Android SDK v0.4.1/iOS SDK 0.11.3 - offline mode support

BLE Beacons
1

Hi,
Our mobile apps needs to be available offline and online. One use case we have is for kids to use their parents old mobile phones (no LTE/3G/… network) at a Safari Park where there is no wi-fi - so no internet access at all. How can we get the new SDKs to monitor onsite beacons when the app does not have network access at all? Can we pre-define beacons to be monitored?

Our apps targets both Android and iOS.

Thanks!

-Sylvain

2

There’s no way to do that currently, but some way of caching/prefetching the attachments/zones is very much on our minds. Not the easiest problem to solve (do we pre-fetch all the data? what if that’s thousands of beacons and attachments? how often do we refresh it? should it ever expire or not? etc. etc.), but certainly doable (:

3

Thank you Piotr. That is definitely a required feature for us.
Would you recommend that we keep using the old SDK in our use case?

4

Hi Piotr.
We’re facing the same problem - we need our app to work offline.
To add to this our entire company basically “speaks in Major numbers”. Should we also stick to the older SDK, or build our own solution? We’d prefer to stick to iBeacon packets, but those sadly aren’t natively supported on Android.
Regards,
Kamil

1 Like
5

Hello guys,

There is a traction toward making our SDK much more offline-friendly! :rocket:

The recent version 0.5.0 has added attachment persistence inside the ProximityObserver. Now you only need to start it at least once when the internet connection is available, and every subsequent call to start() will fetch data persisted locally if no network is available at the moment. This change is our first attempt to allow you guys to do the scanning while being offline :slight_smile:

Version 0.5.0 changelog here.

Let me know what you think!

Cheers,
Paweł

6

That is a great step forward, however, in our context, we are afraid several people will be reluctant to leave their internet connexion ON once the app is downloaded and our site does not have any wi-fi available. With your latest improvement, would we be able to monitor beacons using something like the code below even if the initial use is offline and never use an internet connexion?

zoneBuilder()
.forAttachmentKeyAndValue(
        "uuid:major:minor", 
        String.format("%s:%d:%d", uuid, major, minor))

Also, is the new feature available on the iOS SDK as well?

-Sylvain