ATAK Plugin — Map Depot
Download Map Depot 1.9 (pick the one matching your ATAK-CIV version, sideload, then load it in ATAK's Plugins manager):
- ATAK-CIV 5.6: https://github.com/takwerx/map-depot/releases/download/v1.9/ATAK-Plugin-MapDepot-1.9--5.6.0-civ-release.apk
- ATAK-CIV 5.7: https://github.com/takwerx/map-depot/releases/download/v1.9/ATAK-Plugin-MapDepot-1.9--5.7.0-civ-release.apk
- ATAK-CIV 5.8: https://github.com/takwerx/map-depot/releases/download/v1.9/ATAK-Plugin-MapDepot-1.9--5.8.0-civ-release.apk
All releases: https://github.com/takwerx/map-depot/releases
User guide with screenshots: docs/USER_GUIDE.md (https://github.com/takwerx/map-depot/blob/main/docs/USER_GUIDE.md)
PURPOSE AND CAPABILITIES
Map Depot downloads map data from inside ATAK. Without it, getting elevation or a map source onto a device means a web browser, the Downloads folder, and the Import Manager -- a sequence that is awkward on a phone and impossible with gloves on.
Six kinds of data, each installed into the directory ATAK already scans, so nothing has to be imported by hand afterwards:
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Elevation. DTED2 by state or province. Every cell is verified against a SHA-256 digest before it is installed, because a truncated .dt2 reads as valid to ATAK and silently corrupts line of sight and viewshed. Downloads resume, and a region already partly present fetches only what is missing.
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Streaming base maps. MOBAC map source XML and streaming vector tile configs -- satellite, street, topographic, nautical, and transparent overlays such as BLM roads and trails, FEMA flood hazard zones and current fire perimeters.
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Offline public land vector tiles. US Forest Service vector basemap packages, one per national forest or grassland, fetched directly from ArcGIS Online.
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Offline public land PDFs. The Forest Service's printed map sheets as georeferenced PDFs, which install as image overlays and draw over whatever base map is already in use: ranger district and forest visitor maps, the nine regional maps, the 1:100,000 series and the 1:24,000 FSTopo quads. The two large series are listed nearest the map first, with distance and direction on every row, because nobody knows the name of their quad.
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Incident maps. The operational products a going fire's GIS shop posts to the NIFC archive -- ops, division, air operations, transport, briefing and IR -- browsed by geographic area and fire. Filenames written for a desktop file browser are renamed for a phone screen, keyed to the operational period rather than the plot time, with the original shown underneath.
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Drone IR maps. The same, for infrared flown by uncrewed aircraft and posted to the UAS Wildland Fire Consortium. Flight logs and geodatabases are left out; only georeferenced maps and KMZ overlays are offered.
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Beacon Box maps. FlameMapper's neighborhood pre-plans for the Santa Monica Mountains communities and a few others -- a base map, an aerial, a fire-science sheet and a structure-vulnerability sheet per neighborhood, as GeoPDFs -- browsed by area and neighborhood the way the incident archives are. Their own site cannot be reached from a phone, so they are mirrored on the depot with the author's permission. Maps by FlameMapper.
Any folder in either archive can be pinned to the top of the list, so a crew assigned to a fire reaches it in one tap rather than four.
The catalog is fetched at runtime and cached, so a device that has been to the depot once still shows what it holds when there is no signal. The two incident archives are read live, since what they hold changes through the day.
STATUS
Version 1.9: a downloaded region that inflates to nothing is refused instead of hashed, and the hash is finalized with data in hand (tak.gov's Fortify scan flagged the digest on 1.7 and 1.8). 1.9 also carries the change 1.7 was built for: each ATAK target's APK has its own versionCode, so an MDM can hold all three builds and push each one as an update. 1.7 and 1.8 each went to tak.gov once and were superseded on the scan finding before publication.
Version 1.6. Verified on ATAK-CIV 5.8.0.3 (SDK build) and, as the tak.gov-signed builds, on official ATAK-CIV 5.6.0.18 and 5.8.0.4 -- on the latter the gate, the Move offer, and ATAK starting again afterwards.
1.6 adds the rest of the Forest Service's map sheets, and the Beacon Box maps. The Digital Maps site publishes eight series behind one download gateway, and 1.0 took two of them, the ranger district and forest visitor maps. 1.6 adds the Regional series (18 sheets), the 1:100,000 series (1,841) and the 1:24,000 FSTopo quads (about 18,000), each built from the same index and URL template the site's own Download button uses, and each sheet confirmed with a byte from the gateway before it is cataloged. They share one section with a series chooser, and the two large series sort by distance from the map center and show the nearest 300, saying so, since a list of eighteen thousand quads is not something anyone scrolls. The FSTopo list is fetched the first time it is chosen and kept beside the catalog, so it is bigger than the whole catalog only once.
1.5 responds to a fault in ATAK, not in the plugin: official ATAK-CIV 5.8.0.4 does not start once a vector tile package -- an Offline Public Land Vector Tiles package -- is in its layer catalog. The first import survives; every start after it dies in ATAK's own imagery scan, before any plugin loads, with an AbstractMethodError on TileMatrix.getName(). Measured 2026-09-03 on a Galaxy S22 Ultra, Android 14, with a 20 MB and a 242 MB package; the SDK's own 5.8.0.3 build starts fine with fifteen of them, so this is the official build's obfuscation. Reported to TAK Product Center support with the stack and the reproduction.
So on an official 5.8 build, Map Depot no longer offers those downloads: the section stays, dimmed, and says why. A phone that already has packages is one restart from an ATAK that does not open, and on start Map Depot offers once to move them to atak/imagery.off, which ATAK does not scan; the dialog says that it is the only place this plugin moves a file. The gate is by release, not build number, and lifts when tak.gov ships a fixed ATAK. Everything else -- elevation, streaming base maps, Forest Service map sheets, incident and drone IR maps -- is unchanged, on every ATAK version.
POINT OF CONTACTS
takwerx https://github.com/takwerx/map-depot/issues
PORTS REQUIRED
Outbound TCP 443 (HTTPS) only. The plugin opens no listening ports and accepts no inbound connections.
Hosts contacted:
- The depot itself, which is a preference and not a fixed address. It serves the catalog, the map source files and the elevation cells. It ships pointing at a Cloudflare R2 bucket.
- www.arcgis.com and tiles.arcgis.com, for Forest Service basemap packages, which are fetched from their publisher rather than mirrored.
- data.fs.usda.gov, for Forest Service map sheets of every series.
- ftp.wildfire.gov, for NIFC incident maps. Public, no account.
- uaswfc.org, for UAS Wildland Fire Consortium drone products. Public, no account. Both are preferences rather than fixed addresses, and both are rejected if not HTTPS.
Installing a map source does not itself contact that source's server; ATAK does, when the operator turns the layer on. Which servers those are is visible in the source list before anything is installed.
Non-HTTPS depot addresses are rejected.
EQUIPMENT REQUIRED
An Android device running ATAK-CIV 5.8.0.x, and enough free storage for whatever is downloaded. The plugin checks free space before starting and refuses rather than filling the device.
EQUIPMENT SUPPORTED
No peripherals. No GPS, radio, camera or Bluetooth use.
COMPILATION
Standard ATAK plugin build. Set sdk.path in local.properties to an extracted ATAK-CIV SDK, then:
./gradlew assembleCivRelease
The release build applies minification and ProGuard.
DEVELOPER NOTES
Files are placed where ATAK's own classification puts them, since the directory decides what ATAK treats the file as: map source XML in imagery/mobile/mapsources, streaming configs and vector tile packages at the imagery root, georeferenced PDFs in grg, KMZ in overlays. After a file lands, ATAK is told: imagery through a layer scan, GRGs through the import pipeline, because GRG discovery otherwise runs only at startup.
Removal notifies ATAK before deleting the file. The reverse order leaves a tile reader holding a path that no longer exists.
Downloads stage outside any scanned directory and are moved into place once complete, so ATAK never sees a partly written file and registers a broken layer.
Region, source and package identifiers arrive over the network and become both URL components and filenames, so each is validated against a closed pattern before use, and every written path is checked to be inside its intended directory.
LICENSE
Copyright (C) 2026 Andreas Johansson (TAKWERX).
Map Depot is free software, licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0-or-later), with an additional permission for the TAK Software so that this plugin may be built against the TAK SDK, loaded into ATAK and distributed without the AGPL reaching into ATAK itself.
You may run it, study it, modify it, and share it -- for any purpose, commercial or not, with no fee and no per-seat license. What the AGPL adds over a permissive license is a guarantee that it stays free: modify Map Depot and pass it on, and the people you pass it to are owed the complete corresponding source of your version under the same license. Nobody can take this, close it, and sell it back to the emergency-services community.
If you only install and use Map Depot, this obligation never touches you. Running it, in any agency, on any number of devices, triggers nothing.
Scope. The AGPL covers Map Depot's own code. It does not change the license of the TAK Software, which stays under the TAK Software License Agreement, and it does not cover the parts of this repository scaffolded from the TAK-SDK plugin template -- those are listed under Provenance in LICENSE-EXCEPTION.md. No SDK binary is distributed here.
Contributions are welcome -- see CONTRIBUTING.md for the contribution terms and the Contributor License Agreement.