GSoC16

Google released the new Awareness API for everyone, a suite of signals concurring to gives the developer the context in which our user is, all as part of the Play Services 9.2.0, already available on Android devices around the globe. This library combines 7 different feeds managing both the battery drain and the used memory, providing us with data such as user location, weather, time, headphones connection status, places, nearby beacons and currently performing activity. INTRO The Awareness API comes with two different versions, one is a callback based one (Fence API) and the other one is a polling based one (Snapshot API): while the first one will notify us when the conditions we specified are met, the second expects us to query the suite for the data from a unified interface. There are 7 kinds of context that we can work with in Awareness API such as Time — Local time at current user’s location Location — Latitude/Longitude Place — Places around user Activity — Detected user activity (biking, walking, running, etc.) Beacons — Check nearby beacon(s) Headphones — Are headphones plugged in? Weather — Current weather conditions Now the Two set’s of API’s : Snapshot API — Allows you to “request an information based on user’s context” as listed above. Fence API — Allows you to “receive a signal when user’s context has changed and reaches the condition” through callback function, for example, if user moves closed to the specific coordinate with headphones plugged in, Fench API will call the registered BroadcastReceiver and let you do your job. Getting started Create a project in https://console.developers.google.com (or in case you already have one, you can use it instead) And then browse to API Manager page and search for Awareness and click at Awareness API and Click Enable and wait until it finishes enabling 3. Go to Credentials tab and click at Create credentials -> API key -> Android key. Enter the name you project, for example, Android key and click Create (or if you have already created Android key previously, you could skip this step and use the existed one) 4. Add dependency in build.gradle compile 'com.google.android.gms:play-services-contextmanager:9.2.0' 5. Open AndroidManifest.xml file and add meta-data to <application> tag like this: <meta-data android:name="com.google.android.awareness.API_KEY" android:value="YOUR_KEY" /> <meta-data android:name="com.google.android.geo.API_KEY" android:value="YOUR_KEY" /> <meta-data android:name="com.google.android.nearby.messages.API_KEY" android:value="YOUR_KEY" /> We also need to add permissions for this: 6. Open AndroidManifest.xml <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION" /> <uses-permission android:name="com.google.android.gms.permission.ACTIVITY_RECOGNITION" /> Now we come to the actual java code. open your activity and initialise the GoogleApiClient in onCreate() private GoogleApiClient mGoogleApiClient; @Override protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.activity_layout); mGoogleApiClient = new GoogleApiClient.Builder(this) .addApi(Awareness.API) .build(); mGoogleApiClient.connect(); } So this ends the setup part. Now we move on to the actual data retrieval from the API. Accessing Snapshot API Awareness.SnapshotApi.getDetectedActivity(mGoogleApiClient) .setResultCallback(new ResultCallback<DetectedActivityResult>() { @Override public void onResult(@NonNull DetectedActivityResult detectedActivityResult) { if (!detectedActivityResult.getStatus().isSuccess()) { Log.e(TAG, "Could not get the current activity."); return; } ActivityRecognitionResult ar = detectedActivityResult.getActivityRecognitionResult(); DetectedActivity probableActivity = ar.getMostProbableActivity(); Log.i(TAG, probableActivity.toString()); } }); This will return the most probable activity done by the user. We can get a particular activity like walking, running, driving as well by integers defined below public…