Disable compass on MKMapView

I found a solution to your problem, using Mark Amery's idea about traversing the MKMapView instance subviews to find the compass, along with the use of gesture recognition to trigger the removal event.

To find the compass I printed out the description of the views and found that one of the views was an instance of MKCompassView, this was obviously the compass.

I have come up with the following code that should work for you. It checks for a rotation gesture, and then removes the view in method triggered by the gesture event.

I have tested this method and it works well for me:

- (void)viewDidLoad
{
    [super viewDidLoad];

    UIRotationGestureRecognizer *rotateGesture = [[UIRotationGestureRecognizer alloc] initWithTarget:self action:@selector(rotate:)];

    [self.mapView addGestureRecognizer:rotateGesture];
}

-(void)rotate:(UIRotationGestureRecognizer *)gesture
{
    if ([gesture state] == UIGestureRecognizerStateBegan || [gesture state] == UIGestureRecognizerStateChanged) {
        // Gets array of subviews from the map view (MKMapView)
        NSArray *mapSubViews = self.mapView.subviews;

        for (UIView *view in mapSubViews) {
            // Checks if the view is of class MKCompassView
            if ([view isKindOfClass:NSClassFromString(@"MKCompassView")]) {
                // Removes view from mapView
                [view removeFromSuperview];
            }
        }
    }
}

Create a wrapper UIView with the frame you want for your map and clipsToBounds set to YES (or equivalently, Clip Subviews set in Interface Builder). Then put your MKMapView inside that wrapper view, with the y co-ordinate of the map's frame set to, for example, -80, and the height of the map set such that its vertical center is aligned with its parent.

Then the compass will be displayed but you cannot see it, because it is above the top of its parent view - problem solved.

You can disable the compass easily on OSX 10.9 / iOS 9 and later with the showsCompass property.

Objective-C:

mapView.showsCompass = NO;

Swift:

mapView.showsCompass = false

Hiding the compass this way will not prevent a custom MKCompassButton from acting and appearing as normal.

On iOS 8 or earlier, your choices are:

1. Suck it up and live with it.

2. Use a hack, like:

   • position the map to hide the compass offscreen (credit goes to Alex Wien), or

   • walk the view hierarchy of the map to find the view representing the compass and remove it (credit goes to David Topolansky).

3. If you're not rotating the map programatically and it hasn't already been rotated, disable rotation entirely, using

    mapView.rotateEnabled = NO;
   

The compass only shows up when the map is rotated, so by doing this you ensure that the compass is never triggered.

It's not clear to me why Apple waited so long to allow hiding the compass on iOS, and none of the options above are ideal. Pick whichever you think is the least bad in your case.