Android has officially received support for Google’s Place API which allows developers to equip their apps with better location pickers which enables users to to specify their location using actual place names rather than coordinates. Several features come with the new API that will undoubtedly prove useful to app developers everywhere, Android or iOS, as the company has launched a beta program of iOS as well.
Google has launched its Places API for Android and opened a beta program for it on iOS today. It will allow developers to add better location pickers to their apps, so users can specify where they are with real place names instead of latitudes and longitudes. The new API brings a range of features including a place picker in the form of a drop-in UI widget, autocomplete support for searches, the ability to determine the place where a user is currently located, and detailed information about each spot. In addition, it also allows users to add new places to Google’s database of more than 100 million locations. Google’s Places API and associated JavaScript library has been available for Web apps for some time now, but the new APIs will help developers easily add their functionality into native mobile apps. You can hop over to this Google Developers site to find documentation, code samples and demos for the Android API, or sign up for iOS public beta on this page.