Google maps standard on Android phone?

This may be a st开发者_开发知识库upid question, but here it goes. Is Google Maps a standard (and pre-installed) application on every android phone? I am writing a map application and using a mapview to plot several points near a given zip code. I got that working. If Google maps is pre-installed on every phone, then i can just theoretically send Google maps my two points and it will take care of the rest, correct? Or will i have to go old school and program all driving directions myself?

How are you distributing your application? If you are distributing it via the official Android Market, its pretty safe to assume Google Maps will be present. Any device without Google Maps, probably doesn't have Google's seal of approval and won't have the market app either.

MapView works on all Android phones as far as I'm aware.

But some other features are NOT included on devices that haven't got the Google seal of approval (e.g. 10" tablets prior to Honeycomb):

• The Google Maps application
• The Geocoder class (for converting between place names and latitude/longitude locations)

To be clear - there are devices out there where the MapView user interface element works, but Google Maps itself (the separate application) is not present. And when that app is missing, some of the mapping features in the OS are also scaled back (I know Geocoder is, possibly others).

If you can't use Google Maps for your application, look at OpenStreetMap as there are libraries to render OSMs in Android apps, and that'll work on anything. See here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Android

Android is open-source and includes the core stuff, but some features are Google's proprietary code, and are not part of the Android open source project. So on devices that only use the open-source features, you won't get everything.

Having said all that, I would expect the vast majority of Android devices DO include what you need. If you need to target Android phones without the Google code on them, I suggest you buy one - as they're usually crap they're usually cheap!

Btw, when you send those directions to Google Maps, you use a URL (intent) so if Maps is present it'll pick it up, but if not it'll go to the web so likely to work on some devices anyway.

I suspect this isn't much of an issue for you.

Google Maps is pre-installed on just about every current version of Android. If it's not 100% it's pretty close. You can see where else Maps can be run here.

You can launch an Intent that will open Google Maps. Check out the Intent list for Google Apps.