types of maps that could be included in an android mapping app

Question

what are the types of maps that can be supported by (or requested from server) I had heard about bitmaps, raster maps, and vector maps also maps tiles, I know that google maps and osmdroid (osm android mapping api) use maps tiles and when I download a map from osm mapnik using mobile atlas greater the tiles were downloaded as .png files (images) I want to know what other types of maps that can be supplied by a server (and displayed using osmdroid)because I want to develop android mapping app that work offline and let the user to include the map he/she wants???

Answer 1

You are mixing up things here:

There are only two ways to represent map data.

• via an image of the map
• via vector data (GPS coordinates that when combined to lines etc result in the map)

All the map types you named (except for the vector map) are different names for images to represent the map. "Bitmap" is even a regular image (thats how .bmp files got their name) and has actually nothing to do with maps. Since the complete image of a map is really really big (some terrabytes?) you cut the image into tiles and transfer just those. That's a map tile then.

Using vector data is not practical (esp. for mobile devices) since you have to render the map image yourself. Since that takes longer than downloading an image you have google / osm and probably every other map service use images instead of vector data.