CODEWITHSUNDEEP
iosbeaconeddystonegoogle-nearby
Mark Stanton
Mark Stanton

Reputation: 1

Using a Website to Recognize Google Beacons

As of KitKat 4.4, the required proximity API is baked into the Nearby functionality of the Android OS. This means that Android devices no longer require an application to detect and interact with beacons.

iOS, however, still requires either an app or the chrome browser to do so with Google's beacons.

My question: With current technology, if a website is designed using Google's PWA standards, can it have the ability to detect and interact with beacons in the same fashion that an application would (regardless of the browser being used)?

Follow-up, if YES, would it be able to perform these tasks while open in the background?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 471

Answers (1)

davidgyoung
davidgyoung

Reputation: 64941

The short answer is no, you generally cannot interact with beacons from web apps. This is true even on Android devices that use the Chrome browser. On Android, you can launch a web app on beacon detection using Nearby, but only if the user taps the Nearby notification.

Here's the longer explanation:

Android devices do support Google Nearby which allows you to send a notification to a user when your beacon is detected that can (a) launch a native app, (b) launch the Google Play store to install an app, or (c) launch a URL in the default browser.

When launching a URL, the URL can be to a web app and may include a URL parameter that tells it that the web app was launched by the beacon detection through Nearby. But once the launch of complete, the web app's interaction with beacons is over.

In order to have dynamic interaction with beacons, there must be web APIs that give the web app callbacks when beacons are detected. These currently do not exist. There is hope for this in the future using Web Bluetooth APIs (See: https://webbluetoothcg.github.io/web-bluetooth/), however they do not currently support scanning for arbitrary Bluetooth advertisements needed to detect beacons.

Upvotes: 1

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