Showing a lot of points on Google Maps Android v2.0

Question

I have a lot of points to show on Google Maps Android. I decided to draw them on the map by drawing circles with small radiuses. However, I noticed that drawing a lot of circles (around 1000) is very slow and the app does not respond well, even when the drawing is made in an AsyncTask. Any ideas how to get around this?

Answer 1

The best way is to only plot what you can see on the map and when the map moves get the new points you can see so that you eventually dont have to plot anymore.

You can also look into clustering where if you have a bunch of markers in a certain area you can indicate a group of markers by just plotting one marker

this link goes over the different method you can use

https://developers.google.com/maps/articles/toomanymarkers

Answer 2

Consider using Markers instead and one of the clustering libraries freely available:

• Android Maps Extensions
• Clusterkraf
• Android Maps Utils

If you are convinced you want to use Circles, you may try to use one of the libs and modify code to group Circles.