(Note: Venue is across street from usual location)

Eddystone, iBeacon, and AltBeacon all provide you with a method of adding context to your applications by allowing users to interact with a physical item sitting in front of them. Beacons, however, have some technical limitations when you go to deploy them in your application environment. Small data transfer payloads and a finite life cycle of the hardware add complexity to your system design that you probably didn't originally anticipate.

Google attempts to solve these problems associated with beacon deployments using their Proximity Beacon API. We will see how you can use this API to manage a beacon fleet, and extend their usefulness by attaching extra data for your client applications to provide context. On the client side, we will see how the Nearby Messages API in Google Play Services allows us to take these changes cross-platform to devices.

Dave Smith (@devunwired) is a Google Developer Expert for Android and the Android Lead at NewCircle, where he is focused on developing courseware materials to train beginning and advanced Android developers alike. He has been working with the Android platform at all levels since 2009, developing custom applications and system components to run Android on embedded platforms or interact with external embedded devices. He is the author of the popular developer cookbook “Android Recipes: A Problem Solution Approach” from Apress, and regularly provides developer tips and sample code through the NewCircle Stream (https://thenewcircle.com/s) and his personal blog (http://www.wiresareobsolete.com).