Beacon functionality with Pushwoosh

1

Hello All,

We are trying to implement beacon functionality through the Pushwoosh plugins, however we have not gotten it to work at all.

Our project is being built through PhoneGap and we don’t receive errors, however we don’t get any push notifications when approaching the Beacon.

Any pointers or help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Juan

2

Sorry, I’m not familiar with Pushwoosh—how does it work? Which beacon plugin for PhoneGap do you use?

3

Hello Piotr,

Thanks for getting back to us. Pushwoosh is a push notifications service that integrates with different development frameworks.

It is supposed to work with beacons out of the box.
Our application is being developer using PhoneGap Build. Is there an estimote plugin for PhoneGap?

I am guessing that we still need to integrate with the estimote SDK, even when pushwoosh will manage the messages that are triggered by the beacons, right?

Thanks,

Juan

4

I could only find some documentation for integrating iBeacon with Pushwoosh’s native iOS/Android SDKs:

https://www.pushwoosh.com/programming-push-notification/features-guides/ibeacons/

Did you confirm it works with their PhoneGap plugin? Have you added the NSLocationAlwaysUsageDescription to the Info.plist file? (This is required for iOS apps to be able to detect beacons.)

EDIT: just found this mention on the page linked to above:

By default iBeacon functionality is excluded from our public iOS SDKs (Native iOS, Unity, Marmalade and Adobe AIR), so SDKs with iBeacon support are provided upon request. Please get in touch with our team if you are planning to utilize iBeacon functionality in your application, otherwise please use the regular SDK from our github repo.

5

Thanks Piotr,

We have been following up with Pushwoosh on this as well. They do have a plugin that works with iOS, but since we are building the PhoneGap we are unsure whether we need to also include the Estimote SDK. Do you have any thoughts on this?

6

If they support iBeacon in their own plugin, then you don’t need our SDK. I assume that their plugin does all the beacon detection itself—you probably entered the UUID, major and minor values somewhere in their web panel, is that correct?

7

Exactly! We went into the Cloud Estimote, and basically copy/pasted the UDID, Major and Minor.

8

Gotcha; in this case I think this is most likely something with the Pushwoosh configuration. In particular, you need the entry in the Info.plist file I mentioned earlier. When you deploy your app to your device, does it ask for access to location services?

9

Sorry for the late response. No, we don’t get even asked to use location services.
Is there a way you guys can check for compatibility issues between estimote devices and the pushwoosh platform?

10

If you’re not getting the prompt then that’s the problem. You need to find the Info.plist file in your project and add the NSLocationAlwaysUsageDescription key to it, as described in the “Enabling iBeacons for Native iOS SDK” section of their guide:

https://www.pushwoosh.com/programming-push-notification/features-guides/ibeacons/

You can read why that’s needed here:

Also, make sure you actually have the iBeacon-enabled version of their SDK, as explained on the page mentioned above:

By default iBeacon functionality is excluded from our public iOS SDKs (Native iOS, Unity, Marmalade and Adobe AIR), so SDKs with iBeacon support are provided upon request. Please get in touch with our team if you are planning to utilize iBeacon functionality in your application, otherwise please use the regular SDK from our github repo.

11

Actually, Pushwoosh provided a new plugin version today, and we got it to work on iOS at the moment. Once we get a proper demo, we can share it with you.

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