Moving icons on a Android MapView

Question

I\'m working on an application that displays the location of moving items on a Google MapView. I need a way to update the position of the icons that represent the items (as

Answer 1

Using built-in capabilities of MapView and Overlays to draw animation will likely kill your perfromance. My suggestion is:

1) Combine MapView with another View. MapView will give you necessary screen coordinates and another view will serve as a canvas for animation. Both views should occupy the same screen positions (use frame layout);

2) Once you get positions of the map marker you want to animate - remove it from map and start doing animation of marker's movements using second view. Here you can leverage specialized android animation classes (i.e. Animation, AnimationUtil, AnimationSet)

3) Once you've done with animation - add marker to mapview overlay, now in its new position and invalidate overlay

Maybe there can be more optimal approach (i.e. use animation directly on MapView canvas), but the bottom line - you should use specialized animation mechanism to prevent perfromance issues.