Ferrostar
Ferrostar is a modern SDK for building turn-by-turn navigation applications. It’s designed for customizability from the ground up, helping you build the navigation experience your users deserve.
Ferrostar is...
- Modern - The core is written in Rust, making it easy to contribute to, maintain, and port to new architectures. Platform specific libraries for iOS and Android leverage the best features of Swift and Kotlin.
- Batteries included - The bundled navigation UI is usable out of the box for the most common use cases, with minimal reconfiguration needed. Don't like our UI? Most components are reusable and composable thanks to SwiftUI, Jetpack Compose, and Web Components.
- Extensible - At every layer, you have flexibility to extend or replace functionality without needing to wait for a patch. Want to bring your own offline routing? Can do. Want to use your own detection logic to see if the user is off the route? Not a problem. Taken together with the batteries included approach, Ferrostar's goal is to make simple things simple, and complex things possible.
- Vendor-neutral - As a corollary to its extensibility, Ferrostar is vendor-neutral, and welcomes PRs to add support for additional vendors. The core Ferrostar components do not upload telemetry to any vendor (though developers may add their own).
- Open-source - Ferrostar is open-source. No funky strings; just BSD.
Ferrostar is not...
- Aiming for compatibility with ancient SDKs / API levels, except where it’s easy; this is a rare chance for a fresh start.
- A routing engine, basemap, or search solution; there are many good vendors that provide hosted APIs and offline route generation, and there is a rich ecosystem of FOSS software if you're looking to host your own for a smaller deployment.
Can I use Ferrostar today?
TL;DR?
| iOS | Android | Web Components | React Native | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| High-level core bindings | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Composable UI | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | 🚧 |
| Voice guidance (platform-native TTS) | ✅ | ✅ | ✅* | 🚧 |
| Published packages | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ |
- Note that TTS and background functionality are severely limited in PWAs due to inherent limitations of the platform.
On iOS and Android
We consider Ferrostar ready for use in production iOS and Android apps (and it's already being used in several!).
iOS and Android have "batteries included" UIs which are highly composable in nature thanks to SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose. So you can customize most aspects of the UI today.
That said, we're still labeling it beta, since there are still a few rough edges. Additionally, we are not yet making any API stability guarantees, but do provide release notes documenting any breaking changes. We do not expect breakage in the form of code that compiles but behaves unexpectedly. The sorts of changes we push with minor releases leading up to 1.0 will generally be API breaking that the compiler will catch (and usually often include a quick fix)!
Using multiplatform frameworks
Ferrostar can be integrated into multiplatform frameworks in a few ways.
First, we have a React Native library in active development. This is currently in a pre-alpha state. We will update this guide with instructions on getting started as it moves to the alpha phase.
Both Flutter and React Native have mechanisms for calling platform/native code,
which you can use to create and interact with
the FerrostarCore Swift and Kotlin classes.
Note that React Native is significantly more challenging as it is
deeply dependent on CocoaPods and has not yet adopted SPM (Ferrostar does).
If you are building a custom UI (ex: with flutter_maplibre_gl
or MapLibre React Native),
then this is all you need.
For the UI, both Flutter and React Native include functionality for hosting native views, and some community members are doing this successfully with Flutter already!
More idiomatic integrations are planned, and contributions are very much welcome. We are tracking status via the following issues:
On the web
We consider the web platform to be rougher beta quality than the native mobile platforms. We do our best not to introduce any breaknig changes that are web-specific, but web (particularly the UI layer) is not quite as mature as mobile.
How to use this guide
This guide is broken up into several sections. The tutorial is designed to get you started quickly. Read this first (at least the chapter for your platform). Then you can pretty much skip around at will.
If you want to go deeper and customize the user experience, check out the chapters on customization.
The architecture section documents the design of Ferrostar and its various components. If you want to add support for a new routing API, post-process location updates, or contribute to the development of Ferrostar, this is where the authoritative docs live. (If you want to contribute, be sure to check out CONTRIBUTING.md!)
Connect with the Community
Feel free to open an issue or discussion on GitHub
for bug reports, feature requests, and questions.
You can also join the #ferrostar channel on the OSM US Slack for updates + discussion.
The core devs are active there and happy to answer questions / help you get started!