Google Play Services

Google offers APIs that allow you to access many of its popular services, including Location, Maps, Analytics, Advertising, Identity, and more. In this course, you’ll learn how to access these services, and build better apps!

Why Take This Course?
If you want to be a professional Android developer, you'll need to know how to enhance, tailor and monetize your apps, and to track their performance.

This course includes lessons on:

**Location and Context**: Vitally important for building the best possible mobile app, Location and Context allows your app behavior to change based on location. In this course, you’ll learn how to do this with the Fused Location Provider, which gives you much more than simple GPS. You’ll also learn about Activity recognition, which allows you to tailor your app to what the user is doing. Finally, you’ll learn about Geofencing, and how location services work alongside geofences to allow you to build apps that could be used for augmented reality!

**Analytics**: Where in the world are people using your app? Which activities do they use most? How do they navigate through your app? Take this course to learn how to add code to your mobile app to send usage data to Google Analytics, and answer questions like these. This course also covers how to use Google Tag Manager to send updated information to your app without needing to redeploy the APK, and how to use Tag Manager to manage all your Google Analytics tags.

**Ads**: Learn how to monetize apps using Google's AdMob to display banner and interstitial ads!

**Mapping**: Everybody uses maps, and many people love them. Maps on mobile devices have changed the world over the last few years. They not only provide a local map in your pocket, but also a map of the entire world, down to street level, and even a 3D flyaround of many major cities. In this course, you’ll learn everything from how to add maps to your app, to how to build a virtual hike down the Grand Canyon!

**Identity**: Many apps need to establish the user’s Identity in order to customize the app to the user’s desires, save their data, allow them to identify themselves in social circles and countless other scenarios. Learn how to use Google’s Identity Platform to allow users to sign-in using their Google credentials, and access the data that they grant you permission to access.

### Introduction
Overview of Google Play services and an introduction to the goals and structure of the course.

### Location and Context

#### Part 1 - Getting Started
Learn about Location Services and Fused Location Provider, then create an app to get the current location.
#### Part 2 - Going Deeper
Learn about continuous updates to your app, and then extend this to understand different user activities.
#### Part 3 - Advanced Topics: Geofencing
Learn about geofencing, how it works, and how to build and monitor them.

### Analytics/Tag Manager
Where in the world are people using your app? Which activities do they use most? How do they navigate through your app? Take this course to learn how to add code to your mobile app to send usage data to Google Analytics, to get answers to questions like these.

This course also covers how to use Google Tag Manager to send updated information to your app without needing to redeploy the APK. The final lesson explains how to use Tag Manager to manage all your Google Analytics tags.

#### Part 1 - Getting Started with Analytics
Get a Google Analytics account ID, and update your app to track all screen views.

#### Part 2 - Beyond Auto Activity Tracking
Send tracking data for events, and track how your users move through the shopping process.

#### Part 3 - Intro to Tag Manager
Use Tag Manager to update values in your app without having to redeploy any code. Cool, huh?

#### Part 4 - Integrating Google Analytics and Tag Manager
Use Tag Manager to organize the Analytics tags in your app.

### AdMob
#### Part 1 - Using Ads to Monetize Your App
Introduction to models to make money from an app and Google AdMob.

#### Part 2 - Displaying Ads in an App
Create code to display Banner and Interstitial ads in an app.

#### Part 3 - Using Real Ads
How to go from a test app to an app that shows real ads.

### Mapping
Maps. Everybody uses them, and many people love them. Maps on mobile devices have changed the world over the last few years. Learn how to build a rich map experience in this section.

#### Part 1 - Getting Started
Add maps to your app, understand the different map types, and learn how to use the Google Developers console to get an API key. Even create a map that flies around the world!

#### Part 2 - Going Deeper
Understand the Camera, and how it's used to project a map. Learn about zooming to different locations, and changing the camera tilt and direction. Learn about Markers, and how to place them on a map, as well as drawing shapes that are correctly geographically projected -- including lines, polylines and circles.

#### Part 3 - Advanced Topics: Street View
Learn about StreetView and how you can look at various locations around the globe as if you were there. Build a virtual hike down the Grand Canyon, and learn how to modify this to make it perfect for your app.

### Identity
Learn how to use Google’s Identity Platform to allow users to sign-in using their Google credentials, and access the data that they grant you permission to access.

#### Part 1 - Getting Started
Build a basic Android App that signs your users in with Profile access. From this, you can get metadata about your users such as their full name.

####Part 2 - Going Deeper
Learn about the Google design styles for sign-in buttons, and how to get them to use in your own app. Customize your app with these styles, and learn about different scopes, including email scope, which only allows apps access to the signed-in user’s email address for identification.