I'm currently in the process of converting a custom map from using a CATiledLayer scroll view to using custom map tiles in an MKMapView with an MKTileOverlay. Whilst the CATiledLayer-approach generally works well and looks nicer, you get a lot of things for free by using an MKMapView such as rotations which are otherwise very difficult to achieve.
So, I've redrawn my tiles for use with the recommended format of zoom level, column and row numbers, and have them displaying in the map view correctly. Note that my map tiles only cover a small region somewhere; I don't have them for the entire globe.
The first problem I noticed is that there seems to be an issue when you zoom in past the largest zoom level my tiles support. I have tiles all the way to zoom level 20 so I set my MKTileOverlay's maximumZ property to 20. If you zoom in to level 21, the map view no longer requests tiles at all. Any tiles loaded on the way to level 21 still show (albeit pixelated), but if you scroll away it won't load any more tiles, so eventually the map just becomes blank. Ideally, it would fall back to my level 20 tiles and display those instead, or prevent the user from zooming in too far. When I use the CATiledLayer, you could zoom in as much as you want and it would always show the most zoomed in tiles (even if you were zoomed in further than the tiles were 'comfortable' at). Example
I have other minor niggles too:
If you set canReplaceMapContent to true, you can zoom in a lot further (which is fine), but the camera clips the ground if you get too close and I get all sorts of rendering artefacts. Any way to prevent that from happening? Example
Sometimes there are small pixel-sized rendering artefacts between tiles which indicate the tiles aren't quite positioned or sized correctly my the MKMapView. These artefacts don't seem to affect the native maps app; any way to get rid of these? Example
As you pan around when zoomed in, there are a lot of white flashes as tiles are loaded and it's quite obvious. When I used the CATiledLayer, they were loaded in quite smoothly (by animating the opacity) and the lower-zoom levels were already present in the background so it was overall difficult to tell it was even using tiles. Is there any way to load in my tiles more seamlessly? Example
I'm guessing the answer to most of these questions is that it's not possible to fix using MKMapView, which is a shame because I really want to allow the user to change the heading of the map and it seems pretty difficult to do using a standard CATiledLayer!