How to detect an android device whether it supports google maps API

Question

I am currently developing an android application uses Google map API.

I am wondering do all android devices support map API, becuase this api is an optinal api and i

Answer 1

By using adb, To prints all system libraries:

adb shell cmd package list libraries

If your device supports Google Maps, you'll see this line:

library:com.google.android.maps

Answer 2

If you are using googlemaps in your application you should include the following in your manifest.xml inside the application tags

 <uses-library android:name="com.google.android.maps" />

This will either prevent a user from installing your application or seeing it in the market, not sure which, maybe both.

Answer 3

The optional API just applies to the emulator as far as I know. The 2 different version of the API levels is only for the emulator, real devices should all have the maps API I think

Answer 4

This worked for me:

Use the (undocumented?) uses-library android:name="com.google.android.maps" android:required="false" in the manifest. This will allow installation in a maps-api non-supported device.

Then check this out: http://android-developers.blogspot.com.ar/2009/01/can-i-use-this-intent.html

You can still have all your maps-api code intact in the app (no need for 2 versions), just code your UI to prevent running it. (In my case I greyed-out a preference). As noted, technique outlined above effectively predicts something that won't work, and allows you to respond (no FCs), instead of just reacting to a problem.

Answer 5

Thanks for all your guys help! all of your suggestion are useful to me!!

I wrote a simple application that is able to deployed on None-Google-Map API emulator, and detect presence of Google API problematically.

What I did was I specifying <uses-library android:name="com.google.android.maps" android:required="false" />

(but android "required" attribute only works for 2.1 and doesn't work for 1.6. I will need to find out why. cos when I had look at the documentation, it says that this attributed supported by 1.6)

Thus, I am able to deploy the application on to emulator.

Secondly, I created a map activity which is called HelloMaps In my main activity

try{
     mapActivity = new Intent(TestApp.this, HelloMaps.class); 
     startActivityForResult(mapActivity, 0); 
}catch(NoClassDefFoundError e){
(Toast.makeText(TestApp.this, "Google Map API not found", Toast.LENGTH_LONG)).show(); 
}

This will catch the exception and tell me that the device couldn't run map activity.

Answer 6

I have used following solution in addition to described

<uses-library android:name="com.google.android.maps" android:required="false"/>

in another answers:

public void mapClick(View view)
{
    try
    {
        // check if Google Maps is supported on given device
        Class.forName("com.google.android.maps.MapActivity");

        this.startActivity(new Intent(this, MyMapActivity.class));
    }
    catch (Exception e)
    {
        e.printStackTrace();
        UIUtils.showAlert(this, R.string.google_maps_not_found);
    }
}