Analysis of various APIs for showing spatial information in Mobile Environments

Nowadays by producing smart mobile equipment the dream of having smart and electronic partners is properly realized. On the other hand, combining of mobile facilities and Geographic Information System (GIS), Underlie the emergence of another technology known as Mobile Geographic Information System (Mobile GIS). For developing any kind of Mobile GIS we can use different architecture like stand- alone, distributed and so on. But in any architecture showing the spatial information in client side is one the most vital part of a Mobile GIS. On the other hand, since much of the Android operating system is responsible for the commercial market of mobile devices. in this study, we intend to display spatial data in the context of the Android Operating System. The conducted analysis can be considered as one of the most important studies wich are needed to develop any example of a Mobile GIS. But unfortunately, despite great the importance of this subject to date, comprehensive and technical studies in evaluating the performance of different methods is not reached. Methods examined in this study include the use of Google Map API, ArcGIS Runtime SDK, OSMDroid, MapsFroge and Nutiteq libraries. To compare of these methods, some mobile services for each of them are developed. These services were developed by Java language programming in Intellij Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Finally, after interacting with these services, strengths and weaknesses of each method was expressed. In other words, the results of this study can be considered as a good starting point for the development of a complete Mobile GIS.