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Custom navigation experience

The Navigation SDK provides different ways to integrate a navigation experience into your app. This page explains what a custom navigation experience is and how it differs from other navigation experiences that are available in the Navigation SDK.

What is a custom navigation experience?

The primary way to implement the Navigation SDK is to use the Google navigation experience, which lets you embed a turn-by-turn navigation experience that uses Google-provided UI elements and visuals — similar to the navigation experience within the Google Maps apps. If you need more flexibility than the Google navigation experience offers, you can implement a custom navigation experience. A custom navigation experience refers to anything from eliminating turn guidance entirely with and running navigation only as a background process, to projecting a highly customized guidance experience to a screen separate from the device that runs the navigation. With a custom navigation experience, your app calls the Navigation SDK to request a turn-by-turn navigation feed, and then you provide and manage the UI elements and visuals that the user sees in the navigation experience. While using the Google navigation experience is generally easier to implement, building your own custom navigation experience allows for more customization.

When you create a custom navigation experience, your app calls the Navigation SDK to start, run, and stop navigation, using the following flow:

Start navigation. As with the Google navigation experience, a custom navigation experience still involves creating a navigation instance and setting the destination. However, with a customized navigation experience, you achieve this by first establishing a navigation session using GMSNavigationService.createNavigationSession, which is a state-bearing non-UI object that can operate either with a view controller, or without one.

For more information, see Enable turn-by-turn data feed.

See the demo: The download of the Navigation SDK contains a demo you can run to see an example of a navigation experience that switches between turn-by-turn guidance through standard navigation to a navigation experience that shows only the device location moving along a road polyline.
Active navigation. Here is another key difference between a Google-provided navigation experience and a custom navigation experience. Instead of handing off guidance to the built-in event manager of the Navigation SDK, you enable the turn-by-turn feed and implement event handlers. This allows your experience to respond to the events described in Listen for navigation events.
End navigation. As with the Google navigation experience, custom navigation also requires you to terminate navigation in the manner best suited for the app's experience.

When might you use a custom navigation experience?

The following table describes some custom navigation scenarios.

Example scenario	High-level steps
You need to provide text-only driver guidance for small devices such as 2-wheeled vehicles.	Create your navigator and set up the turn-by-turn guidance as a data feed to a small screen device while the navigator runs on the driver's mobile phone outside of their immediate view.
You want to make your app available as a car service for drivers who use Android Auto	Set up the car service. Set up your Navigation SDK project. Establish a navigator if you haven't already. Enable the turn-by-turn guidance feed. Draw the map on the auto app surface and populate the fields from the data feed you configured. For more information, see Enable Navigation for Android Auto
Drivers using your app want an overview map for most of their journey, with only minimal turn-by-turn guidance for city streets.	Your app should allow drivers to enter and exit the Google navigation experience as they need, without alternating the navigator's settings for destination and trip mode.

Example scenario

High-level steps

You need to provide text-only driver guidance for small devices such as 2-wheeled vehicles.

Create your navigator and set up the turn-by-turn guidance as a data feed to a small screen device while the navigator runs on the driver's mobile phone outside of their immediate view.

You want to make your app available as a car service for drivers who use Android Auto

Set up the car service.
Set up your Navigation SDK project.
Establish a navigator if you haven't already.
Enable the turn-by-turn guidance feed.
Draw the map on the auto app surface and populate the fields from the data feed you configured.

For more information, see Enable Navigation for Android Auto

Drivers using your app want an overview map for most of their journey, with only minimal turn-by-turn guidance for city streets.

Your app should allow drivers to enter and exit the Google navigation experience as they need, without alternating the navigator's settings for destination and trip mode.