Tag Archives: Maps API

Always-on Android Wear apps with the Google Maps API

Originally posted on the Geo Developers Blog

Posted by Ankur Kotwal, Developer Advocate

Some Android Wear apps are most useful when they are always available to the user, even at a glance. Now, with Google Play Services 8.1, the Google Maps Android API supports ambient mode, the API that provides always-on capabilities. In ambient mode, the map adjusts its style to provide a simplified, low-color rendering of the map. All markers, objects, and UI controls disappear, keeping the map on the screen while letting the user know that it is not currently ready to accept user input. An important advantage is the camera position and zoom level are retained, thus keeping the user’s context within the map.

The screenshot below show how maps appear in interactive mode and in ambient mode.

To implement ambient mode in your maps, follow these steps:

  1. Set your your targetSDKVersion to 22 or higher
  2. Add the following dependencies to build.gradle for your app to add the wearable support library. 
     dependencies {
    compile 'com.google.android.support:wearable:1.2.0'
    provided 'com.google.android.wearable:wearable:1.0.0'
 }
  3. Add the wearable shared library entry into the wearable app manifest: 
    <application>
  <uses-library android:name="com.google.android.wearable"
                android:required="false" />
  ...
</application>
  4. Add the WAKE_LOCK permission to the handheld and wearable app manifest: 
    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.WAKE_LOCK" />
  5. Have your Activity extend WearableActivity. This will provide the overrides that notify your app when the wearable enters, exits and provides screen updates in ambient mode.
  6. In the onCreate() method of your activity, call the setAmbientEnabled() method. This tells the framework that the app should enter ambient mode rather than returning to the watch face.
  7. Set your map to support ambient mode. You can do this by setting the attribute map:ambientEnabled="true" in the activity's XML layout file, or programmatically by setting GoogleMapOptions.ambientEnabled(true). This informs the API to pre-load necessary map tiles for ambient mode.
  8. When the activity switches to ambient mode, the system calls the onEnterAmbient() method in your wearable activity. Override onEnterAmbient() and call MapFragment.onEnterAmbient() or MapView.onEnterAmbient(). The map changes to a non-interactive, low-color rendering of the map.
  9. When in ambient mode, your app can update the display every minute by overriding onUpdateAmbient(). If you need more frequent updates, check out this guide.
  10. When the activity leaves ambient mode, the system calls the onExitAmbient() method in your wearable activity. Override onExitAmbient() and call MapFragment.onExitAmbient() or MapView.onExitAmbient(). The map returns to the normal rendering and is now ready to accept user input.

With always-on maps on Android Wear, you can now show maps at a glance. For more information on these APIs check out the documentation and the sample code.

Fitness Apps on Android Wear

Posted by Joshua Gordon, Developer Advocate

Go for a run, improve your game, and explore the great outdoors with Android Wear! Developers are creating a diverse array of fitness apps that provide everything from pace and heart rate while running, to golf tips on your favorite course, to trail maps for hiking. Let’s take a look features of the open and flexible Wear platform they use to create great user experiences.

Always-on stats

If your app supports always-on, you’ll never have to touch or twist your watch to activate the display. Running and want to see your pace? Glance at your wrist and it’s there! Runtastic, Endomondo, and MapMyRun use always-on to keep your stats visible, even in ambient mode. When it’s time for golf, I use Golfshot. Likewise, Golfshot uses always-on to continuously show yardage to the hole, so I never have to drop my club. Check out the doc, DevByte, and code sample to learn more.

Runtastic automatically transitions to ambient mode to conserve battery. There, it reduces the frequency at which stats are updated to about once per 10 seconds.

Maps, routes, and markers

It's encouraging to see how much ground I’ve covered when I go for a run or ride! Using the Maps API, you can show users their route, position, and place markers on the map they can tap to see more info you provide. All of this functionality is available to you using the same Maps API you’ve already worked with on Android. Check out the doc, DevByte, code sample, and blog post to learn more.

Endomondo tracks your route while your run. You can pan and zoom the map.

Google Fit

Google Fit is an open platform designed to make it easier to write fitness apps. It provides APIs to help with many common tasks. For example, you can use the Recording API to estimate how many steps the user has taken and how many calories they've burned. You can make that data to your app via the History API, and even access it over the web via REST, without having to write your own backend. Now, Google Fit can store data from a wide variety of exercises, from running to weightlifting. Check out the DevByte and code samples to learn more.

Bluetooth Low Energy: pair with your watch

With the latest release of Android Wear, developers can now pair BLE devices directly with the Wearable. This is a great opportunity for all fitness apps -- and especially for running -- where carrying both a phone and the Wearable can be problematic. Imagine if your users could pair their heart rate straps or bicycle cadence sensors directly to their Wear device, and leave their phones at home. BLE is now supported by all Wear devices, and is supported by Google Fit. To learn more about it, check out this guide and DevByte.

Pack light with onboard GPS

When I’m running, carrying both a phone and a wearable can be a bit much. If you’re using an Android Wear device that supports onboard GPS, you can leave your phone at home! Since not all Wear devices have an onboard GPS sensor, you can use the FusedLocationProviderApi to seamlessly retrieve GPS coordinates from the phone if not available on the wearable. Check out this handy guide for more about detecting location on Wear.

RunKeeper supports onboard GPS if it’s available on your Wearable.

Sync data transparently

When I’m back home and ready for more details on my activity, I can see them by opening the app on my phone. My favorite fitness apps transparently sync data between my Wearable and phone. To learn more about syncing data between devices, watch this DevByte on the DataLayer API.

Next Steps

Android Wear gives you the tools and training you need to create exceptional fitness apps. To get started on yours, visit developer.android.com/wear and join the discussion at g.co/androidweardev.

A Closer Look at Google Play services 7.5

Posted by Ian Lake, Developer Advocate

At Google I/O, we announced the rollout of Google Play services 7.5 that deliver new capabilities and optimizations to devices across the Android ecosystem. Google Play services ensures that you can build on the latest features from Google for your users, with the confidence that those services will work properly on Android 2.3 and higher devices.

You’ll find the addition of Smart Lock for Passwords, Instance ID, new APIs for Google Cloud Messaging and Google Cast, as well as access to the Google Maps API on Android Wear devices.

Smart Lock for Passwords

Typing in a password, particularly on a mobile device, is never a pleasant experience. In many cases, your users have already logged in on the web or another device - shouldn’t your login process know that? Smart Lock for Passwords builds on the Chrome Password Manager, adding a new CredentialsApi API and UI on Android to retrieve saved credentials as part of your login process and saving new credentials for later use on other Android devices and any Chrome browser. Both password-based and Identity Provider (IDP, like Google Sign-In) credentials are supported. Keep your users logged in as they move between and to new devices; don’t let them drop off, get frustrated, or end up with multiple accounts.

Learn more about Smart Lock for Passwords on the developer site.

Instance ID, Identity, and Authorization

Instance ID (IID) allows you to retrieve a unique identifier for every app instance, providing a mechanism to authenticate and authorize actions, even if your app does not have user registration and accounts. For example, this allows you to uniquely determine which app instance is sending a request from by including the Instance ID token. We’ve also made it easy to handle edge cases to ensure that you’ll have valid Instance ID tokens.

Google Cloud Messaging

Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) gives developers a battery efficient mechanism for sending information to your users as well as send upstream messages from a device to your server.

Google Cloud Messaging and InstanceID

Previously, GCM used a unique registration ID to refer to each device - while these IDs will continue to work, you can now utilize Instance ID tokens for GCM, gaining all of the advantages of InstanceID around handling error cases. Instance ID tokens are fully compatible with user notifications, allowing you to send notifications to all of a user's devices.

Topic based subscriptions

You’ll also get another new feature for switching to InstanceID with GCM - topic based subscriptions! This makes it easy to publish a message to exactly the right audience and have GCM handle all the heavy lifting of sending to all subscribed instances. Your app can subscribe to multiple topics, allowing you to create any set of topics needed to best handle your app’s messaging needs.

Receiving messages with GCM

Of course, just subscribing to receive messages is only half the battle: receiving GCM messages can now be done using a GcmReceiver and a subclass of GcmListenerService. These two classes make it easy to help your app reliably process messages, even when the device is awakened from deep sleep.

GCM Network Manager

Applications often need to sync data with their servers when new information is available. In GCM we refer to this model as “send to sync”. We made this task much simpler with the introduction of the GCM Network Manager APIs, which handles many of the common implementation patterns such as waiting for network connectivity, device charging, network retries, and backoff. GcmNetworkManager will schedule your background tasks when it is most appropriate and it can batch multiple tasks together for efficiency and battery savings, even utilizing the JobScheduler APIs for best performance on Android 5.0+ devices. With support for both one-off tasks and periodic tasks, this API serves as a flexible framework for many different types of operations.

App Invites Beta

Now in beta, App Invites is new functionality for both Android and iOS that provides a standard UI for users to invite their contacts to install your app and optionally deep link specifically to selected content, using your users’ device and Google-wide contacts as a source to drive referrals to increase the reach of your app.

With the ability to send invites via SMS or email, this provides a great mechanism to organically grow your user base, give your users a consistent way to share your app with exactly who would like it, and track how effective your invites are.

With App Invites, our goal is to take the hard work out of building user referral and onboarding flows, so that you can focus on your core app experience. Learn more about App Invites on the developer site!

Google Cast

Google Cast is a technology that lets you easily cast content from your mobile device or laptop right to your TV or speakers. With the new ability to use remote display on any Android, iOS, or Chrome app, better media support, better game support, we hope your Google Cast experience is better than ever!

Remote Display API

We are making it easy for mobile developers to bring graphically intensive apps or games to Google Cast receivers with Google Cast Remote Display APIs for Android and iOS. The new Remote Display API allows you to build a tailored, integrated second screen experience, without requiring an identical mirroring of content between mobile devices and the Google Cast device.

Learn more about Remote Display on the Google Cast Developers Site!

Autoplay and Queuing APIs

Playing single media items on Chromecast has been something RemoteMediaPlayer (or CastCompanionLibrary’s VideoCastController) has been doing well for some time. With this release, RemoteMediaPlayer is gaining a full media queue and support for autoplay for a seamless media playback experience. This ensures that all connected devices can easily maintain a synchronized queue of upcoming media items, opening up new possibilities of creating collaborative Google Cast media experiences.

Game Manager APIs for Google Cast

Bringing your game to Google Cast can make for a great multiplayer experience, using a mobile device as a game controller and the TV to display the action. To make it easier to send messages and state changes to all connected clients and the cast receiver, Google Play services 7.5 introduces the GameManagerClient and the Game Manager APIs for Google Cast, available for Android, iOS, Chrome, and for receivers.

Android Wear

Watches are great devices for telling time. But what if in addition showing you when you are, watches could easily show you where you are? With the new release, you can now use the familiar Maps APIs on Android Wear devices:

This makes it possible to display fully interactive maps, as well as lite mode maps, directly on Android Wear devices. You’ll be able to scroll and zoom interactive maps, show the user’s current location, and more. Check out the full list of supported features in the developer documentation and check out all the details on the Geo Developers blog.

Google Fit

Google Fit is an open platform designed to make building fitness apps, whether that means retrieving sensor data like current location and speed, collecting and storing activity data, or automatically aggregating that data into a single view of the user’s fitness data.

You’ll now be able to use the RecordingApi for gathering estimated distance traveled and calories burned data, making it available to your app and other Google Fit enabled apps via the HistoryApi.

Being active can take many forms. While some activities are easily measured in terms of steps or distance, strength training is measured in terms of type, resistance and repetitions. This type of data can now be stored in Google Fit via new support for a large number of workout exercises, helping users build a complete view of their activity.

SDK is now available!

Google Play services 7.5 is now available: get started with updated SDK now!

To learn more about Google Play services and the APIs available to you through it, visit the Google APIs for Android site.