Maps on mobile devices are one of the most useful tools. Adding maps to your apps can sometimes be difficult especially due to the slow speed Google's mapping framework has developed lately. Fortunately we have amazing people in Android community who are not afraid to step in and contribute. Cyril Mottier is on of the most active contributors to the common good of Android. Today, Cyril announced Polaris, a free library for building maps for Android.

Polaris is a flexible and easy to use Mapping library that allows developers to build annotated maps on Android. For more info read Cyril's blog post about the library. You can also see the library in action by installing the example app from Google Play.

Cyril lists following features of the Polaris library in his blog post:

• Gesture support
• Effortless map annotating
• Map callout variable anchor positioning
• Built-in “user tracking” mode
• Automatic built-in zoom controls
• Natural map callouts transitions
• Additional listeners

You can find the library from Github:  https://github.com/cyrilmottier/Polaris

I want to extend my thank you to Cyril on behalf of the whole Android community. Thank you for your awesomeness!