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google / eddystone

Specification for Eddystone, an open beacon format from Google
Apache License 2.0
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Nearby Notifications default language #223

Open Shimmi opened 7 years ago

Shimmi commented 7 years ago

Hello, We are implementing and using the Nearby notifications feature of the Eddystone beacons (either using the UID or EID packets) but we found out the mandatory language to be really limiting (See https://developers.google.com/nearby/notifications/developer_faq#what_about_localization_of_the_title_product_name_uses).

Typical use case is that user enter some venue and you want to provide him with a Nearby notification. You will set up Nearby notifications in the five most common languages but chances are that you either do not know which ones those are or you miss a big portion of visitors due to not having the Nearby notification set-up in the language they have on their Android phones.

It would be very helpful to have the ability to provide a "default" Nearby notification option. If the Nearby notifications will not have the requested language the default one will be provided.

It's still better to provide, for example, an English notification for the visitors than none. It's the same as with the Apps. If you do not have the App localized in given language, the default one (in English) will be used.

Our current only solution would be to/is to use the Proximity API and set rest of the languages with the default text. But as of October 2015, there were 184 two-letter codes. Although If we use a batch requests it will take ages to update just a few beacons.

P.S. From the Beacons philosophy, I expect users will deploy hunders or even thousands of beacons and although the Proximity API is great, I am a bit worried once users will need to use it to manage this number of beacons. Having something like fleets or groups that will have the ability to have same settings or Nearby notifications for a higher number of beacons would be also great.

Thanks for looking into this and providing (not only) us with some solution, Jiri

helenclarko commented 6 years ago

You could set a default message after registering to Google. Setting an attachment in English using the API may solve the issue.

As for setting the attachments in bulk, splitting the beacons into different projects may allow you to run multiple scripts at once.

Shimmi commented 6 years ago

Hi @helenclarko , Thanks for your input, but I am afraid I do not understand what do you mean. The thing is there is no option to set "default" [language] Nearby notification.

Setting an attachment in English will also not solve this issue as this attachment will be delivered to Android phones with English OS, but it will not be delivered to phones set to Czech.

You can group your beacons via user properties and you can also use batch requests, but this still does not solve the issue of the need to make hundreds or thousands of requests (if you want to cover all languages and or having a really big fleet of beacons you need to set up). What do you mean by running "multiple scripts at once", please?

Regards, Jiri