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Create a new Map Version

A published Map is frozen, so changing it means publishing a new Map Version: a copy you can edit, which becomes the newest version of the same Map when it is approved. The one that is live stays live the whole time.

(A Map Version is a version of your map. It has nothing to do with the version of the FriendTrack app, which updates itself through the app store.)

Do it

  1. Open the Map. Its panel offers 📝 Create New Version, with the reason beside it: it creates an editable draft copy to make changes, and the published version stays live.
  2. Press it. You get a draft carrying everything — the image, every Anchor Point, every Area of Interest, floors, names, icons.
  3. Make your changes in the draft. It behaves exactly like an unpublished Map: nothing is reviewed, nothing is visible to anybody else, and you can take as long as you like.
  4. Submit it for approval, the same way as the first time — submit for review. While it is Pending, the published Map is still the one people install.
  5. When it is approved, it becomes the newest Map Version. Installers of the older one are offered the update and each chooses.

What happens to the live Map while you work

Nothing. It stays in the catalog, stays installable, and everybody using it carries on. That is the whole point of the mechanism: there is never a window in which the venue has no Map.

The panel is explicit about which is which — it distinguishes the published version from your draft, and says when you have made changes since publishing.

What happens to people on the older Map Version

They keep it, indefinitely, until they choose to update. Nothing expires and nothing degrades. The detail — including what a Group with mixed versions experiences — is what happens to people on the old version.

What to put in one Map Version

Batch your changes. Each new Map Version is a review round and an update prompt for every installer, so five small corrections published separately is five reviews and five prompts people learn to dismiss.

Worth publishing promptly:

  • Calibration corrections. People are in the wrong place until they update, so this is the one to hurry.
  • A layout that has genuinely moved — a stage in a different field this year.

Worth waiting and batching:

  • Renaming Areas, adding icons, tidying descriptions, adding Areas nobody has asked for.

One thing you cannot do

You cannot version a Map Version that has already been superseded. New versions only ever come off the newest one, so the chain stays a line rather than a tree. If you have published v1 then v2, the draft has to come from v2 — there is no way back to branch from v1, and the editor will not offer it.

A worked example

A ski area Map published in December. In February a new chairlift opens.

  1. You open the Map and use 📝 Create New Version.
  2. In the draft you replace the image with the updated piste map, re-place the two Anchor Points whose features moved on the new picture, check the error figure is still Good, and draw an Area for the new lift queue.
  3. You also take the chance to rename an Area that people had been confused by. Both changes ride in the same version rather than two.
  4. You submit. The December Map stays live for the week the review takes, which is the middle of half-term.
  5. Approved. Skiers are offered the update; those who take it get the new lift, and those who do not keep a working Map of everything else.