mapilio started in 2020 to solve a simple problem: turning ordinary photos — from a phone, an action camera, or a professional 360° rig — into usable street-level imagery and map data, at scale. Since then, the Mapilio CLI toolkit ( GitHub - mapilio/mapilio-kit: Mapilio Kit is a library for processing and uploading images to Mapilio · GitHub ) has been MIT-licensed and open since January 2024. This month we took the next step: Mapilio Mobile, our iOS and Android capture app, is now open source too ( GitHub - mapilio/mobile-apps: Open-source street-level imagery capture app for iOS and Android. · GitHub ).

Getting here took real work. Opening a production mobile app isn’t a visibility flag you flip — it’s months of deliberate preparation: moving login off a shipped client secret to a proper public-client flow, rotating and sanitising historical credentials, pinning a secret scan into CI, bringing dependencies and native libraries current, fixing the release signing path, and clearing the codebase for public licensing and formatting standards. That work has been the Mapilio team’s, methodically, gate by gate — this release is the result of it, not a shortcut around it.

Why open source, and why now? Two reasons, and we want to be upfront about both. First, every image captured through Mapilio is licensed CC BY-SA and explicitly cleared for OSM use — the app exists to feed the map, and opening it lets anyone verify that’s really how it works in code, not just in a privacy policy. Second, and just as important: the team wants the public’s help building it. Alongside platforms like KartaView and Panoramax, street-level capture tools work best as open infrastructure a community can actually contribute to, not just consume — bug reports, accessibility fixes, capture-flow improvements, new features. This is a genuine invitation to develop with the project, not just a transparency gesture.

Where it stands today. As of 18 September 2026, Mapilio has over 20 million image records, 1,700 registered accounts, and more than 280 contributing accounts.

What’s next. The team’s already planning better panorama support, drone imagery alongside street-level capture, a marketplace, F-Droid distribution, refreshed interfaces for both the platform and app, and an updated contribution scoring system. Plenty of room for the community to help shape where it goes.

Getting involved. The repository is at GitHub - mapilio/mobile-apps: Open-source street-level imagery capture app for iOS and Android. · GitHub , with a contribution guide ( mobile-apps/CONTRIBUTING.md at main · mapilio/mobile-apps · GitHub ) to get started. If you’d rather just talk first, the issues are open for discussion too.

It would be great if you could check out the newly opened repo.

Thanks,

Chris

6 Likes
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Thanks to Moderator Allan, for his help.

Chris

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Can you clarify the position of Mapilio in the whole “street level imagery” universe? Are you building your own imagery database, competing with the fully-proprietary Google Street View, the closed-source-but-usable-by-OSM Mapillary/KartaView and the federated concept of Panoramax?

The Mapilio website says “We are a team coming together to make the world a better place for ourselves and others” - are you a nonprofit or do you have a business model and if so, what is it?

Perusing your web site I get the impression that you want to automate the process that makes maps from street-level imagery. Is that correct? If so, under what license will you be publishing the map data you create from user-supplied photos? Will this be proprietary, potentially competing with OSM?

6 Likes
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Thanks Frederik, good questions. To be clear, I’m a volunteer contributor to the project rather than part of the Mapilio team. The announcement was based on wording from them, hence the “we”. I’ve asked them to answer these directly rather than guess on their behalf, and I’ll make sure they see this thread.

Thanks,

Chris

1 Like
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Hi Frederik,

Thanks for the questions.

We have updated the Mapilio website to describe the project and its relationship with OpenStreetMap more clearly.

Mapilio is an independent street-level imagery platform. Our goal is not to replace or compete with OpenStreetMap, but to build imagery, tools and data-processing capabilities that can also be useful to the OSM ecosystem.

Opening the Mapilio Mobile source code is part of that direction. We intend to make more parts of the project transparent and accessible where it makes sense, and we will continue improving the documentation around imagery, APIs, integrations and data usage.

We are also actively developing workflows around extracting useful information from street-level imagery. For OSM-related use cases, our focus is on making these capabilities useful to contributors rather than creating a separate replacement for OpenStreetMap.

The website has now been updated accordingly, and we will continue refining it as the project evolves.

Community feedback on what would make Mapilio more useful within the OSM ecosystem is welcome.

Best
Ozcan