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

Question

Hi,

Hi all,

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

I am wondering does all android devices support map API, becuase this api is an optianal api and it is an add-on to the platform.

I am worried that my application won't be able to run on that device.

What I need to know is programatically detect wether the device support map API, and catch the exception and do something else.

Because, using map capability is only one of features of my application, I would like to let those devices that doesn't support map api are still able to download and run my application with out effecting other features of my app.

Any comment or suggestions are welcom

Answer 1

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 2

You are right, some Devices, like Archos 5IT and Some Tablet does not have Google Maps, Android Market, etc...

Here is my Code. BelgianMap is a MapActivity:

            try {
                Intent i = new Intent(InfoGare.this, BelgianMap.class);
                startActivityForResult(i, 0);
            }catch(ActivityNotFoundException e) {
                (Toast.makeText(context, "Google Map not found", Toast.LENGTH_LONG)).show();
            }

But maybe there is an other way to find that at the creation of your application and display a message. That might be better.

Answer 3

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 4

Assuming that the Google Maps API is a package, this is another way of detecting it:

try {
    this.getPackageManager().getPackageInfo("com.google.android.maps", 0);
    text += "It exists!\n";
} catch (NameNotFoundException e) {
    text += "Google Maps isn't installed... \n";
    e.printStackTrace();
}

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 is I specified 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.