is it possible to cache map for offline use in a way other than saving tiled images?

Question

We are working on mapping apps for ios and android and we want to do map caching for offline use in the apps. It occured to me during my research that the most common way to cache a map for offline use is to cache tiled images at different resolutions. Is there any other way to cache a map which is less memory and time consuming as caching tiles take a long time even for low resolutions and the resulting cache size even for small maps ends up getting pretty huge. also esri ios sdk and mapkit donot support caching methods in their API

Thanks

Answer 1

Check out the MapBox iOS SDK and possibly use the RMMBTilesSource tile source to refer to local, offline tiles.

Answer 2

Try to use Open Street Map in your app, it allows you to download the data in vector format. Google maps are copyrighted and non-downloadable. But OSM is a free wiki-map and quite precise nowadays.