Overview

Before you begin: Before you start using the Places SDK for iOS, you need a project with a billing account and the Places API enabled. We recommend creating multiple Project Owners and Billing Administrators, so that you'll always have someone with these roles available to your team. To learn more, see Get Started with Google Maps Platform.

Introduction

The Places SDK for iOS allows you to build location-aware apps that respond contextually to the local businesses and other places near the device. This means you can build rich apps based on places that mean something to the user.

Concepts

A place is defined as a physical space that has a name. Another way of thinking about a place is that it's anything you can find on a map. Examples include local businesses, points of interest, and geographic locations. In the API, a place is represented by the GMSPlace Class Reference. It includes information such as the name of the place and its address, geographical location, place ID, phone number, place type, website URL, and more.

Note: Whenever your app displays information about places sourced from the Places SDK for iOS, the app must also show all relevant attributions that are returned by the API. See the documentation on displaying attributions.

API overview

Help your customers explore where they are and what’s around them:

• Current Place returns a list of places where the user’s device is last known to be located along with an indication of the relative likelihood for each place.
• Place Autocomplete automatically fills in the name and/or address of a place as users type.
• Place Photos returns high-quality images of a place.
• Place Details return and display more detailed information about a place.
• Place IDs stores the unique ID for one or more places for retrieval of place information on demand.

Other highlights of the API include:

• Accurate place detection at low power with WiFi scan.
• On-device caching: Most requests to the Places SDK for iOS may involve a round trip to a Google server, but you can also cache data locally for 30 days.

Policies and terms

All applications that use the Places SDK for iOS must adhere to the requirements described in the Google Maps Platform Terms of Service, and Displaying Attributions.