Android MapView with High Res tiles?

Question

I have created a simple map app that shows the local garage sales in my town. It was simple enough to create and I parse out the Google Maps (html) xml doc that the local paper uses on their google maps mashup on their website.

I have noticed that the Map Tiles used in the MapView class are not as high-res as the tiles used in the real Android Google Maps app (I have a Droid). I have searched the docs and google, but I cannot find any info on this. Actually, I can't even find anyone mentioning this, which surprises me and makes me think I am missing something simple. Is this a case of Google making the APIs available, but at a lower quality, or am I missing some setting that enables higher quality map tiles?

Answer 1

You are not missing any settings. Google is in control over the map tiles that are supplied to the Google Maps add-on for Android. There may be technical or contractual reasons for their current implementation.

Sorry!

Answer 2

Ok, now that I have published my app to the app store it now has high res map tiles. What probably changed the behavior was that I added the <uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion="7"/> tag to the AndroidManifest.xml file.

Other than that all I did was add a new menu icon, publish it and download it from the market instead of installing manually. Hope that helps someone.