Correct order display of UIAnnotationView

In which order do you create the arrow wrt the labels ?

I tried every orders

Currently, for each map pan, I remove all annotations which become out of the screen, add all annotation that enter the screen, and keep unchanged the annotations which stays.

But for testing purpose I also tried a simpler implementation : by removing all annotations every time, and 1) adding first the arrows, then the labels, or 2) first the labels and then the arrows, the result is exacly the same : arrows are always above the labels.

I suppose this is MapKit OpenGL optimisations, and my arrows (polylines rendered with UIBezierPath) would be rendered before my harbors (UIImage + UILabel)

Have you looked at what overlays could do in this case ?

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/mapkitjs/mapkit/overlays

Or look at these 2 threads:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1267600/adding-annotations-to-mkmapview-in-specific-layer-order

and even better, this one, to subclass and define layer order.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1145238/how-to-define-the-order-of-overlapping-mkannotationviews/1213450#1213450

Hi, thanks for your answer.

Your suggestion about using overlay is very interesting. I haven't tried yet, but i'm afraid that overlay element size depends of the map zoom level. I'll check that.

Your other links are all about bringing to front or sending to back the MKAnnotationViews from their unique superview, like

annotationView.superview?.bringSubviewToFront(annotationView)

Maybe it worked in 2009 (these are pretty old links), but il does not work anymore. It think mapkit is doing its secret sauce in rendering annotation views.

I would love hear some Apple developers on this point.

Year 2021 and this is still mystery. On iOS 14 there is zPriority on annotation view, but what if I want to be backward compatible with older os?