Chapter  22

Exploring Maps and Location-based Services

In this chapter, we are going to talk about maps and location-based services. Location-based services form one of the more exciting pieces of the Android SDK. This portion of the SDK provides APIs to let application developers display and manipulate maps, obtain real-time device-location information, and take advantage of other exciting features.

The location-based services facility in Android sits on two pillars: the mapping and location-based APIs. Each of these APIs is isolated with respect to its own package. For example, the mapping package is com.google.android.maps, and the location package is android.location. The mapping APIs in Android provide facilities for you to display a map ...

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