There are a plethora of amazing APIs built right into the core operating system to take advantage of when developing for Android, and Google Play services (GPS) allows for the addition of even more unique experiences.

What is Google Play services?

GPS is a continuously updated library from Google that enables adding new features to Android apps without waiting for a new operating system release. One of the most well known feature of GPS is Google Maps, which allows developers to add rich, interactive maps to their apps. Since GPS is a separate library that’s updated regularly, there are always new APIs to explore. The most recent release, 7.5, has tons of great new features.

Getting Started with Google Play services

In previous releases of GPS, everything was bundled into one huge NuGet and Component Library to be added to an app. However, this has now changed and each API has been broken into its own unique NuGet package, so you can pick and choose which features to add to an app without increasing app size or worrying about linking. To get started with GPS, simply open the NuGet Package Manager and search for “Xamarin Google Play services”. A list of new packages available for Android apps will be displayed, and you can choose to install the “All” package or select only the ones you want.

To learn more about the changes to the GPS packages and APIs, Xamarin Software Engineer Jon Dick’s blog post on the topic is a great place to start.

Once you have GPS installed, you can take advantage of tons of new APIs for your Android app, including some that I’m particularly excited about, outlined below.

Google Fit

Developers of fitness apps will be excited to see that Google Fit has been updated with a brand new Recording and History API that enables gathering estimated distance traveled and calories burned in a simple API. This is in addition to the other APIs already available to discover sensors, collect activity data, and track a user’s fitness.

Android Wear Maps

Until now, there wasn’t a good way to show users their current location on a map on their Android Wear devices. The latest release, however, brings the entire Maps API to Android Wear, including support for interactive maps and non-interactive maps in Lite mode.

Google Cloud Messaging Updates

One of my favorite features of GPS has to be Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) for sending push notifications to Android devices, and there have been several updates to GCM in Google Play services 7.5. The new Instance ID tokens enable a single identity for your app across its entire lifetime instead of having a unique registration ID for each device. This simplifies the process of sending push notifications to all of the devices on which an app is installed.

So Much More

These aren’t the only additions to GPS with this release. Several new APIs have been added, including App Invites, Smart Lock for Passwords, and updates to Google Cast. The full list can be found in in the Google Play services documentation.