On Tuesday, Google announced they have finished rolling out a new version of Google Play Services. This one is version 3.2 and has plenty of new features. Among the many new features are better performance, greater power savings, enhancements to location based services, maps, InstantBuy, Google+ and PhotoSphere.
Location based services has a new Fused Location Provider which supports the selection of a low-power mode option when requesting location updates, and the ability to inject mock locations. Google is also updating geofencing APIs to support hardware-based GPS geofencing on devices that have the needed hardware. Hardware geofences generally consumer significantly less battery, and can automatically be used on supported hardware without developers having to change the code in their apps.
Google+, Photo Sphere, InstantBuy and Analytics got quite the update as well:
If you’ve used Google+ sign-in you can take advantage of the new simplified sharing control that can be embedded directly within your app, simplifying the process of sharing content directly to Google+. We’ve also taken the opportunity to add some butter to the Google+ sign-in animation.
The Photo Sphere viewer has also been extended to include a compass mode that allows users to explore Photo Spheres by moving their phones.
The InstantBuy implementation has been improved to increase efficiency, with improved latency, a cleaner UI with contextual text and assets for the holo light theme, and support for passing through loyalty and offers information.
We don’t have an APK just yet, but if you’ve got it feel free to send it in by emailing us (link is at the top of the page), and we’ll post it for everyone.
For those that don’t know, Google Play Services is an app that allows Google to push out updates to all Android devices at once. Like the new Android Device Manager, which was part of Google Play Services. Google was easily able to push the Android Device Manager out to the millions of devices very easily without needing manufacturers to send out an OTA.
How many of you have received the update? Have you noticed anything else that Google didn’t mention?
Update: And we’ve got the APK!
Cheers Adrian!