In today’s programming tutorial, I’ll show you how easy it is to use OpenStreetMap maps in your app instead of default Apple maps. There are many reasons why you might want to do this: for example, the OpenStreetMap project is being built by a huge community of contributors and therefore the maps are really detailed; or, you might just want to give your users the option to use whatever maps they prefer.

Prior to iOS 7, it was also possible to use different map tiles than those that MapKit provides, but it required fairly large amount of code and work. Luckily, the map kit team introduced a really simple way to do this in iOS 7: new classes MKTileOverlay and MKTileOverlayRenderer. If you are a registered iOS developer, I highly suggest you watch the session 304 of WWDC ’13 here (requires ADC login). The introduction of it starts at 22:09.
You probably came here to see the code, so I’ll skip the explanation for now.
And… here it is!