RE: How to detect BLE beacons on Android tablet.

Aleksander Nowakowski — Mon, 02 May 2016 13:39:13 GMT

Hi,

On Android 5.1 no additional permissions, except the android.permission.BLUETOOTH_ADMIN are necessary. The Location permission and Location service enabled are required on Android 6.0 upwards.

As it works on some phone, and doesn't work on your tablet, I assume it related to the Bluetooth chip on the tablet. But you also say, that the nRF Master Control Panel application is able to detect and parse beacons' data. When you use the scanner compat library, do you set any filters? Like for iBeacons or Eddystone? With manufacturer data, or Service UUID? If so, try to call this method with parameter false. Than, instead of relying on hardware filtering, the app will parse the adv data on it's own. I had here some phones with the offloaded filtering failing, that's actually why I have added this and some similar methods.

If you are using nRF for Eddystone app - I guess this app relies on the native BLE scanner (via Nearby API), so it also may have the offloaded filtering issue. The nRF Beacon app also is using the native API inside the nrf-beacon-lib for scanning for beacons.