For the past two years it’s been imperative for us to listen closely to what users of Estimote Beacons are saying and to fix problems they’re facing. Thanks to your direct feedback we’ve made it possible, among others, to manage beacons remotely through Estimote Cloud, mute them with Flip to Sleep, and secure them from piggybacking and spoofing with Secure UUID.
Now we want to go a step further and take this debate public. Tell us what’s bugging you, what’s your biggest pain point with our stack, what’s confusing you in the Estimote apps or the SDK? Tell us in this thread, and we will work to fix it!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! We designed the stickers for the purpose of creating smart objects you communicate with using a smartphone, and we wanted it to be straightforward, withouth developers having to worry ‘what’s a good broadcasting power for my dog?’ Byt we’ve heard some opinions from our dev community that actually exposing access to settings would be helpful, so we’ll definitely consider that. Thanks!
Can you add filtering when using the Estimote Cloud REST API /v1/beacons. Although not documented, this does seem to work /v1/beacons/[MAC Address]. Can we extend this to include UUID, Major, Minor, Name, Tag as well as Eddystone URL, namespace and instance. Also combinations would be very handy as well such as namespace and instance.
Also can this filtering be added to /v1/beacons/pending_settings as well.
For extra brownie points the ability to filter with wild cards would be great especially for Eddystone-UID. So something like:
/v1/beacons?namespace=abcd*
Would find all beacons with a namespace prefixed with abcd. This would allow sub grouping within the namespace. This is of interest to me as my clients are individual retail stores but they probably will only have a hand full of beacons. I don’t really want to have a namespace dedicated just to them. I would rather they were a sub group of a main namespace. Hope that makes sense.
Support for pagination would also be very helpful.
Great feedback, thanks for sharing! We’ll see what we can do about it (:
A little (pro) tip: just like /v1/beacons/[MAC address], you can also access an individual beacon by its UUID, major and minor via /v1/beacons/[UUID]:[major]:[minor]. We should definitely document this!
It would be really nice if you could provide really good standard pickers for ranging nearby beacons and stickers. It’s a common component and it would save a lot of time and allow focussing on implementing the actual use cases.
I saw one in the examples. But something more polished and capable (one that allows ranging for stickers and beacons in one list + the option to add beacons from the estimote cloud) would be helpful. (… in case this already exists, please let me know ;)) Maybe you could also share the one you use in the Estimote app as a starting point.
One thing I could use your help understanding a little better: I personally find this “list of beacons” component useful for utility apps (like the Estimote app, or the Examples), but I assume that when actually integrating beacons with your production app, you wouldn’t want your users to have to pick beacons from a list? Are you mostly thinking about the admin/mgmt apps here? Or you maybe the beacons are associated with some areas / items in the physical world, and you want the list not to be about beacons per se, but about these items / areas nearby? (In which case the component would need to be appropriately customizable.)
The Android app is missing a lot of features that the iOS app has. The ability to enable flip-to-sleep would be very nice to have, so I don’t have to make myself a Faraday cage.
“Flip to Sleep” is already there, in the “Sensors” section. That’s good feedback still, means we should make it easier to find, and place the options consistently across the iOS and Android apps; thanks for sharing.
Compared to iOS, Android is currently missing Secure UUID, and accelerometer and temperature sensors support; both of which we’re already working on, so stay tuned (:
Estimote Indoor SDK still uses Estimote SDK 2.4.0. I just cannot integrate the Indoor SDK if I’m using Estimote SDK 3.0. In April, you said that you’ll update in a week or 2, but still it’s not updated. Kindly let me know how to integrate both SDKs in a single project; as I’m using cocoapods; it is not allowing me to install Indoor SDK due to the presence of Estimote SDK 3.0
Byt we’ve heard some opinions from our dev community that actually exposing access to settings would be helpful, so we’ll definitely consider that. Thanks!