Physical Web not picking up beacons on Android Phone

[louwng]

I am having issues with Android phones with the PW app installed not picking up my beacons any specific settings i need to check for except bluetooth = on, off course

Regards Nico

[ferencbrachmann]

Location services needs to be on too. If you're having poor or no data connectivity it won't work either.

[louwng]

Is there a way to make the introduction of BLE and the Physical Web as seemless as possible to customers as i am constantly hearing from potential customers that is too difficult to get BLE and PW to work on there Android phones and therefore thet are not interested in the technology?

Is there any other suggestions on how to reach a potential customer within a beacon zone that doesn't have their bluetooth enabled, WiFi Direct or Progressive Web Apps ???

Please advise on how i can use mobile technology to make the introduction to BLE, beacons and the Physical Web as seemless as possible to potential customers

Regards Nico

[scottjenson]

I'm very confused here. I understand that getting Nearby notifications can sometimes not work as people may not have location permission turned on. But the PW app (which we don't recommend for consumers, it's a developer testing tool) actually prompts you for everything you need. If you can't see your beacon using the Physical Web app, something is very wrong.

Step 1: Use the excellent nRF Connect app from Nordic and see if you can even see the beacon in it's raw state. That shows that the beacon is working and your phone can see it.

Step 2: Use our validator tool at verify.physical-web.org to make sure your target URL will be shown by the Physical Web Service. If it fails, it will give you a reason.

Try these both and get back to us so we can help you figure this out.

[scottjenson]

I haven't heard back from you so I'm closing this issue. It wasn't clear if this was a specific issue or a generic one about how hard it is to turn on Physical Web. Note that we have two paths:

1) Automatic: the URL 'just shows up' In order for this to work, the user needs to have BT and Location turned on. When this works it is magical but as we've been discovering it is no where near 100% of users. We understand that and our looking at better solutions

2) Manual: Just turn it on The best, most sure fire way of turning on the Physical Web is to just go into (Google)Settings>Nearby Discoveries and switch it on. This doesn't happy for free but it works 100% of the time

We see the Physical Web as a early wifi: people need to know a little bit about what it is and that they have to turn it on. We're finding out that it just can't be magic. There are too many privacy issues to force it on. We hope that as people start to turn it on, we'll get enough of base to get this ecosystem to kick off.

[vincentgiraud]

Hi there,

I'm facing a the similar issue, never a problem on iOS but Android is acting up every now and then.

I got passed step 1) getting the raw data from the Nordic app (and detected with a few scanner apps).

Step 2) The validator fails to validate with: ReasonResult Filtered (Blocked by robots. See: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/getting_started).

I've cleared the content of the robots.txt file then set to: User-agent: * Disallow:

All URLs https.

What do I miss? What can I try?

Thanks for your answers! Rgds Vincent

[louwng]

Hi Vincent

I must be honest with you my experience with this is that iOS always works " out of the box" have tested this many times and its works everytime.

The problem with Android is that because its an open source eco system you have many equipment manufacturers and many Android versions which are not regulated like Apple.

This results in non standard 3rd party Bluetooth stacks being used on these Android phones with in complete librarie. From what i could gauge is that Bluez and Bluedroid are the preferred stacks.

Furthermore the Bluetooth chip that the android smartphone manufacturers use also poses a problem i read a couple articles online that states it the Bluetooth chip on the Android was made by Broadcom and Intel then you should be fine but if its from any of the other chip manufacturers you might have a problem

Thus there are many variables at this stage, my take on this is we will have to wait for the market to accept Bluetooth ble as the way forward like it took a while for wifi to be accepted as the norm

Only then hopefully will the quality of Bluetooth ble on Android phones improve across the board

This is probably not what you wanted to hear but is my honest experience with Bluetooth ble on Android

Regards Nico

On Fri, 18 Nov 2016 at 18:14 Vincent Giraud notifications@github.com wrote:

Hi there,

I'm facing a the similar issue, never a problem on iOS but Android is acting up every now and then.

I got passed step 1) getting the raw data from the Nordic app (and detected with a few scanner apps).

Step 2) The validator fails to validate with: ReasonResult Filtered (Blocked by robots. See: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/getting_started ).

I've cleared the content of the robots.txt file then set to: User-agent: * Disallow:

All URLs https.

What do I miss? What can I try?

Thanks for your answers! Rgds

Vincent

— You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/google/physical-web/issues/817#issuecomment-261571221, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ATTb5WLw2BejUB-0Fi2-XbgCJiKXR-NFks5q_c7bgaJpZM4J1f2Q .

[scottjenson]

Can you be more specific about the Android issues you're having so we can help address your concerns? Are people not able to turn BT on? Do they turn BT on and things don't show up?

[vincentgiraud]

I had a similar experience on both S7 and Nexus 5 so i ruled out the fact that the issue could come from the Android BLE implementation or activation.

I finally found out that the root of my issue was related to some settings in my robots.txt file as i get a more consistent behavior now and receive Nearby and PW notifications.

Thanks Nico and Scott on your the fast replies!

[scottjenson]

This is exactly why we have verify.physical-web.org

Use that for any website URL you'd like to use to verify that it will show up properly.

[cheena19]

I tried the above two steps and i was trying to broadcast https://www.Google.com and still it did not come. Please tell me what can i do. It showed on nrf and gave notification on apple but on android physical web it is not detecting

[mmocny]

If you open Nearby app directly, does the result show?

Android Settings -> Google -> Nearby