Overview

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Introduction

The Places SDK for Android lets you to build location-aware apps that respond contextually to the local businesses and other places near the user's device. This means you can build rich apps based on places that mean something to the user, to complement the straightforward geographic-based services offered by the Android location services.

Concepts

The following interfaces provide the primary entry points to the Places SDK for Android:

  • Places provides programmatic access to Google's database of local place and business information, as well as the device's current place.
  • Autocomplete provides pre-made widgets to return place predictions in response to user search queries.

A place is defined as a physical space that has a name. Another way of thinking about a place is that it's anything you can find on a map. Examples include local businesses, points of interest, and geographic locations. In the API, a place is represented by the Place interface. It includes information such as the name of the place and its address, geographical location, place ID, phone number, place type, website URL, and more.

Choose your SDK version

The Places SDK for Android features that are available in your app are determined by a combination of the SDK version number (e.g. 3.5.0) that you specify in your app configuration, the APIs enabled on your API key, and how you initialize your app. For more information on the differences between the Places SDK for Android and the Places SDK for Android (New), see Choose your SDK version.

Your first task is to decide which SDK to use. This is true if you are a new customer or an existing customer already using the SDK. To learn the key differences between the two SDK versions, see Choose your SDK version.

Pricing for each SDK version

The SDK version that you enable controls the pricing for your usage of the SDK. Places SDK for Android (New) supports a simplified pricing model so that you only pay for the data that you use. For detailed pricing information for both the Places SDK for Android and the Places SDK for Android (New), see Usage and Billing.

API overview

Help your customers explore where they are and what's around them:

  • Place Autocomplete automatically fills in the name and/or address of a place as users type.
  • Current Place returns a list of places where the user's device is last known to be located along with an indication of the relative likelihood for each place.
  • Place Details return and display more detailed information about a place.
  • Text Search returns places based on a search text string. Text Search is part of Places SDK for Android (New).
  • Place Photos returns high-quality images of a place.
  • Place IDs store the unique ID for one or more places for retrieval of place information on demand.

Policies and Terms

All applications that use the Places SDK for Android must adhere to the requirements described in the Google Maps Platform Terms of Service, Usage and Billing, and Displaying Attributions.