Why would you choose Android API over Google APIs in the SDK on Eclipse?

Question

When you create an android project in Eclipse, you have to choose which platform to compile with. You can choose API 17 (Android 4.2) or Google APIs (API 17).

From my understanding, Google APIs is API 17 (Android 4.2), but has the maps library support and usb open library. So if Google APIs is the same as Android, but with more features... why wouldn't you choose it everytime?

Is there a downside to Google APIs? Every tutorial online I see, they use API 17 (Non Google APIs). I'm always curious as to why they manually change it to that instead of just using the one that has more in it.

Answer 1

When you run with Google APIs, your app is built to run on a device which has the Google services installed on it already (Maps, USB etc). If you absolutely require these services, you should build against Google APIs, but then your app will not run on device which aren't certified by Google (that is, don't have Google Play installed).

If you do want to run on device without Google Play, and your app does not require any of the Google Services to be 100% present, then you should compile against the normal Android APIs.

See this document for a bit more on what Google expects from certified devices.