Provide a non-Google Play Services edition of OTP Android

[barbeau]

We made the decision to move to Google Maps API v2 (which requires Google Play Services) due to trouble integrating old versions of OSMDroid with newer Android components.

There now seems to be one-to-one parity with the Google Maps API v2 interface in OSM Droid.

We should investigate this, and if possible provide a version of OTP Android that doesn't rely on Google Play Services.

[vreixo]

Yes, would be interesting. Another good option would be to use Skobbler API, as you said in another conversation, which has for example the step-by-step navigation mode and other very interesting features as very good support for offline tiles, although it has the problem of not being FLOSS.

One possible problem of OSMDroid is that the last demos that I have seeing are not visually appealing at all (tiles loading, zooming, not acceleration, limited map movements,...) , but maybe this has been improved.

[barbeau]

After looking at OSM Droid further, it does not have one-to-one parity with Google Maps API v2 interface. Instead, it provides a wrapper around Google Maps API v2, but exposes only a Maps API v1 interface to the application. More here - https://github.com/osmdroid/osmdroid/issues/75#issuecomment-77438081.