The hidden costs of the Google Maps API

Many times we promote the awesome benefits of Google. Why, they give so many things for free! It has become such a groundbreaking company when it comes to its services! You can even visit the Google campus and use many of the company perks for free whether it be riding one of the Google bicycles or using their soccer field. It does come as a surprise to many that when it comes to developing applications, that using some of the APIs given by Google may actually end up accruing a cost.

True to its Google nature we can see in the following image that Google does allow free access to Google Maps through its API. A great benefit to beginning Android products who want to see some tangible implementations take effect. When a particular map is loaded, there is an internal counter in the API that logs how many times a map is loaded. For small apps, Google generally absorbs any cost and it is free to use. However, when the map load count reaches a high count, a daily charge may be inflicted.

 Img. 1 Google Maps API cost per day

 Fig. 1 The growing pain of costs for daily map loads in an app using the API

Source: Svennerberg, G. 2010, Pak, J.

At the beginning stages of the Santa Clara Valley Wine App, there will be an estimated traffic that will most likely fall under the free categories. However, once the app is put onto the Google Play Store, a daily fee may begin to be charged unbeknownst to the ill-advised product owner.

A possible problem would be the map is loaded each time a winery is visited through the app. Now this could be potentially disastrous as we would want to minimize the amount of map loads per user. An excellent solution would be to not overload a map with markers but to utilize the GPS coordinates of a set of wineries to prevent the map from being reloaded constantly. According to Svennerberg who wrote about the Google Maps API, he said, "overloading a map with markers may hurt more than help." (Svennerberg, 2015).

The ultimate goal of an app though is to generate revenue. To generate revenue, we need to see many users access the app. More users using the app and we will have more and more map loads. As the revenue increases, so will the cost of using the Google Maps API. A growing pain but a necessary pain nonetheless. As developers continue to utilize different APIs, it will be integral in the software development to keep a track of the costs.

FAQ. (n.d.). Retrieved October 15, 2015.  https://developers.google.com/maps/faq?hl=en.
   Svennerberg, G. (2010). Beginning Google Maps API 3. New York: Apress. 

Encouraging False Hope

"Schools and parents should encourage young people to be realistic rather than idealistic about their career goals." This quote is an incredibly loaded question that pertains the deeper-seated question of how high should we push our youth? Should we just accept the fact that they're not brilliant enough to reach for a high position? Should we baby them and blindly encourage them to reach for an unattainable goal? One might even argue that the reason why the American dream is failing us is because of a failure to raise our youth up in the right way. Should we give them school of hard knocks instead? I heartily disagree with this question because it implies that we are telling kids to give up their dreams.

My personal belief is that we as schools and parents should not only encourage people to be idealistic for their careers, but not just give blind words and actually equip the kids. If an athlete tells his or her coach that their goal is to be the best in the world, the coach's role is to do everything they can to help attain this goal. The athlete who wants to attain this goal needs to put their work into it and with the coach pushing him, he may or may not attain this goal. If he fails to reach it he will still finish much higher than the "realistic" idea about their career goal.

However, there is a large caveat when it comes to being idealistic in their encouragement. It would be prudent to encourage the young people to be bold with their ideas and work hard at their goals rather than telling them they can achieve anything but not emphasize the proper work ethic and the knowledge that would be required behind it. Pragmatism is the true encouragement behind the idealism of a career goal. If say a child says, "I want to develop an idea into a start-up." The pragmatic response to promote their idealistic career goal would be, these are the tools that you will need to put this idea into play. You need to learn how to code in several languages, how to write a resume, how to get a venture capitalist to invest in you idea, how to market your product. These are all real world useful skills that can be used in the real world. (Study, 2015)

To summarize, we should encourage young people to reach for the stars. Pragmatically.


Pragmatism: Overview & Practical Teaching Examples. (2014). Retrieved December 8, 2015, from http://study.com
    /academy/lesson/pragmatism-overview-practical-teaching-examples.html