Amazon Location Service maps now let you choose which POIs show up, and how many!

Hey friends, it's Shii! Today I found a happy little update around Amazon Location Service's maps, so let me tell you about it right away!

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

In AWS's What's New, Amazon Location Service announced that you can now filter the POIs (Points of Interest, the shops and spots shown on a map) by category and by density. Amazon Location Service is a fully managed service that helps you add maps, place search, routing, and tracking to your applications, backed by high-quality geospatial data.

With this update, you get two new query parameters on the GetStyleDescriptor API: poi-categories and poi-density. Together they let you control, server-side, which kinds of POIs show up on your map and how many of them appear.

The story so far

Until now, every map style rendered all POI categories at once. If you wanted to narrow things down for your use case, your only option was a client-side workaround tied to internal style layer identifiers, a fragile approach since it depended on implementation details that could change on AWS's side at any time.

What changes

Pass an allowlist of categories, like Food & Drink, Transit, or Accommodations, to the poi-categories parameter, and Amazon Location Service returns a style descriptor that includes only those categories. The poi-density parameter lets you tune how many POIs show up overall.

Because the filtering happens entirely server-side, there's no extra work required on the client. Web, mobile, and headless server-side renderers all get a correctly filtered map without any additional code.

Here are a few examples of what this unlocks:

• A property-listing site can surface only Accommodations-related POIs
• A logistics fleet app can show only Transit and fuel-related POIs
• A tourist map can highlight sights and Food & Drink spots

Being able to control exactly what shows up, and what doesn't, with just an API call is a small thing, but I think it's genuinely useful.

Dive Deep

The original announcement also lists the regions where this is available right now:

• US East (Ohio)
• US East (N. Virginia)
• US West (Oregon)
• Asia Pacific (Mumbai)
• Asia Pacific (Sydney)
• Asia Pacific (Tokyo)
• Canada (Central)
• Europe (Frankfurt)
• Europe (Ireland)
• Europe (London)
• Europe (Spain)
• Europe (Stockholm)
• South America (São Paulo)
• AWS GovCloud (US-West)

The announcement doesn't go into the exact parameter value format or pricing, so if you want the details, check out the Map features page in the Amazon Location Service Developer Guide.

Wrap-up

• Amazon Location Service now lets you filter map POIs by category and density
• The GetStyleDescriptor API gained two new query parameters: poi-categories (an allowlist of categories) and poi-density (how many POIs to show)
• Previously you got every category, or had to hack around it client-side using internal layer IDs; now it's all handled server-side
• Property listings, logistics, tourism, and more can all show only the POIs that matter for their use case
• This one's for developers building maps with Amazon Location Service, especially if you're building something use-case specific