MapView doesn't display tiles - debugging strategies?

Question

There are a number of posts (both here & elsewhere) about why a MapView might not be displaying tile info (personally, I've liked http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1809507/android-hello-mapview-tutorial-map-tiles-do-not-load, but there are other good ones, too).

My question is slightly different: I'm not getting tile info to show up (on my handset or in the emulator), and I'm looking for advice on what to try in order to debug this problem. As far as I can tell I've correctly located my debug.keystore, and used the Java JDK keytool to get the signature from it, which I then plugged into the Google web page, and then plugged THAT key back into my XML file. The app runs ok, it just doesn't display any tiles.

I was hoping that if I did something wrong here I'd see an error message in, say, logcat (or an exception that Eclipse might catch) that would confirm that this is the source of the error.

So here's my question - what would y'all recommend someone try in order to figure out what the actual problem is?

Answer 1

Step #1: See if the built in Maps application works. If it does not, you have problems with the device.

Step #2: Triple-check that you have the INTERNET permission correctly defined.

Step #3: Triple-check that you have a proper API key.

Step #4: Return to Step #1. :-)

I have many sample Maps applications scattered throughout my books -- here is the simplest one.