A walking route across a city and a hiking route up a mountain should not share the same clock.

That sounds obvious until you ask a routing engine for an ETA. Most routing systems are good at distance, turn costs, access rules, and road classes. Hiking time is different. A two-kilometer trail can be easy, slow, dangerous, or all three depending on slope, descent, surface, visibility, and how the local trail network publishes reference times.

For Globus routing, this matters because we use Valhalla deeply. Valhalla already has the graph, the route shape, and elevation in the tiles. The question was whether we could use that information to make hiking ETAs less optimistic without breaking tile compatibility or inventing a regional formula that only works in one mountain range.

Over the last research pass, we built the corpus, tested the formulas, rejected several tempting models, used a deliberately expensive research hook to learn what worked, and then moved the result into production-shaped Valhalla code.

The first Globus predicted-traffic release for Valhalla had a deliberately simple shape: coverage everywhere, richer temporal detail only where the data could carry it.

That was the right place to start.

The June navigation data update keeps the same product promise. There is still no new API, no separate traffic overlay, and no integration change for SDK customers. The traffic layer is still baked into the regular map and navigation data update.

What changed is the model's judgment underneath.

It now handles local time correctly, treats recent evidence more carefully, and refuses to widen weekly profiles where freshness already explains the signal better.

Tilt the camera on most map SDKs and the world stays flat. The view leans, labels reorient, the perspective looks 3D — and the ground underneath is still a sheet of paper. For mountains, ridges, coastlines, and any app that cares where the high ground is, that flat sheet is the long-standing gap.

GLMap SDK 2.0 closes it. The elevation data is on the device. The mesh is on the GPU. The camera lifts off and the planet stands up underneath it.

This post is what shipped, what we left out on purpose, and how to turn it on in your app.

It is Monday, 08:12. A delivery driver leaves the depot on a route the dispatcher built on Sunday afternoon. The routing engine that built it does not know that the arterial out of the warehouse jams between 08:00 and 08:30. The driver does. So does anyone who lives nearby. Every minute the engine does not know costs someone — the driver, the customer, the company.

Predicted traffic is the routing feature most people assume already works. In Valhalla, it can — once someone does the work to feed it well. Over the last several months at Globus, we have done that work.

This post is what we shipped, what we threw away, and why a deliberately small layer ended up mattering more than a flashy one.

Better Navigation UI with Track Arrows​

v1.13.0 makes navigation routes clearer with directional arrows along your track. Plus: a new helper for displaying user location, Android stability fixes, and better cross-platform API parity.

API Refinement, Smarter Tile Loading, and Cross-Platform Consistency​

v1.12.0 is all about polish and performance. We've cleaned up coordinate conversion APIs, optimized tile loading to reduce bandwidth waste, and standardized naming across platforms to make your code more maintainable.

TL;DR​

1. Unified screen-to-map conversion API on Android – now uses android.graphics.PointF, eliminating the old MapPoint/Point mix-up
2. Property clean-up on iOS – mapZoom → mapScale (and heads-up about v1.13 renaming of mapZoomLevel)
3. Smarter tile pipeline on both platforms – fewer aborts, fewer duplicate downloads, better cache hit-rate
4. NDK r28.1 & 16 KB page-size support for Android – rebuilt libs and updated CMake configs

Lane Guidance, Valhalla Integration, and Smarter Route Tracking​

v1.11.0 brings professional-grade navigation features that help drivers navigate complex intersections with confidence. We've added turn lane information, direct Valhalla JSON route creation, and intelligent alternative route tracking.

Map Pitch: Bringing Navigation to Life​

Navigation apps work best when they mirror how we naturally see the world. That's why v1.10.0 introduces map pitch – the ability to tilt your map view to create a more immersive, perspective-based navigation experience.