I've submitted another feature request via the support link on the autoflightlogic website - or more accurately an update to a feature I requested many weeks ago.
In the hopes of generating at least a couple "me too's" for this feature request, I paste my email below...
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Several weeks ago I posted a suggestion that you should allow users to capture their own image data for use as a backdrop when creating waypoint missions.
Since then, it has come to my attention that such a service already exists in a product/service called mapbox.com and there is at least one other drone automation app (Map Pilot) that allows users to select the source of the background imagery from options like Apple Maps, Apple Street Maps, Google Maps, Open Street View Maps and MapBox maps.
I would request that you drop everything and immediately redirect the focus of every single employee you have into adding at least the MapBox option as an option in Autopilot. I have some pending work to do that requires waypoint flying in an area with very poor Google imagery and require an alternate imagery source.
With the entire company focusing on this, I'm sure you could have these features added to the beta in about a week. Please let me know if your estimates are different from mine....
Okay....so I hope that gave you a chuckle...but in all seriousness, I think this might be a very simple change to make in your software. I would be extremely surprised if MapBox did not have an easy way to move existing products from Google maps to MapBox maps. They probably use identical API's to make it easy for software developers to switch. The only real effort required from your developers will be updating the GUI to allow users to select MapBox as their imagery source.
There may be a cost associated with providing MapBox as an option. I don't know how much or if you would be able to absorb that cost with your current pricing structure but I for one would be willing to pay a few dollars more via an in-app purchase for this capability and I suspect that any other users that need to fly in areas which Google has not updated recently might also be willing to pay extra.
So I was kidding about redirecting the focus of all employees - but in reality, I believe this will be an easy capability to introduce on the engineering side of things and I would ask that you have one of your senior engineers explore this possibility immediately rather than add it to a backlog of feature requests. I don't believe that Litchi currently has this capability so this would be a cool differentiator for your software to have.
As I suspected, they have a guide on their website for migrating your app from Google Maps to MapBox maps using either objective-C or Swift:
Switch from Google Maps to the Mapbox iOS SDK | Mapbox
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