Android Client 0.2.1

Create demos section with FatBeacon and Wi-Fi Direct demos
Bug fixes
Removed beacon configuration

Android Client 0.2.0

This release of the Physical Web app has several new features we’re interested in discussing with the community. These features are exploratory and meant to invite discussion with the community.

Blocking and Starring in List View
This allows users to ‘swipe away’ beacon URLs they no longer want to see. Any URL broadcast from that swiped away domain will no longer be shown. There is a menu item to return blocked sites to the list.

Starring an item makes it more important in 2 ways: (1) the item rises to the top of the list and (2) the notification now shows up on the lock screen. However, it still doesn’t vibrate the user’s device.

The purpose of these explorations is to see if giving the user more control is useful and to see if there are other ways we could offer similar functionality.

Wifi-Direct and mDNS
The scanner will now look for wifi direct and mDNS records and display them in the list. This raises a number of security issues as these beacons can no longer be filtered by a central server. For this reason, they are marked as insecure (Red favicon) and placed at the bottom of the list. We want to explore what a signed package format might look like.

FatBeacon
We’re also exploring an experimental third transport called FatBeacon. This is a regular BLE beacon with an experimental GATT characteristic. This beacon will give a short title and description in the advertising packet and if the user picks it, the scanner will connect directly to the beacon and pull down the web page. Like Wifi-Direct and mDNS, this has potential security issues and will follow the same package format tracking as the other two. Due to slow BLE transfer rates, the size of the web page is fairly limited.

For now, we’re suggesting very small page sizes (<10 KB) so the user doesn’t have to wait long. We expect this size to increase with BLE5.

Sharing
The Physical Web app now contains a sharing service so any app on Android can share with “Physical Web”. If you are using Chrome, Twitter, or any other app that shares with a URL, the phone will shorten that URL and broadcast with BLE. If you are sharing a file or other binary object, you will share using Wifi-Direct. Please note that the wifi-direct sharing is only detectable by the Physical Web app.

These explorations are early and a bit rough around the edges. We hope you can play with them and discuss them in our issues section. We hope they even inspire other scanners to try similar features.

The Physical Web Team

Android Client 0.1.857

• Added URL broadcasting through Share intent
• Added option to change backend Physical Web Service
• Added Runtime permission support
• Added Google Physical Web Service option
• Added favicon caching
• Removed some dependence on uribeacon library

Android Client 0.1.856

Web service:

• Added groupid to web service response

Android client:

• Fixed crash when scanning for mDNS beacons
• Disabled mDNS discovery for pre-M devices (improves battery life)
• Updated bluetooth adapter to use the system service local adapter
• Added error handling for device bluetooth support
• Added detection and URL shortening of non-ASCII URLs
• Exposed groupid in debug view

Android Client 0.1.855

• Removed demo mode
• Removed the go link redirection
• Removed most of our dependence on the uribeacon library
• Added a metadata cache for faster display of URLs
• Added more robust short-url resolution
• Added more robust Eddystone-URL support
• Added more support for batch metadata requests
• Refactored code around a new PwoMetadata class

Android Client 0.1.854

• Fix sorting bug -- now nearest beacons more consistently show up front
• Set notification priority to MIN -- this keeps the notifications off the lockscreen and off the status bar.
• Use https when gathering beacon metadata
• Use development server endpoint when in debug mode
• Add timing info and assigned rank to debug display
• Add some additional code cleanup

Android Client 0.1.853

Android client related changes:

• Use the web-service for URL shortening
• Remove double spaces in notifications

android-0.1.851

updated logos
minor bug fixes

android-0.1.850

SSDP support
URL shortening updates
Minor bug fixes

android-0.1.830

Nexus 7 notifications improvements
Minor bug fixes