Android Chrome is not detecting Eddystone beacon (Nexus 5x, Android 6.0.1, Estimote 3.2.0, Chrome 52.0.2743.98)

[GabrielleMo]

My trusty Android Chrome is not detecting my Eddystone beacon.

Specs:

• Nexus 5x,
• Android 6.0.1,
• Estimote 3.2.0,
• Chrome 52.0.2743.98

Everything is kosher on the beacon settings end of things:

• Beacon has latest firmware
• Beacon configured to Eddystone-URL
• Desired public site uses HTTPS. URL shortened w/google shortening service.
• Beacon is right next to phone, beacon not sleeping, power set to -20dBm, 500ms broadcast interval, smart battery saving "off".
• Phone does see beacon in Google Beacon Tools > Beacons Near Me. Recognizes it as EddystoneURL.

On the phone side:

• All antennas on (Btooth, WiFI, Location, cell antenna)
• Chrome Physical Web "on"
• Chrome access to location "on"
• Chrome notifications "on"
• Google > Nearby = "on" (beacon doesn't show up in Google > Nearby Discoveries)

Are there other settings/avenues I'm overlooking? Thanks in advance.

[scottjenson]

Sorry you're having so much trouble. It certainly appears that you've done everything right. We are working on a validation service to help debug these issues. Here are a few things to try:

1) Just to make sure your beacon is broadcasting correctly, please download the excellent BLE debugging app nRF Connect. It will scan for ALL BLE devices nearby your phone. If there aren't too many, you should be able to see your beacon. It'll be marked as an Eddystone-URL and show the goo.gl link inside (just to be safe) If you can't see anything, I'm not sure what to say. The 5x does have a pretty bad BLE stack (it will be fixed in the N release) and sometimes that keeps things from being seen)

2) If you can see it in the app then make Android not Chrome is scanning. We've recently moved the scanning from Chrome into Android. It should have shown up automatically but to force it. Go into Settings>Google>Nearby and make sure it is turned on. It even shows things it can see.

3) The last possibility is that you're website is blocking the Physical Web. If your site has a robots.txt file that prevents crawling, we honor that and won't show it.

[GabrielleMo]

Thank you for the follow up!

• Regarding (3) - Good suggestion on the robots file. I removed my top level htacess to rule that out, but overlooked robots as a possibility. In any case, robots.txt is updated to exclude bots from sub-directories only.
• Regarding (1) - I downloaded nRF Connect to my Android. It was able to detect the beacon.
• Regarding (2) - I could've been clearer in my original post. I did have Android Settings > Google > Nearby > "On" with no success.

Do you know what would be producing the difference in results between nRF Connect (detection) and Android > Google > Nearby (no detection)?

Thanks again for all the help.

[scottjenson]

If you had a robots.txt that was blocking google, that would explain it. The cache should update in a few hours. If our proxy service can't resolve the URL (as would be the case with robots.txt) then we don't show anything. That's why you don't see anything.

Whenever people have problems like this, I suggest you set the beacon to point to google.com or reddit.com. If you can see them, your basic plumbing is working. THEN test out your site, if you can't see it, there's usually an https/robots.txt problem.

[GabrielleMo]

Thank again. I also did not account for the time needed for the cache update. Thanks for all your help. It is working now.