After introducing Nearby Notifications to Android over three years ago, Google has today announced they will be stopping the notifications later this year.
The decision to end Nearby Notifications is due to an increase in spammy notifications being received by users, which while they can be filtered out, equate to a less than pleasant user experience.
The original intent for Nearby Notifications was to be helpful about services around you, and developers have indeed delivered interesting and useful implementations including letting ‘users know about free wifi nearby, provide guides while in a museum, and list transit schedules at bus stops’, but they’ve devolved into something less than pleasant and according to Google it will stop in December.
Google will continue to allow developers to deliver proximity based experiences through the Beacon Dashboard to their own apps, but tehy will stop delivering notifications from both Eddystone and Physical Web beacons on December 6th.
Google will now focus on developing their Nearby Messages and Connections APIs for developers allowing them to create great ‘device-to-device connectivity experiences’. Google also has their ‘Fast Pair’ service they introduced for the Pixel Buds last year, which allows for fast device discovery and pairing.
There’s nothing worse than noisy interruptions from SPAM, so this seems like an overall great idea. It allows developers to encourage users to install an app to take advantage of location based notifications, while stopping the random messages you don’t want.
Really?? I actually thought this nearby stuff for buses/trains was alright. Let’s me know if there’s any delays without having to go in to any apps.
Does mean that the Australia Post app will no longer be able to pop up your tracking unlock QR Code when you get to the parcel locker?