Drawing Library is deprecated and and starting from May 2026 it will no longer be available

[GianlucaBassi]

Description

https://developers.google.com/maps/deprecations?utm_source=devtools&utm_campaign=stable#drawing_library_deprecated_as_of_aug_8_2025

Google Maps has deprecated the Drawing Library, and starting from May 2026 it will no longer be available. How will this affect this library?

Steps to Reproduce

a warning is displayed on console when using drawing-manager that says:

Drawing library functionality in the Maps JavaScript API is deprecated. This API was deprecated in August 2025 and will be made unavailable in a later version of the Maps JavaScript API, releasing in May 2026. For more info, see https://developers.google.com/maps/deprecations.

Environment

• Library version: "@vis.gl/react-google-maps": "^1.5.1"

Logs

Drawing library functionality in the Maps JavaScript API is deprecated. This API was deprecated in August 2025 and will be made unavailable in a later version of the Maps JavaScript API, releasing in May 2026. For more info, see https://developers.google.com/maps/deprecations.

[usefulthink]

I moved this to the discussions / Q&A section, as it's neither a bug-report nor a feature request

We are aware of this, and I personally appreciate the move. I'm not yet sure if this includes removing the "editable" property for the polygon/polyline/circle/... classes, but from reading it, I'd think that they might stay around.
So the "drawing" library would only affect tha DrawingManager class, and we can very much do without that.

The least we will do is to migrate our editor-example to use an external library like the excellent terradraw instead of the now deprecated library. We have to see if there are other ways to make integrating an editor like that easier for users of this library.

[GianlucaBassi]

Thank you for your reply, and I apologize for having duplicated the post both in the discussions and in the bug section.

If I understood correctly—optimistically speaking—it seems that only the drawing manager would need to be modified, while still keeping the polygon rendering and Google Maps integration, right? I ran some tests to migrate using Terradraw, but at the moment it doesn’t support complex polygons (with holes) which I've currently implemented using this library. I just hope the migration won’t turn out to be too costly.

Thanks again for your support, and have a great day.

[usefulthink]

So if the "editable" functionality stays around, we'd only have to re-implement the drawing-manager and the controls and we could still use google.maps.Polygon for this. If that is removed as well, we'll have to look for other libraries that implement this functionality. For now the best choice here seems to be terrdraw, but others might emerge.

The nice thing about terradraw is that its implementation works with all map-renderers, and it looks like it would be good place to add contributions to (for example adding support for polygons with holes).