The Google Maps mini app

Create a new project and call it Simple Map. As we will be using a fairly new API, on the Target Android Devices screen, select API 19 Android 4.4(KitKat) in the Minimum SDK field. Also, on the Add an Activity to mobile screen, select the Google Maps Activity option. We will see that this will save us some work as well as provide us with some helpful information to get our app up and running with less complexity.

Note

Of course, you will also need a device with Android 4.4 or a later version to run this mini app. Furthermore, this app won't run on an emulator.

There are a couple of ways to use Google Maps. We can use an Intent to open the Google Maps app a bit like we did with the camera app, or we can connect directly to the Google Map's servers, which gives us the flexibility of making a better featured app.

We are going to use the second method that we discussed to get map data on our app by directly connecting to Google Map's servers. We will use...