Google today announced the release of Play Services 7.0 for Android devices. The update brings with it a lot of enhancements, features and APIs for developers to take advantage of. 

First and foremost, Play services 7.0 now includes an API that will allow developers to display a pop-up when their application requests your location and there is room for the location accuracy to improve by enabling Wi-Fi, GPS etc.

There is also a new Places API that will display all the relevant place details like name, address, website, and more when you select a location inside an app. The APIs can be implemented by developers with their own UI, and it also provides autocomplete predictions for a faster search experience.

Additionally, Google is breaking down its Fit API into multiple segments with this update to reduce the memory requirement for Google Fit enabled apps running in the background. While the older Fit APIs will continue to work, Google strongly recommends developers to switch over to the new APIs in their apps. The company has also added support for two new data types in Play services 7.0: body fat percentage and sleep data.

The highlight of Play services 7.0, however, has to be the new Nearby Connections API that allows games to seamlessly connect to smartphones and tablets thereby allowing them to be used as a second-screen controller for a game running on your TV.

There are a lot of other features that Google has included in Play services 7.0, including App  indexing, enhancements to Google Mobile Ads, and more.

Google Play services will be rolling out to Android devices worldwide over the next few days, with the SDK being made available once the rollout is complete.