Why it is only possible to change setting for Nearables using iOS device?
Why there are much less API features in Android SDK e.g. getting interval information, changing settings, etc.
Short story: we simply haven’t gotten around to implementing it yet on Android.
Long story: when we started more than two years ago, iOS was way ahead of Android in terms of beacons and BLE adoption, so our initial focus was on iOS first. Since then, Android started catching up rapidly: Android 5.0 gained completely new, rock-solid BLE API, the adoption of Android 5.0 has grown, more and more Android devices come equipped with modern BLE chips (not the early version, terrible chips used e.g. in Nexus 4 or 7), Google announced Eddystone, etc. With all of that happening, we also started catching up our Android stack to achieve feature parity with iOS—but as you can imagine, it’s not something that happens over night. We’re mostly there now, with only a few things remaining (stickers settings, analytics, trigger engine, that’s it I believe!), so it shouldn’t be long. And going forward, our goal is full feature parity. For example, the Location Beacons we’ve just announced will come with the full iOS and Android support the day we ship out the first dev kit, next month.
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Are you planning to open source the firmware of nearables? (:
Rather unlikely, I’m afraid. But we’re definitely looking into other ways of allowing customizing and extending functionality of our hardware. For example, the Location Beacons we’ve just announced come with GPIO ports, and allow you to broadcast custom packets made by you, and we’re also working on making it possible for these custom packets to change in response to data fed to the GPIO ports. So you could, e.g., connect a Location Beacon to your washing machine, and make it broadcast the machine’s current status.
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