[Thali-talk] Google's Nearby

[Yaron Goland]

Near as I can tell the whole thing is proprietary and other than the audio technology isn't doing anything particularly new. We just switched ourselves from Wi-Fi Direct Service Discovery to BLE for Android. Which is unfortunate because only new Android phones with Bluetooth 4.2 hardware support being a BLE peripheral. So we just massively reduced the number of phones that we can do discovery with. We do have a plan (that I hope to post on later this week) for how to support older phones but the solution will eat a lot more battery and be a lot slower than BLE.

Also Toby already ran a BLE scanner on his Android device that was able to see BLE communications between our iPhones doing discovery (we use BLE for discovery on iOS as well). So we have high hopes for being able to do discovery across Android and iOS devices using BLE. Unfortunately moving non-trivial amounts of data is a whole other story. See http://www.goland.org/thaliiosandroidinterop/ and try not to cry. :(

And unlike Google's work, our work is completely open source. :)

BTW, strictly out of curiosity. Do you subscribe to our atom feed [1] or to our twitter feed [2]? I only ask because that is where we publish all of our technical content and I haven't found a good tool yet to automatically re-publish from there to our mailing list.

          Yaron

[1] https://thaliproject.org/atom
[2] https://twitter.com/thaliproject
________________________________________
From: Thali-talk <thali-talk-bounces at thaliproject.org> on behalf of Nathan of Guardian <nathan at guardianproject.info>
Sent: Tuesday, August 18, 2015 12:01 PM
To: thali-talk at thaliproject.org
Subject: Re: [Thali-talk] Google's Nearby

On Tue, Aug 18, 2015, at 02:31 PM, Yaron Goland wrote:
> http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/2015/07/connect-with-world-around-you-through.html
>
>
> Google has been playing with this for awhile. Nothing fundamentally new
> here although I think this is the first time they have made their audio
> based coordination technology available for third party use.

I agree! I am curious if this is all done on the device, or is somehow
reliant on their cloud. I guess I can do some testing with airplane mode
on.

At some level, this seems like just another API that can help in the
discovery process, if it is available on the device, but not the true,
open chime protocol I hope we can all still collectively develop.

--
  Nathan of Guardian
  nathan at guardianproject.info