This release of the Physical Web app has several new features we’re interested in discussing with the community. These features are exploratory and meant to invite discussion with the community.

Blocking and Starring in List View This allows users to ‘swipe away’ beacon URLs they no longer want to see. Any URL broadcast from that swiped away domain will no longer be shown. There is a menu item to return blocked sites to the list.

Starring an item makes it more important in 2 ways: (1) the item rises to the top of the list and (2) the notification now shows up on the lock screen. However, it still doesn’t vibrate the user’s device.

The purpose of these explorations is to see if giving the user more control is useful and to see if there are other ways we could offer similar functionality.

Wifi-Direct and mDNS The scanner will now look for wifi direct and mDNS records and display them in the list. This raises a number of security issues as these beacons can no longer be filtered by a central server. For this reason, they are marked as insecure (Red favicon) and placed at the bottom of the list. We want to explore what a signed package format might look like.

FatBeacon We’re also exploring an experimental third transport called FatBeacon. This is a regular BLE beacon with an experimental GATT characteristic. This beacon will give a short title and description in the advertising packet and if the user picks it, the scanner will connect directly to the beacon and pull down the web page. Like Wifi-Direct and mDNS, this has potential security issues and will follow the same package format tracking as the other two. Due to slow BLE transfer rates, the size of the web page is fairly limited.