Expose tracksViewChange and icon property to improve some performance issues

[PhamBaTho]

Expose tracksViewChanges property of GMSMarker. By default, this property is YES.

Setting tracksViewChange to NO appropriately can solve some performance issues causing high CPU load on iOS (e.g. #1031 , #1176).

The followings are some guidelines relating to tracksViewChange I extracted from Google Maps SDK documentation:

• The UIView can be demanding on resources when tracksViewChanges is set to YES, which may result in increased battery usage. In comparison, a single frame UIImage is static and does not need to be re-rendered.
• Some devices may struggle to render the map if you have many markers on screen, and each marker has its own UIView, and all markers are tracking changes at the same time.
• To decide when to set the tracksViewChanges property, you should weigh up performance considerations against the advantages of having the marker redrawn automatically. For example:
  • If you have a series of changes to make, you can change the property to YES then back to NO.
  • When an animation is running or the contents are being loaded asynchronously, you should keep the property set to YES until the actions are complete.

Please note that this property has no effect if iconView of marker is nil. In other words, I don't think we have any issue with performance if we use default marker.

I have tested on iOS simulator with many use cases like adding many markers on maps, drawing polyline between markers, animating custom markers... and the CPU remains in good health when the map is idle.

Sample usage:

<MapView.Marker
   tracksViewChanges={ false }
   anchor={ { x: 1, y: 1 } }
   coordinate={ {
      longitude: location.longitude,
      latitude: location.latitude,
   } }>
   { this.renderMarker() }
</MapView.Marker>

[PhamBaTho]

UPDATE:
I have just updated this PR a bit. I'm exposing additionally icon property. It's equivalent to icon property of GMSMarker Class.

The image property is great, it can cover most of use cases. Though, I believe that using icon property still has an advantage over image property in term of performance, battery usage... because it doesn't trigger tracksViewChanges which has no effect if iconView is nil.

We still need to have a better naming between icon and existing image to make them less confusing.

[henrikra]

I would refactor this to ternary if statement :)

[gpeal]

+1

[heysailor]

Thanks for this. Could you give a full example of use with the icon property?

[juergengunz]

i discovered that if i use < image > the images are not being displayed on google maps (ios)... when i use the image property it works fine but i am not able to resize the images

[krabbypattified]

+1 would really like to see these optimizations in my app!

[compojoom]

@PhamBaTho - how do I add your changes to an existing project? I tried directly modifying the AirGoogleMaps in the project in xCode, but then I get a compile error:
"Linker command failed with exit code 1"

[gpeal]

@PhamBaTho Is this prop iOS only?

[satori-ytolstoguzov]

Only applicable for iOS. Android don't have issues with that.

[gpeal]

@PhamBaTho Can you give this a more specific prop type?

[satori-ytolstoguzov]

At what stage this PR? I use a fork with tracksViewChanges in my project for at least half a year while waiting to be merged.
@PhamBaTho Are you going to fix comments?

[rborn]

@satori-ytolstoguzov if you could address the comments (if @PhamBaTho won't) I can have a look

[compojoom]

@rborn @satori-ytolstoguzov @PhamBaTho - we've merged this back in November: #1705 and it exposes tracksViewChanges. Shouldn't we close this pull request? Or what is the difference here with pull request 1705?

[satori-ytolstoguzov]

@compojoom It seems merged PR forgot to add that to the docs. Other than that I don't see any differences

[rborn]

@satori-ytolstoguzov could you test if it's working and make a PR for documentation? I'll be here to merge it ❤️

[satori-ytolstoguzov]

@rborn It's a busy day, will look into that on Monday. Also would you consider useful if I add one more bridged property: tracksInfoWindowChanges. It's only for iOS and without it Google Maps SDK ignores all changes in callout after first render.

[pqminh]

i'm testing on maps provider google and default.
rn 0.47.2
react-native-maps 0.17.1 | 0.19.0.
All of them don't working. I'm render maps about 700 markers. When use provider google, it's so slow and lag. And use provider default. It does not slow, but when press on random marker, callout is show behind the markers around...

[christopherdro]

trackViewChange prop has been added here: 78a36ac