Adding a Google Map to Android Application

I’m documenting here my first successful crack at adding a google map to an android application. Below are the steps I followed, with prerequisite steps of having the Android SDK and Eclipse installed, and being all set up for Android development (documented here).

1. Created a new Android project
2. Navigated to Help->Install New Software in Eclispe.
3. Added a new source with URL http://dl.google.com/eclipse/plugin/3.7
4. Selected all possible options (why not, right?) to have access to the google API in general.
5. This install took about 5 minutes, all told, and I had to restart Eclipse
6. In my new project, I navigated to project properties and went to Android, where I selected (the newly available) “Google APIs”
7. From here, I got excited and ran my project, and was treated to a heaping helping of fail in the form of an error message saying that I needed API version 9 and my device was running API version 8 (Android 2.2.1). I fixed this by opening the manifest and changing the uses-sdk tag’s android:minSdkVersion to 8. Then when I ran, I had hello world on my phone. (Later, when all was working, I just deleted this line altogether, which eliminated an annoying build warning)
8. With that in place, I added the node

   to my application node in the same manifest XML file.

9. Then, as I discovered in an earlier post, I had to add

10. From there, I followed the steps in this tutorial, starting at number 4.
11. One thing to watch for in the tutorial is that you should add the lines about the map view after all boilerplate code already in onCreate or mapView will be set null and you’ll dereference it.

With all of this, if you ignore the bit about the API key, what you’ll wind up with is a map with no overlay on your phone. That is, it looks like everything is normal, including zoom icons, but the map hasn’t loaded yet. This was the state I found myself in when I decided that I’d take the last step and get the API key. This was not at all trivial.

I understand that if you’re familiar with the concept of signing software for distribution in app market, this probably makes sense. But, if this isn’t something you’ve been doing, it comes straight out of left field and, what’s more, there was no real place where how to do this was described in any detail. So, I’ll offer that here.

1. Navigate to your JAVA_HOME bin folder (wherever your java and javac executables are)
2. Run the command

   keytool -v -list {keystore}

   . The -v is important because this gives yo all the fingerprints (the default is SHA1, which won’t help you in the next step — you want MD5). The keystore is going to be debug.keystore, which is what your device uses for signing when you’re developing and not releasing. For me, this was located in C:\documents and settings\erik\.android on this win XP machine (YMMV with the directory)

3. What you’ve done here is generated a fingerprint for the developer debug keystore that Eclipse automatically uses. This is fine until you want to deploy the app to an app store, at which time you’ll have to jump through a few more hoops.
4. Take the key that this spits out and copy it (right click and select “mark” in cmd window), and paste it into the “my certificate’s MD5 fingerprint” text box here: http://code.google.com/android/maps-api-signup.html
5. This will give you both your fingerprint, and an example layout XML to use in your Android map project
6. Copy this into your project’s layout, following the guide for naming the attribute that contains the key. (That is, find your layout’s com.google.android.maps.MapView node and set its android:apiKey attribute to the same as the one on the page you’re looking at.
7. Once you’ve got this, you can paste it into your map layout, run your app (phone or emulator) and get ready to start navigating to your heart’s content

After I went through all this, I found this clearly superior tutorial: http://mobiforge.com/developing/story/using-google-maps-android. This is really great for getting started, complete with code samples and starting as simple as possible.