For several years, devices running at least Android 4.4 KitKat and compatible versions of Google Play Services have had the capability to display notifications based upon proximity to Bluetooth-signaling beacons in correlation with Google's geolocation service. The "Nearby Notifications" feature was supposed to be a way to help Android users gain additional information and awareness of potentially relevant places and services while out and about in the real world.
However, in an announcement on the Android Developers Blog, it seems that Nearby Notifications didn't turn out exactly how Google had envisioned three years ago when the feature was first created. In fact, at some point earlier in 2018 the Mountain View company noticed "a significant increase in locally irrelevant and spammy notifications that were leading to a poor user experience". While the search giant mentioned that the questionable quality of such notifications could possibly be addressed via "filtering and tuning", it has made the ultimate decision to sunset Eddystone and Physical Web beacon notifications on December 6th, 2018.
Although users have had the capability to turn off Nearby Notifications, the news may come as welcome relief to owners of Android hardware who may forget to turn it off after the purchase of a new device. However, developers can still embed the capability directly into their own apps using the Proximity Beacons API.
_-_img_1104_small.jpg)
6 Comments - Add comment